Passing Seasons by Lily Kaplan

It’s October, I’m 23, and I live in Los Angeles. The air isn’t as crisp as it was back home when I was growing up. When my mother would wrap me up in scarves before the other girls at school were made to wear sweaters. I remember itching at thick grey tights and scraping my knees as I climbed trees to grab the plumpest apples I could find. I wasn't yet aware of Plath’s fig tree and had no issue grabbing what was right in front of me. 

Now I live on the west coast, where time seems to stand still. I don’t own gloves and haven't yet crushed red leaves under eager boots. I feel much older than I was when I arrived here last fall, but I also can’t parse when those months ended, and these began. I miss the seasons of New York, but more than that, I miss the memories that come with them. Celebrating the start of school by attending evening shows at Lincoln Center with my grandma, ice skating at Wollman Rink with my sisters, attempting lopsided cartwheels under the cherry blossoms in Central Park, hot summer escapes to the Met under my mother’s watchful eye.

In an effort to prescribe what I’ve been experiencing, I came to the determination that LA was simply devoid of culture. Where are the museums? The theater? The community I found so easily back home? They must not exist. It turns out I was unsurprisingly very wrong. Los Angeles is filled to the brim with music, art, and history. If you are new to the city and have struggled to find these things, don’t blame yourself; there is one significant barrier to entry: proximity. 

I have learned that it is nearly impossible to get anywhere in this town by foot. One must drive, or have a very, very generous roommate. Coming from Manhattan, I experienced a sort of baptism by fire: driving a film director across the 405 every morning with only a nervous smile and a freshly printed license. There is public transportation, of course, but it’s nowhere near NYC’s MTA or Chicago’s CTA. My deepest respect goes to those who have navigated the LA Metro, but in my limited experience, LA isn't particularly walkable. 

One Thursday after work, at the start of autumn, I found myself behind the wheel, driving towards the Broad. Maybe it was because of the inescapable advertisements for the Yoko Ono Special Exhibition on every pole banner down Sunset Boulevard, or maybe I just wanted to put off writing with a seemingly productive distraction.

In the museum I sat in front of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, and felt rage pulsate through my temples as a grinning man tore through her blouse and sheared off her bra straps. I rode the escalator up to the permanent collection where I walked past my favorite Cindy Sherman photographs and inspected a Rauschenberg painting I had never seen.

Eventually I stepped Under The Table. Robert Therrien’s table, to be precise. A large wooden, metal, and enamel structure which stands nearly 10 feet tall. The object's ordinariness, combined with its uncanny size, made me feel more than just small; it felt alienating. It provoked a strange out-of-body sensation, transporting me to a different time when a table was a roof with pillars. I was Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, when he temporarily escapes the mind wipers by hiding in his uncorrupted childhood memory under his kitchen table. My brief dissociation felt like looking down at my small limbs from far away, as I remembered the last time I found myself in this same position.

I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, gripping the carpeted floor of my friend’s apartment for dear life. I can’t remember where my friend or her mother went, but I know I was alone with the largest, most menacing creature I had ever seen. This beast looked at me from across the room with sharp teeth and a shimmering collar, and all I could do was hide, under the table.

Despite our persistent friendship, I only remember being back in that apartment years later. When I walked through the front door, the sweetest dog in the world met me. I gave him belly rubs and threw around a toy, and when I insensitively asked, “What happened to the old scary one?”, my friend looked at me with a puzzled expression. It turns out this adorable canine was the same monster I'd hid from years before. How silly it then seemed that I could have been afraid of this adorable, harmless creature. 

My innocent embarrassment was interrupted by something far more disturbing: the realization that my body was no longer the way it had once been. The dog had not shrunk, but I had grown. It was the first moment I truly asked myself, am I the same girl I once was? The girl who could climb up narrow branches that only her little limbs could slide through. The child who could seemingly spin for hours in ballet class without blistering her toes.

Standing under Therrien’s table, I felt this again. Asking myself which parts of my identity are innate and which are defined by the temporal or situational. Replaying memories, I felt frozen in time like seasons passing without falling leaves or melting snow. I thought about my father and how tall I felt sitting on his broad shoulders on our way to the park, and how small I felt standing in front of my second-grade teacher after being told I needed to remember to raise my hand when I had a question. 

There is another sculpture at The Broad, Fall 91’ by Charles Ray. It hasn't been on view for many years now, but I distinctly remember seeing a photo of a man standing next to it in my sophomore-year modern art history class. 

She’s an eight-foot-tall mannequin, with a dissatisfied expression, demanding presence, and a bright pink power suit from the fall of 1991. A man looks up at her, dwarfed to the size he might have been when he couldn’t reach medicine cabinets or open pickle jars. This man could be six feet tall, serious and mature, with neck tattoos or metal rings, but next to an eight-foot-tall mannequin he is proportionally a child. 

I often feel that this is what it’s like to grow up. To constantly feel defined by how you fit into the spaces around you, how you compare to the people you surround yourself with, whether in size, intellect, taste, or executive functioning skills. To always question whether you are the growing one or if the people around you are responsible for changing.

In Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion writes that “there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went ‘but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,’ and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later”. 

I’m not sure where the schoolgirl who used to be me has gone. The girl who hid behind tables and fell off of trees. I do know that now, beneath the blouses and occasional blowouts, there is the same curiosity, anxiety, and bravery as the little girl who loved hula hoops and rainbow looms. 

Like the seasons, hairstyles change, and fashion is recycled. Nothing external is permanent, but it's humbling to know you are part of a larger world of fixed objects and living people, whose proximity situates you but doesn't define you.