(Photo: Kennedy Tanaka)
When the river's running at 30,000 cubic feet per second, gather your wife and her best friend, your niece and her best friend, get in the car and drive through the rain for two hours to the de Young Museum.
Take some time to stand in front of Robert Motherwell's "At Five in the Afternoon" and tell your turning-fifteen-years-old niece and her just-turned-fifteen-years-old best friend who Federico Garcia Lorca was and talk about the language of abstract expressionism.
Tell them that Lorca's poem, "The Goring and the Death," inspired Motherwell and that the poem foreshadowed Lorca's own execution at the hands of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
Then listen to them explain the relationship between the white background like the sand of a bull ring and the black shapes like death in the painting; how the thick black columns seem to be crushing the round black shapes. Listen, and learn something.
