Proceed with Mom through darkness
When I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, I began to worry that coming here with my mother had been a terrible idea.
We were groping around the Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium, the science museum, which our family has been visiting since I was a kid, back when it was located in the drafty warehouse in the northern edge of San Francisco, and its classic exhibits are vivid in my childhood memories: standing in the tilted room that distorts your perception, making the other person seem tiny, or jumping up to take a picture of our shadows on the wall.
We’d visited often since it relocated to the waterfront, but that night, it was the first time that my brother, my mother, and I had ventured into this particular exhibit. I’d left my twin sons at home with my husband, so for once, we could enjoy the exhibits without chasing after them.
I didn’t know much about the Tactile Dome, other than that you proceeded in total darkness, touching different textures, and sliding into a pit of dry beans — akin to a full-body experience of that Halloween game where you’re blindfolded and you shiver at the touch of cold spaghetti that stands in for intestines and peeled grapes that double as eyeballs.
As we shucked off our shoes, the attendant assured us that she would be able to see us the entire time via infrared cameras, that there were exits throughout, and that she could pull us out if we got into trouble. Until we entered the white geodesic dome, I didn’t realize that ramps went up, ceilings went down, and that my mother would have to crawl, squat, slide, and climb to get to the end. Even so, my mother was eager to try, with the curiosity that has propelled her through life, through her research, a curiosity that manifested in me as a writer.
My brother led, my mother followed, and I kept up the rear.
“Reach up your right hand, and run it along the wall,” my brother said.
I put a hand to my mother’s back, guiding her and steadying her. Her body felt solid and warm and familiar as my own. “You’re doing great!” my brother said. “I bet you’re the oldest one in here tonight,” I said. Just the sort of superlative compliment my mother appreciated.
It made me think about what her life must have been like as a child, as a teenager, growing up in war and its aftermath, in China and Taiwan, which didn’t have American pastimes and pursuits like the Exploratorium.
In the Tactile Dome, she was making up for lost time. In the dark, we kept going, hunched over, holding onto each other. To the attendant monitoring us, we must have appeared like we were trying to escape a mine collapse or fumbling through a blizzard.
“Are you doing OK?” the attendant’s disembodied voice asked every few minutes. “Yes!” we shouted. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed or how far we had progressed when we reached our hardest challenge yet: a rope spiderweb that seemed to stretch into infinity. The knots bit into the arches of my feet, which were callused from running and toughened from stepping on a million Legos, but I worried my mother’s feet would be too tender. “Mom?” I asked. She didn’t immediately respond. What if she panicked, collapsed or fell through the rope web? She’d bruise her face or break a hip — but then somehow we carried on, making our way up and over the web.
The dark, narrow passages of the Tactile Dome seemed a blatant metaphor for the birth canal — all the more fitting, for me and my brother, to make this trip with our mother. At last we slid into a pile of beans, cool and sleek, and we waded our way out, our legs churning, to the exit. Blinking in the light, we grinned at each other. She seemed proud she’d made it through and proud we were at her side, proud as I was of her.
“Were you scared?” I asked.
“I was with you and your brother,” she said. “I knew I was safe.”
We strolled through the bustling hall, stopping every few feet at exhibits where we could spin wheels, drop balls and dazzle ourselves in lights — in a place where I always feel like a kid again, and my mother now can, too.
What are your favorite exhibits at the Exploratorium and other Bay Area institutions?
I put a hand to my mother’s back, guiding her and steadying her. Her body felt solid and warm and familiar.