It’s easy to forget that we live near one of the great museums in the world what with our busy lives in Brooklyn.

But in the last few months I’ve been spending more time at the Met. Yesterday a friend, an ex-Park Sloper and I, walked around the museum for a few hours. There is, as always, so much to see. I strongly suggest a visit. Saturday night the museum is open until 8:30. Here’s what we saw:

The newly expanded and renovated gallery for 19th and early 20th century paintings is just filled with great work from Prud’hon to Picasso, by way of Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Seurat and others.

The Age of Rembrandt is a knock out exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum’s 228 Dutch paintings (dating mostly from the 1600s).

Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor is an amazing survey of 17th-century European tapestry, a large show, is also quite incredible.

My favorite space in the museum right now is the Greek and Roman sculpture gallery that is in the space where the old cafeteria used to be. It is a glorious space to be in. The sculpture. The light. The feeling of the room.

ENJOY!

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

Just the other day Hepcat received an invitation to his 30th college reunion. It left him feeling mighty old, but you can bet that Hepcat wants to be at Bard College to celebrate that milestone.

“The Hudson Valley in spring? What’s not to like?” Hepcat said nostalgically when Smartmom asked if he plans to attend.

Still, it’s hard to believe that Hepcat is old enough to have been out of college for 30 years.

Smartmom should talk. This June, it will be 28 years since the day the great I.F. Stone, that iconoclastic journalist and critic of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the Vietnam War, spoke to her class of 1980 at SUNY Binghamton.

She can’t remember a word he said, but she does remember that his commencement speech was quite long and characteristically controversial, as it elicited boos from some parents in the audience. Their reaction disgusted and embarrassed her.

Smartmom isn’t sure whether she will be attending her 30th reunion in 2010. She keeps in touch with most of the college friends she wants to be in touch with.

Still, it would be interesting to see how the campus has changed and to say hello to some of her professors (if they’re still there), to have a cup of coffee at the Argo coffee shop and to visit the Salvation Army on the south side of town.

One thing’s for sure: Smartmom never wants to fill out one of those “So, what have you been doing since graduation?” questionnaires.

Smartmom thinks that those kinds of questionnaires are such a horrendous exercise in personal reductiveness.

A friend of Smartmom’s actually decided not to attend an important college reunion recently because she took one look at the questionnaire and knew that she was incapable of filling it out.

“I’m having a mid-life crisis,” she told Smartmom. “I wasn’t going to sit there and do it.”

Those kinds of reunion questionnaires invite boasting — about your career, your children and all your creature comforts. People feel like they’ve really got to impress all those people they went to college with.

So what has Smartmom been doing since that day in the Broome County Arena? What fabulous resume can she whip out to impress her peers, what personal biographical detail will just wow them all….

Hmmmm.

Well…

Ahhhh….

Seriously, how does one honestly characterize more than a quarter century of one’s life? Is it all really just a list of degrees, courses, jobs, projects, addresses, and names?

Are we nothing more than our resumes?

What about the interstitial life — the life that goes on between the lines of all the other stuff? The little discoveries we make about ourselves; the conversations we have with our friends and family on the phone; the surprising moments we have with our children on the way to the store; an inside joke told over and over; the words of a wise therapist; getting proposed to at Two Boots Restaurant on Avenue A; an epiphanic walk across the Brooklyn Bridge; stopping at the National Poultry Museum while driving through Kansas; hearing Caetano Veloso at Lincoln Center and Patti Smith at CBGB; a memorable meal in a small Tuscan town or at Al Di La; Teen Spirit and the Oh So Feisty One’s birth and their first words; OSFO practicing the piano, or Teen Spirit’s show last October at the Bowery Poetry Club; the day Hepcat made latkes (or the day he cleaned out the basement).

What of the life we live concurrent to the resume life? The life of our hearts, our minds? Our sensations? Our love and our pain?

Hepcat is actually looking forward to his 30th graduation. And he’s not afraid of those stupid questionnaires.

“Me intimidated? If someone asks me what I’ve been doing for the last 30 years, I’ll just say, ‘Funny you should ask…’”

I met Peter Loffredo for the first time yesterday in front of the Food Coop. He was with his partner, The Love We Make, who I know from another context.

I heard her say, "There’s Louise…"

I was standing there with my sister. Of course I recognized Peter’s face from the photo on his blog, Full Permission Living. It was really nice to meet him. But I wasn’t sure what to say standing out on the street in front of the Food Coop.

It’s always awkward to actually meet someone, whom you’ve been corresponding with but don’t know in person. At first, we smiled. I think we shook hands.

"Really nice to meet you," is what I hope I said. I know I said something like, "It’s been such fun…" What I meant: it’s fun to get your interesting emails and post them on the site.

I think I told  The Love We Make, that I love to link to her blog, as well. What I meant: I think your pieces are unusually thoughtful and lovely.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Seeing Green.  Loffredo and Seeing Green have had interesting and heated arguments on OTBKB comments.

Then I had a moment of panic. What if they start arguing right here on Union Street. I could tell that The Love We Make knew what I was thinking. But they’re both way more classy than that.

They shook hands. Peter said something like, "I’m the one with the big mouth." That seemed to neutralize any tension.

Peter and The Love We Make wished all of us a happy holiday and continued toward Seventh Avenue. Seeing Green went into the Coop with his snazzy little cart.

An OTBKB reader wrote in with the following request:

My Djembe drumming teacher is from Senegal and he is interested in providing for the children and adults of his community there.

He is requesting donations of clothing, household items, electronics, and toys, etc. that he would be able to ship back to Africa to help his community.

If you are interested, contact the Keur Djembe African Drum Shop to arrange a drop off at the store. The shop is located at 568A Union Street at Third Avenue. The phone number is 718-522-7324. www.keurdjembe.com

Here’s a little something from our pal Pete of Full Permission Living, who finds himself agreeing with the New York Times’s Op-Ed writer David Brooks more and more.

Wow! I’m having trouble with these occasional pieces by David Brooks that I really agree with. Today’s latest, called "The Obama-Clinton Issue," is not just a great assessment of Obama’s appeal, but of the essential ingredients that make for a good leader. [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/opinion/18brooks.html?ref=opinion]

Here are some excerpts from Brooks’ editorial:

– "With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. "

– "Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood."

– "He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall."

– "Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions."
– "In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual."

– "Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House."

– "Obama reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways."

I repeat – Wow! Imagine having a leader in the White House who is actually self-aware and able to follow something more than ego? I’d almost given up.

BONUS NOTE FROM PETER: At this time of year, when so many are stressed, exhausted, financially stretched, and desperately hoping for that bonus check, and in the coming weeks heading towards the New Year, inclined to re-evaluate their lifestyles, I thought that this article I wrote on working (and not working) would be timely. It was originally entitled "Full Permission Working." You can find it on my blog at: http://fullpermissionliving.blogspot.com/