museum adventure # 5, the seaside

We walked the boardwalk with strollers towards the aquarium with the Coney Island skyline behind us and Anna's first view of the ocean on the right. The beach was nearly empty and packed with the delicate wire outlines of empty trash cans, they looked like the skeletons of some large and simple almost-vegetable creature from the deep sea, what is the name? Sea cucumber! Anna was indifferent to the ocean it seemed but we didn't get very close. The sky was white and wet and low-down, almost on our shoulders. At the aquarium we lined our babies up on the ledge below the viewing window to watch the walrus make her underwater rounds. The babies weren't indifferent to the walrus. Her bulk rippled as she cruised by, brushing her whiskers against the glass, disappearing into the murk of her cave, reappearing to push off the glass with a flipper the size of Anna. She was very impressive but I felt sorry for her, she didn't have much to do but circle and circle in her little bucket of water, touching the same points again and again. It sort of made me too sad to think hard about. The babies smacked the glass with the flats of their hands and watched her. Some of us fed some of them (babies, not walruses) in the jellyfish room later, glowing in the blacklights. We sat near an aquarium shaped like a tube with tiny pulsing jellies drifting around. I was thinking how pretty they were, like snow or stars, and how they didn't have a thought in their heads. Didn't have heads either. Babies ate, then smacked the glass some more. After, we walked down to Brighton Beach where the boardwalk is full of the sound of Russian, older gentlemen doing their calisthenics, older ladies walking arm in arm. We sat at one of the vast Russian restaurants that lines the boardwalk and ate borscht and fish soup and watched the babies watch each other. Then bumped our strollers back along the boardwalk to the F train and rattled back home. It was another very good day.