A Morning at the Museum

As a child, a perfect Saturday afternoon was a trip to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum with my parents. Free from buzzing spelling bee quizzes and multiplication flashcards, the weekends were moments to explore the other corners of Brooklyn outside the 10-block radius of my home, elementary school, and neighborhood playground. We would drive our car to Crown Heights as the clouds parted their way for the sun. With my mom holding my left hand, and dad holding my right, I walked in between them into the glowing entrance of the Brooklyn Children's Museum with a smile on my face.

Most of the exhibits that I remember so distinctly now may not still be around, signs that my childhood of a mid-2000s baby is aging, making room for all of the new children of the 2020s, with iPads stuck to their fingers and cheerios stuck to their lips. Still, I find it essential to give an ode to these childhood memories, these exhibits that set a spark into my heart as a young Sanai who just wanted to know everything she could about the world.

My memory is as fuzzy as a caterpillar, but I remember walking into the museum and feeling like I had the whole world at my fingertips. Far from your average museum with plexiglass, solemn security guards, and roped-off areas, this museum  was an interactive battle zone for Brooklyn parents to let their children roam free. The Brooklyn Children’s Museum was, well, for children.. 

I often dragged my dad to the first attraction that caught my eye — an old-school MTA bus with iconic blue seats that reminded me of riding the B44 with my Ummi to KeyFood. He would pretend to be the bus driver, or we would switch roles as five-year-old me steered a 30,000-pound bus in the dizzying New York Streets. 

Once I grew tired of that, I would join the mass of other children at the Totally Tots room, which should honestly have been called the "Aquatic Wonderland" room, in my opinion. Every child wore a blue smock to protect their clothes from the water apparatus in front of them, filled with tubes, miniature boats, balls, and water shooter machines. I remember waddling around in my too-big-smock, which smelled like a damp raincoat and stuck to my skin with inseparable force. Yet, I had the time of my life in that room, splashing my hand in the water without a care, often hopping over to the sandbox and watching the blue sand slide through my fingers like I was on an alien planet. An element of silliness and unshameful fun penetrated that room as our parents watched us from behind, just playing as children do.

The rest of the museum was just as grand. A frequent stop for photos was the Chinese Lunar New Year dragon puppet, where you could act as if you were the dragon often seen at Lunar New Year parades throughout Chinatown during the festival season, bobbing your head around and immersing yourself into one facet of the Chinese-American experience in the city. I also loved to take pictures at the motorcycle right next to the dragon prop — I felt suave as I imagined myself zooming down to the streets of New York, as you can tell by the cover picture to this piece. 

The World Brooklyn was another popular stop, where children could play in kids-size shop replicas of stores often seen throughout Brooklyn — the doctor's office, fire station, African jewelry market, and the grocery store, which often was just as packed as one on Christmas Eve. I loved pretending to shop at the grocery store as I lugged huge chunks of baguette, oranges, and sticky steak replicas into my cart, swerving through other kids as we envisioned ourselves as future civilians cooperating in the Brooklyn economy. 

In these spaces, I learned more about my neighbors, the children from all corners of Brooklyn, the city, the state, and the world, as I allowed myself to explore freely through the Brooklyn Children's Museum. 

Most things have stayed the same.

While I haven't visited the Brooklyn Children's Museum in years, my love for museums has grown since childhood. Now, I understand just how many different types of museums there are to get lost in — art museums, history museums, science museums, and so on.  

Instead of weekends to the Brooklyn Children's Museum with my parents, now I spend my Saturdays at the Museum of Modern Art, sometimes with friends, or sometimes alone, getting lost in the art of today, the art of yesterday, and envisioning what the art of my generation may look like. 

There is a universal quality to all the museums I have been to in my life, the fact that I am at once an observer of all that has come before, and also a living testament of all the life that is to come. One day, my writing, poetry, or photographs might be in a museum that a young teenage girl happens to walk by, stand in front of, and learn something new from. The cycle of understanding is always continuing. 

Creation is one of the most human things about humanity, and I will forever be thankful to museums for displaying such artistry and allowing me to see how I fit into this big and beautiful world.