As is tradition, here is the exhaustive play-by-play of my birthday:
I wake up on the 26th floor of a Kansas City hotel room. I open my computer and search for museums. Liz has made it known she wants to go to a local hair museum, where some woman displays her collection of hair, each lock formerly attached to a famous person’s head. There’s the Nelson-Atkins Museum, of course – everyone who’s visited Kansas City since the mid-1990s has posted a photo of themselves standing next to one of the giant shuttlecock sculptures, but that’s all I really know about it. I look it up and see that the museum is most famous for its extensive collection of Asian art, something that doesn’t appeal to me. Instead, we decide we’ll go to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art after breakfast.
My mother is keeping our youngest son, who turns seven months old today – this weekend is the longest Liz has ever been away from him. While I read a text from my mother about Magnus’s sleep performance last night, a notification from Instagram drops down my phone screen. Liz, who is in the bed beside me, has tagged me in a post, which is out of character. She’s averaged less than one post per year since 2018.
“What are you doing over there?” I ask. I pull up Instagram and see a photo of the two of us from last night, in the hotel elevator after we walked a half-mile from the restaurant – the food was incredible. Fried rice croquettes with tuna, Icelandic lamb dumplings, seared scallops, cappellacci with shrimp, crawfish, squid, and anchovies – I love anchovies so much. You can see the redness in our faces from the bitter cold we’d just come from. I read her Instagram post and when I look up, I realize she is watching me read it, waiting for me to smile.
“Thank you,” I say.
“I worked on it a long time,” she says as she shows me the notes in her phone. It’s pages long. “I tried a lot of different avenues but then we had that silly picture and I had to make the post funny to match.” She leans in and kisses me. “Happy birthday,” she says, and then she walks out of the room.
Alone, I read the post again. The first time I read it I mostly saw that she says I’m a good writer and father – those are the parts I feel confident in. But when I read it again, I read that she calls me the love of her life. She wouldn’t have written it if it weren’t true. I know she loves me, but she’s never called me the “love of her life.” It gets to me. I read it again and again until I have to fight back a tear. I hear her walking back to the bedroom, so I put the phone down.
“Let’s go,” she says, “Mama needs to eat.”
We mask up and take the elevator down to the mezzanine – a couple in their mid-to-late 50s gets on the elevator with us and they tell us about riding up and down the elevator twice before getting off and trying another to get where they need to go, which is the level with the fitness center. “It was the elevator from hell,” the woman says, laughing. When they get off, Liz says they are exactly the kind of people she thinks of when she thinks of Kansans.
“We’re in Missouri,” I say.
“You know what I mean,” she says. I love this about her.
On the mezzanine level, we follow the signs to the restaurant, walking past pockets of caffeinated dance moms and teenage girls in Athleta joggers, sequined backpacks on their backs – there’s a dance convention at the hotel.
Liz and I stand at the restaurant’s host stand, but two dance moms walk by us and go straight in. We follow them, there’s a buffet. We get plates. I’m prepared to show someone my breakfast voucher, but there’s no one. I’ve only spotted one employee – a server helping other tables. I put honeydew melon on my plate. And bacon, scrambled eggs, a French toast triangle. Liz and I sit in a booth.
“Are we sure we aren’t going to have to pay for this? Is this where we’re supposed to use the voucher?” Liz asks. The food is sub-par and the price is way too much.
“I’m sure,” I say. My plan is to say we don’t want the terrible food, if someone says our voucher is no good here. And then we walk away. But no one comes. And we eat. Liz goes to get coffee and brings me back a water. As we’re finishing up, the server comes and asks if we’d like something to drink – a question generally posed at the beginning of a meal. (I’m sensitive to customer service.) We tell her the water is fine. She walks away, then comes back to drop a check. She puts it right beside the voucher I’ve left on the table. I open up the black check holder and see the bill is $30. I put the voucher into the check holder and say, “You ready?” As we walk away from the restaurant, I half-expect someone to come running after us, but it doesn’t happen. Praise be.
---
The parking garage was mostly empty when we checked into the hotel yesterday, but now it is a motor pool of minivans with dance decals on the back glass. The license plates are from states all across the Midwest. We drive a couple of miles north to the Kemper Museum, but when we get there, it looks closed. The main entrance has a sandwich board sign out front that says, “Entrance Closed.” I pull a u-turn in the middle of the quiet street to circle back around. Liz says she saw a parking lot for the museum. I start to drive the alley behind the museum, but she says to stay on the road, the parking lot is a little further. Sure enough, there it is. Kemper Museum Parking. It seems too far away, but there are two other cars in the lot, so someone is using it. I call the museum from the truck and get an automated message. The hours are 10am-4pm on Saturdays. It’s 10:30. I put on my hat and gloves and we walk out of the parking lot and past a building with ceramic heads lined up in a row in front of it. It’s got to be a studio for the Kansas City Art Institute, which is across the street.
“That one’s my favorite,” I say, nodding toward the one on the end with large, shiny dreadlocks hanging off it.
“Mine, too,” Liz says. “But that one’s cool too,” she says, nodding toward one that sits in the grass, away from the others. It’s a human body, chopped up, but not in a gory way, if there is such a way to chop up a body.
We find a second museum entrance, but it also has an “Entrance Closed” sign in front of it. Just the same, I glance through the glass behind it and see someone inside, which brightens our spirits as we push forward against the cold. The museum isn’t massive and we’re getting some good perspective on its size as we continue our walk around the whole building in search of an entrance. When we turn another corner, we see a single row of parking – plenty of it – with cars dotting the lot right in front of the third entrance we approach – this one welcoming us in. There is a sign that says Kemper Museum Overflow Parking is down the street, where we parked. I glare at Liz. She grins as a plea for forgiveness.
---
“This is the kind of art I want in our house. It’s so ugly,” Liz says. We are looking at a drawing – pencil on paper – of a man’s mangled head. It does nothing for me, but Liz loves it. At Halloween, when we go to the pumpkin patch, she likes the gnarled, warty ones. I can only hope this bodes well for me as I grow into old age.
My own favorite in the gallery is a tall, bright, obnoxiously colorful piece that seems like nothing more than random brushstrokes until my eye gets to the top, where the brushstrokes form the image of a bear’s head. The eyes are the only realistic part of the painting. I didn’t like it at all until I saw the bear, and then somehow all the colors made sense. “That does nothing for me,” Liz says.
“I’m going one…” I say, naming my favorite, and starting with a point to the bear, “two…three.”
“One…” Liz counters, pointing at the mangled man’s head, “two…three.” Our only crossover is a portrait of a well-groomed black man against a baby blue background.
---
“What’s up?” Liz asks. She’s asking why my nose is in my phone when I am surrounded by art.
“Bronco has COVID,” I say.
“Oh, God.”
Omicron is making its way through our office, just like it’s been making its way through society. Liz and I have agreed that it’s no longer a matter of “if” and instead it’s a matter of “when” we contract the virus ourselves. Though we are not scared for ourselves as much as we are for our unvaccinated children, both of them too young for the vaccine.
---
I park the truck on the street, right in front of an art supply store that I use to orient myself whenever I am in this part of Kansas City. We are centrally located between the art galleries we want to visit and the restaurant where we want to eat lunch.
When we enter the first gallery – in a large, industrial, brick building – a labradoodle greets us loudly, barking an alert more than a threat. A woman’s voice calls out to the dog, telling him to stand down. We assure her the dog is fine with us, but she tells him to come behind the counter anyway. I take off my hat and gloves and jacket and we look at a series of staged photographs of a female mannequin in various poses, doing various things – drinking, petting a stuffed cat, sitting at a table full of ceramic frogs. Liz likes them more than I do. We move on to look at a collection of intricately crafted vases and I imagine how easily and quickly they would perish in our home. I imagine standing over our energetic four-year-old and asking, “Gus, what do you need to say?” and he would say, “Sor-ry.” And then we would have no choice but to sweep up the broken pieces of the $3,500 vase so that we could move on to the next thing.
---
We love the food at a place called Café Gratitude. It’s a vegan restaurant I sought out years ago when we weren’t eating meat, but the meal was so good that we’ve come back multiple times since returning to an omnivore’s diet. Our only complaint is the names of all the items on the menu – something that shouldn’t matter at all, but they are so damned bad. Each dish has some over-the-top, hippy-dippy, self-assuring positive mantra label. If you want a kale salad, then you order an “I am Pure.” A chai latte is an “I am Charismatic.” A mimosa is an “I am Radiant.”
Our server is a young woman in a two-toned denim jacket. In my head, she’s a student at the art institute, but that’s based on nothing. She has a kind of slow-moving demeanor that makes me think she hasn’t been waiting tables long, but maybe she’s just tapped into the vibe of this place. No one here is in a rush, like at every other restaurant in the world. These people are completely in touch with their seven chakras or whatever.
“I am Terrific,” Liz tells our server.
“Excellent,” the server says.
When she looks at me, I can’t remember what my food’s mantra is. “May I have the raw pad Thai, please?” The noodles are made from kelp.
“That’s what I’m getting!” Liz says.
“Oh,” I say. (It turns out that I am also terrific.) The server looks at me like I might want to change my order so that Liz and I don’t get the same thing, but instead I say, “And may I get a cup of the soup?”
She pushes some buttons on the tablet she’s holding and says to herself, “I am Thriving.”
I want to say, “We all are. This is America.” But I don’t.
Before she walks away from our table, she says, “Here at Café Gratitude we have a question of the day and today’s question is ‘How are you transforming?’”
Liz and I look at each other and both give a courtesy “Oh…”, but we are unsure if we are supposed to answer the question immediately or if we are supposed to think about it for a while. The server looks at us expectantly, but she’s also slowly backing away from our table. Is she waiting on us to say something? I am Awkward. Finally, she turns and walks away.
“Oof,” Liz says.
“Are we going to have to tell her how we’re transforming when she comes back to the table?” I ask. “Or are we just supposed to talk to each other about how we’re transforming?”
“I don’t know, but I was really counting on you to take control there and you let me down.”
“I know. But I really just didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”
“Try this juice,” Liz says. She has a small glass of green liquid in front of her.
“It’s good. What is it?”
“I am Rejuvenated.”
“I know you are, Honey, but what’s in the juice?”
“I don’t know. Active cultures.”
I’m a slow eater. While I finish my kelp noodles, Liz searches the Internet for Café Gratitude copycat recipes she can make us at home.
“If we ate like this for dinner just twice a week, I think we’d feel way better about ourselves.”
“I’m down for it,” I say.
Less than two hours later we’re starving, so we go to a tapas bar and eat three different kinds of sausages and drink coffee with Bacardi 151 and whipped cream in it through a straw. I am Gluttonous.
---
“Heater, heater, heater,” Liz says after we climb back into the truck. We aren’t going anywhere, but we need a quiet place to sit and Facetime her mother so we can talk to Gus. He sings “Happy Birthday” to me and as soon as he’s sung the last line he buries his face in his Yiayia’s shirt. He’s embarrassed. I wouldn’t trade this time alone with Liz, but I miss our little boy.
He asks if I’m going to have a cupcake for my birthday. I tell him I might. He says, “You have to have a cupcake, Dad. Because it’s your birthday.” He seems genuinely concerned about my birthday experience.
“I’ll see if I can find one,” I say.
---
At the next gallery, the door is locked, but there is a sign with a number to call. The man who answers says he’ll be right down. He wears a navy blazer and glasses. He looks like a young Bernie Sanders. On his lapel he wears a button that says “Art hard, KC!”
“On Saturdays, it’s just me,” he says, locking the door behind us and leading us across the floor of a warehouse-turned-art studio. “We’ll start with this first piece over here.” It’s a life-sized ladder -- a corporate ladder -- with multiple people climbing up or falling off it. At the top is an angry white man in a suit, using the heel of his feet to push people off. “A financial firm commissioned the artist to create a piece they could display in their lobby, but they didn’t give him any parameters. When they saw it, they paid him for it, but didn’t want it displayed in their lobby, as you can imagine.”
He leads us onto an old freight elevator with wooden doors and we ride it up to the third floor. The room is black and unlit except for the lights shining on the artwork.
“What do you see?” the man asks. The piece in front of us is a large, rectangular piece – the images look to me to be a pattern of wood blocks linked together, something found in a carpenter’s workshop. One is the shape of a baguette, the other the shape of a slice of Wonder bread. I like looking at art more than I like analyzing it. I like taking things at face value.
“I see sperm,” the man says. “Some people see baguettes.”
At first I think the man is going to give us an introduction to the three-room gallery and turn us loose to wander on our own, but then it becomes clear that he intends to accompany us the entire time. We are his only visitors right now. Very quickly, Liz and I realize his knowledge does make each piece more interesting.
“See this black and white pattern here? The artist’s father was a surveyor and he uses the black and white pattern of a surveyor’s rod in a lot of his work.”
Sure enough, as we work our way through the gallery, I see that pattern over and over. “There’s Dad,” I say. The man nods.
“What was his relationship with his father like?” I ask.
The man says, “It must have been good because he shows up A LOT in his work.”
I think of my own work and how often I write about my dad. He was nearly all I wrote about for two solid years, but it wasn’t because we had a great relationship as much as it was because we had a relationship I barely understood. I wonder if William T. Wiley was doing what I was doing – processing his complicated relationship with his father, but I don’t say that.
I only catch snippets of the man’s explanation of the piece I like the most in the gallery, but the piece’s message is not hard to ascertain. It’s a 12-foot-long terra cotta, porcelain, and fabric sculpture by a Caribbean artist named Joann Quiñones. The bust of an elderly white woman in an extravagant dress that is absurdly long, and the whole thing is held up by 17 black feet. I stole glimpses of the piece long before we got here because it sits ominously at one end of the gallery. When we finally reach the part of the tour where we are standing in front of it, I’m almost scared of it. I stand back and take a picture of Liz and the man in front of it.
Once we’ve seen all the art on display, we ride the elevator back down to the first floor, and the man says, “Hey, how about a picture of me with the birthday boy?”
“Let’s do it,” I say.
The man grabs an oversized papier-mâché Abraham Lincoln mask and we position ourselves in front of the museum’s sign. As Liz starts to take the picture, the man spreads his arms out like wings and squats like a baseball player caught in a pickle, ready to run either direction. “What’s he doing?” the man asks Liz. “Is he posing too?”
“No,” Liz says. “He’s just doing his normal thing.”
The giant Abraham Lincoln mask turns to face me and though I can't see the man inside it, I know I have disappointed him. But he doesn’t let it get to him, which I appreciate.
---
On our half-mile walk to dinner, we come across a bookstore with a bar – or maybe it’s a bar with a lot of books – either way, it appeals to us, so we go inside and order martinis. There is a little boy in the back, just older than Gus, and we talk about how much we miss our son. But we also know he is at home having as much fun without us as we are having without him. Just the same, Liz pulls up a picture of our little boy. She accidentally scrolls to the next picture in her phone and I see it’s a selfie she took in front of the mirror in our hotel room just before we left for dinner. She took it because she wanted to see what she looked like. She was checking her makeup in different lighting. She was looking at her hair. She meant to delete the photo, but she forgot and now I’ve seen it and I’m making it a thing.
“Hellllllo…” I say, taking the phone from her hand. I send the picture to myself so I have it. Liz smirks, faking humility. We have been married five years, but we still get excited – or relieved, in my case – when the other finds us attractive in photos.
The man next to us has the Chiefs game pulled up on his phone and there are a couple of people looking over his shoulder. It’s the fourth quarter and a way closer game than it should be. Before we leave, I notice the bartender stands idle, so I ask her to take our picture, which embarrasses Liz.
We’ve had reservations at the Corvino Supper Club for weeks and our expectations are high. The server tells us we should order four to five plates – most of them are small. (But she doesn’t know we had the sausages at 2pm.) We order the tuna & octopus tostada, then the seaweed donuts with trout roe & cream, maitake mushrooms with smoked eggplant and pistachio pesto, and we finish with a whole branzino and anchovies – I love anchovies so much.
Over and over we ask the other, “Did you taste that yet?” It’s all delicious. At one point our server tries to take the branzino plate when the only thing left on it is the fish head. “Actually, I’m going to get after that head,” I say. The server laughs. Liz laughs. But I am not laughing when I cut the head in two and use my hands and teeth to get to the small pieces of meat around the eyes.
“What time is it?” Liz asks.
I tap the screen of my phone on the table.
“You made it your wallpaper?” She asks. She’s talking about the photo I sent to myself from her phone. The hotel mirror selfie. “What is it about that photo that you like so much?”
“You look good,” I say. But I can tell she’s not satisfied with that answer.
“But you think I’m hot when I’m happy and smiling. I’m not smiling in that picture.”
This is new information for me. I don’t know why she feels that way, but she’s not entirely wrong. Maybe she knows me better than I do. I look at the photo of her on my phone again and ask myself why I like that picture of her so much – I have hundreds and hundreds of pictures of her – why did I choose this one to make my wallpaper when I’ve had the previous wallpaper for two and a half years?
“It’s because I can tell your guard is down,” I say. “You’re relaxed. All the anxieties that normally plague you – the things that need to be done around the house, keeping the kids healthy in the middle of a pandemic – they are gone in that photo. The big problems are gone and all you are looking for in that photo is something that doesn’t really matter and you know it. You’re looking at the subtleties of your makeup or your hair. You aren’t smiling, but I can tell you are happy. And I like it when you are happy.”
Liz squints playfully at me from across the table. She knows me well enough to know what’s coming next.
“And you look fine as hell.”
The server brings a dish we didn’t order. It’s a bowl of milk chocolate ice cream with what she calls “a birthday crunch.”
Liz takes my picture and says, “You have to send that to Gus and tell him you got your birthday cupcake.”
---
I don’t want to be 40 years old, but I would not trade this life for anything.
Dad.
Kansas City, Missouri. 1.8.2022 - 12.02pm.
SIDENOTE: The photo is us taking a shortcut from the Belger Arts Center to Cafe Gratitude. I posted other photos from the day to my Facebook page. It was such a great day with your mother.
Cafe Gratitude lunch was delicious, even if it didn’t look that great. Coconut “ceviche” and polenta with kale, pesto, pepitas, and summer squash. God, I love vegetables.
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