I have been an avid reader from the time I was three years old. Whether Grandma would read to me or I’d listen to the Disney fairy tales on those tapes that came with the picture books, I was always engrossed in a story. Authors make magic with their pens, creating images and descriptions of places, people, and things so vivid that you can practically see them. Even I, who have never actually seen lace pantaloons and organza dresses placed over unyielding hoop skirts, nineteenth century tapestries in grand drawing rooms, gardens made colorful by an abundance of flowers, or people’s faces and physiques, have had my mind’s eyes opened by these rich details, so it’s like I see them with physical sight. It’s as if my fingers have actually touched the places Jane Austen has been, the people Charles Dickens describes in fastidious detail, and the town in which Lucy Maud Montgomery sets all her books about Anne Shirley, my literary soul mate. The words of my favorite authors are worth an infinite amount of pictures, and beginning at a very young age, these pictures turned me into a visual person who wanted to see everything for myself.
Mom, Brian, and I accompanied Dad on a business trip to the East Coast in the summer when I was seven. Going to Washington, DC meant spending our days in the overwhelming Smithsonian and making our way through museum after museum.
I eagerly entered the space museum holding Mom’s arm. Space had fascinated and excited me from the time we studied it in science class, and from this one book on tape I had about a kid in the twenty-first century who lived on Mars with his parents. I couldn’t wait to touch the parts of old rockets, the specimens from meteorites on display, and the astronaut space suits that lined the museum walls.
“Oooo, Laurie, come feel this moon rock!” Brian said excitedly, placing my hand upon a flat, almost rectangular-shaped object secured to a glass display. The rock felt like one you’d find on any beach but had tiny holes on its surface.
We signed ourselves up for a museum tour, and a man who had been obviously instructed to be enthusiastic and energetic guided us into the first room. He began explaining the first rockets and space capsules, pointing to their parts, which were displayed all around us.
“Mom, can I feel them, please?” I whispered excitedly.
“They’re all behind ropes, Honey,” Mom said.
“But Mom, I have to feel them!”
“Sir,” Mom interrupted the tour guide. “My daughter is blind. She would like to touch the space capsule.”
“I’m sorry, Ma’am, I can’t allow her to do that.”
“The only way she can experience what we’re seeing is by touching,” Mom said, her voice sounding annoyed.
“We have a special braille exhibit in the natural history museum,” our guide suggested, his voice still unnaturally peppy, as if the smile he wore was plastered there forever. “Perhaps your daughter would enjoy that.”
“She touches braille all the time,” Dad said angrily. “She’d like to touch something she can only touch in a museum.”
“Yeah, you try walking through here with a blindfold,” I said.
“Laurie!” Mom said sharply. “You let your father and me handle this.”
“That’s okay,” said the tour guide. “She’s quite a firecracker, so cute.”
With that, he continued shepherding us to room after room with mysterious objects that were roped off. I listened to the people around me ooooing and aaahhhing about what they were seeing.
“Why does everyone else get to see everything, and I have to just stand here?”
“I think they are afraid of the oil on anyone’s hands destroying anything. They’re trying to preserve history,” Mom said.
“Lilly, I don’t think the steel of a space shuttle would be destroyed by one kid’s hands,” my dad responded. “I’m going to let the manager have it.”
It was the same stumbling block at every museum. I stood just inches away from sculptures at the art museum, fossils that were thousands of years old at the natural history museum, Presidential furniture at the White House, and I was physically banned from connecting with any of it. It was as if everyone else around me had been inducted into a special club that required eyesight, and I was forced to stand by and let everyone else take it in and learn and enjoy.
Finally, we approached an exhibit I could actually experience. The natural history museum had a petting zoo where you could hold unusual insects in your hand.
“And here,” said an eccentric woman, placing a large something that scuttled across my hand onto my arm, “is an endangered roach about three times the size of a quarter.”
“EEEEK!” I shrieked with amusement as I felt its large papery wings and shell-like body.
“And here is a caterpillar that you won’t find on any backyard plant,” she said, chuckling, dropping a plump furry creature shaped like a crescent moon on the back of my hand.
“And here’s the butterfly he becomes,” she said as she placed something that felt like a magical moving flower on the hand that had acted as the roach’s jungle gym.
“Laurie, that butterfly is an electric blue!” Brian said.
“Do you have any sight at all?” the woman asked.
“Just light,” I said. “I can see light.”
“Well, take the next right and visit our gem room. We have bins and bins of every semi-precious stone known to man,” she said. “You can touch ’em all.”
“Wow, they don’t feel like the ones you have in your rings, Mom,” I said excitedly, as I picked up some unpolished amethysts that felt like the ones I had collected at Lake Tahoe.
“That’s how they start out before they’re cut for jewelry,” Mom said.
Nature had worn these stones into fascinating misshapen forms, some almost feeling as if they had intentionally been shaped that way, like tiny abstract figurines.
* * *
I awaited our trip to England three years later with a breathless anticipation. I had read so much about queens, kings, princes, and princesses, castles, jewels, and ornate architecture. The books had been narrated many times by the voices of English actors, and this would be my chance to be in the London that had been inhabited by so many of my beloved protagonists.
As we waited outside the gates of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, I prepared myself to be bored, resentful, and detached.
“Your daughter will get in free,” said the lady at the information desk. “And she will be allowed behind all the ropes to touch anything she likes.”
Some people die and go to heaven. I died and went back in time. I touched wax figures of kings and queens who had once lived and the embroidered velvet of their regal uniforms. I felt the prominent chins and high cheekbones of actors and actresses from the ’30s and ’40s whose likenesses had been preserved. I felt the shockingly big hairdos with bejeweled baubles on famous people from each century, and I felt the almost eerie skin-like, realistic faces, hands, and bodies of every figure in that museum. I began to appreciate the benefits of being on equal footing with my family and those around me, of the open-mouthed fascination that only comes from firsthand experience.
I was greeted with the same warm reception at Stratford when visiting Shakespeare’s house and Anne Hathaway’s cottage, where I felt the Renaissance embellishments on furniture. I was taken behind ropes at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle to feel the prized possessions of monarchs past. I heard indignant shouts from lookers-on as Brian and I touched the naturally formed arches in Stonehenge.
“She’s blind. Now run along!” the tour guide told the horrified good samaritans.
* * *
France proved just as understanding as England. I felt the Winged Victory, and the Venus de Milo, which filled me with joy since I had just studied Greek mythology. I touched relics of the French Revolution. I felt everything I could touch in Versailles.
When I returned to the US and visited a museum in New York, I was greeted by an attendant who might as well have been a robot.
“You have to pay, and no, you can’t touch anything that’s roped off or behind glass.”
That’s when my letter-writing campaign began.
“If I can touch Shakespeare’s bed, I think your space shuttles can handle the oil from my hands,” I wrote to the Smithsonian.
“Do you realize you’re prohibiting a percentage of your population from enjoying your art?” I wrote the Met. “Isn’t your mission to allow people to experience art so that they can have an appreciation of it, thus keeping the visual arts alive? Isn’t what you’re doing in direct conflict with what you set out to do?”
The Smithsonian sent me a form letter, reminding me that I was more than welcome to listen to the audio guides, which would allow any of their patrons to have a self-guided tour through the museum.
The Met at least had the decency to send a small typed note with an actual signature on it, which said that preserving art was of the utmost importance and unfortunately meant not allowing it to be touched by anyone but the curators.
“We want generations of people to appreciate what we hold in this museum.”
They had failed to address one glaring problem, that I, and others like me, would never, ever see what they were supposedly preserving for the appreciation of mankind.