Metamorphosism

The House of Music

If same-sex marriages ever become legal in Washington State, I will be very tempted to marry my brother-in-law.

Listen: this is just a few hours of one day of the two weeks my sister and her family spent with us in Austria. Which we are now recalling fondly, FYI.

We shall take them to the House of Music, said one of us. Yes, let's, said the other. It is educational and has many entertaining interactive displays for children.

We shall aim at 9.00 for a departure time, said one of us.
Fine! Let's, said the other.

Listen: recall my formula for chaos? The chaos coefficient? Generally, this is how it works: the average chaos in your life is a function of the number of family members and pets in your household. Specifically, this is the formula:

C=(f+p)^f
In my case, with three pets and four family members, that works out to this:
2401=(4+3)⁴.

However, with four relatives visiting, we had a chaos coefficient not of 2401 but of 214,358,881, so breakfast took longer than planned and we got to Vienna around lunchtime.

The kids (the kids, not my kids) were hungry and cranky as they had not eaten much breakfast to speak of so we went straight to an Asian restaurant, assuming correctly that service would be fast, food would be delicious and include vegetarian options for the vegetarians and pseudo-vegetarians in our party. Tables were moved to accomodate us. We ordered beverages and changed our orders repeatedly (Not tea, cola. Not cola, mineral water. But only if it's without gas ("with gas" and "without gas" although not correct English nor German had become popular with us by this time, since a waiter somewhere had said it to us in his quaint English and we all adopted it...) We ate and paid and left and the tables we had occupied looked as if a blind rugby team on crystal meth had had a mass seizure there.

We took a horse ride around Vienna after that. I highly recommend that to anyone visiting Vienna, take a Fiaker ride. Those are the horse-drawn carriages that convey you slowly through the streets while the driver points out things of interest. (The modifier "horse-drawn" is unnecessary, I guess, as there are no carriages drawn by anything else here, unless you count the pedicabs which are perhaps propelled by pedifiles (that reminds me, I had always envied an acquaintance of mine for an encounter she had with a foot-fetishist outside a hotel once - he glanced at her feet and told her correctly what shoe size she wore before inviting her somewhere; I went shoe-shopping last week and the sales lady did that to me: it was so nice, I nearly proposed to her. Maybe it's just me)). In Venice you take a gondola ride (also recommended) and in Vienna a Fiaker. It costs a bit, between €40 and €100 depending on how far you go, but it's worth it. Even if you live here. Anyway. The kids liked that.

Then we had icecream, or before, not sure, and there was much dripping and licking and getting sticky, in an entirely family-friendly G-rated way.

Then my wife had to go. Also my sister. They had some pressing engagement. We all walked them back to the cars because it looked a bit like rain and we needed the raincoats we'd packed. We all went down into the dark belly of the filthy parking garage and got our stuff and negotiated with the kids whether they would ride home with their mothers, in which case we would not see the House of Music we had come to see in the first place, or whether they would go with their fathers. And who would carry what and which toys would be brought and who would ride on whose shoulders.

My wife recommended we take the subway one stop so we wouldn't have to walk so far, and Gamma heard it. The mothers got ready to leave and we looked around for the kids, who had disappeared. We found them, got shoes on my niece who was barefoot and wearing a licensed Disney princessdressnightgown and nothing else except underwear. We found them, they had been playing behind some cars. Bye mom! Bye honey!

Back outside in the fresh air we walked through this little park where junkies hang out and where I saw a young woman giving some guy head in public once; the park was empty which simplified things since I hadn't been looking forward to explaining any of that to three kids between 4 and 7 (15-year old Beta, who could have helped us(with the kids, I mean, not with the explaining, at least I hope not), was away that day). We stood around gathering our thoughts, my brother-in-law and I. We would walk, because I didn't relish getting that flea circus ticketed and down the escalators and onto the right train. My niece and my daughter and my nephew went and played with this large advertising thing, a column three or four feet in diameter and ten or twelve feet tall covered with advertising posters; working together, three children could make it rotate on a vertical axis, it was discovered. I hoped they weren't unscrewing it and it would tip over and crush an unsuspecting passerby.

So they did that for a while. They were hungry, they told us. We reminded them they had just eaten lunch, but then gave them snacks. We will walk, I said. But Gamma protested, Subway, she said. Her cousin joined her so, Okay, we said forcefully, subway.

Then my brother-in-law asked his daughter where she had gotten so dirty. Her pink princessdressnightgown was grey, and her leg was covered with soot to the knee and she likewise wore elbow-length gloves of black grime. Playing under the cars in the parking garage, she told him. Calmly he tried to rub some of it off, then gave up, a prince among fathers.

Somehow Gamma had managed to stay almost spotless, although she had been among the cars with her cousin.

The subway ride was uneventful except for the wino drinking wine out of a carton and yelling gutturally. He was standing right in front of us on the platform, so I moved us all a couple steps back, cause, you know, wine out of a carton?

From the station where we got out I found straight to the House of Music for the first time in my life.

Let me explain a little about the House of Music: it is for kids or anyone else who wants to learn about music in a fun manner. It is a zillion stories tall, or at least four, but the only toilets are in the fucking cellar.

Any parents among you know how the next part goes:

1. "Anyone need to go to the bathroom? Let's all go to the bathroom now, just in case. Even if you don't have to go."
   
2. But no one has to go, and they all refuse even trying just in case.
   
3. We buy tickets. The guy working the ticket place gives us a family ticket, which saves us like 50% or so, even though we're two guys. This is where I get my same-sex marriage idea.
   
4. We carry the kids upstairs, to the very top, passing the floor with classical music and composers and stuff on it, on the assumption the kids would rather hammer on things than read about Gustav Mahler.
   
5. At the top, maybe it is the altitude, two fathers are out of breath from carrying kids and gear up four or five flights of stairs (no elevators) without oxygen or sherpas, and two kids are holding their crotches and dancing.

Somehow, from where we were when this happens, and the way the House of Music is arranged, we had to go completely through the exhibit, consisting of several large rooms, before we found any stairs back down. But, stroke of luck: while looking for stairs, we found some large stainless steel elevators, freight-elevator sized, with handicapped signs on them.

Obviously, not "handicapped signs", the signs for handicapped people, I mean. That icon of a person in a wheelchair, in blue and white, used to mark handicapped parking (parking for handicapped people) and so on. Meaning that people with wheelchairs can use these elevators, for example.

Or fathers in a hurry to get downstairs to the restrooms. We jumped in, loaded the kids, hit "E" for ground floor (in Austria, as in many parts of Europe, ground floor is "G" or whatever ("E" stands for "Erdgeschoss" which means "groundfloor" and the second floor is the first floor, etc.) and sped to the ground, got off, doors closed and hrm.

Where's my niece? Here's my brother-in-law, here's Gamma and her cousin and what's that hysterical screaming issuing faintly from the elevator as my brother-in-law stabs the buttons. Up, down, he's not being picky.

Door won't open, he said. We asked the ticket guy about that. You need this card, he said. We have a little girl stuck inside, we said.

Wow, imagine some handicapped person upstairs had called the elevator while we stood around scratching our heads just then.

But the guy was nice and ran over and let out my niece, who was red in the face and holding her crotch and screaming. We got the kids on the toilets (Gamma still didn't have to go, but I talked her into trying) and went back up and looked at all the cool stuff.

There's this room where you mess around with bits of sound and can hit things and make noises. Actually there are several rooms fitting that general description in different ways. I like them, they are cool. I walked around playing, checking on the kids occasionally. I noticed my brother-in-law sitting on the carpeted floor with his daughter, calmly feeding her pretzels from a plastic bag stashed among his gear. The whole chest part of his grey tee-shirt, from shoulder to shoulder, was soaked in water. He noticed me looking and held up a a bottle of mineral water. "With gas," he said, and fed her another pretzel. Marry me, I thought.

Posted at August 10, 2004 08:32 AM