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KAYA AMONG THE FOSSILS

Yesterday Kaya and I went on an afternoon trip to the Lake Biwa Museum, a superb place filled with great and conscientious stuff for all ages. As a two-year-old, Kaya was intimidated by the walk-through ancient Japanese elephant diorama, and quailed at sight of the giant mammoth skeleton, with the loudspeakers replaying screeching mammoth field tapes recorded 300,000 years ago, but in the old farmhouse diorama she was fascinated at being unable to take the laundry out of the solid soapy-waterlike resin in the wash tub. Newness has its own rewards.

In the big map room we both got down on our hands and knees on the floor, Kaya mainly to find out why I was suddenly on my hands and knees: because the floor of that room is a detailed large-scale satellite photo map of Shiga Prefecture, and I could probably have found my house by Kaya's foot on the green mountainside above the big blue lake, if only I'd brought my glasses.

Kaya then had the best time of all in the Discovery Room, playing spontaneous rhythms on various folk instruments, getting her fill of frog puppetry and consolidating a wooden train empire before the final big adventure of the day, when she suddenly had to go to the bathroom, a new and recently required ability, and one that I had not foreseen. It has been decades since I had to foresee such things, and I'd forgotten how. It's not like riding a bicycle.

I didn't want to take her into the men's room to watch all the elderly men (coincidentally it was senior visitors day), and couldn't take her into the ladies room among all the elderly women since I was one of the elderly men, so I did the next best thing. Figuring Kaya must know what to do by now, I just sent her into the ladies room alone and waited outside, peeping in now and then anxiously for any signs of difficulty or untoward surprise, until some of the ladies walking by began to eye me suspiciously and seek another ladies room.

So I loitered nonchalantly over by the men's room, who cares what the men might think, and listened for sounds of struggle or unduly splashing water until a surprisingly dry Kaya at last came running out of the ladies room saying "I can't!! I can't!!" I asked: "Kaya, where are your shoes?" She was barefoot. I sent her back to get her shoes, didn't ask why she had taken them off. Even in museums, some things are better left unknown.

We found a convenient natural facility in the greenery outside and then went to the museum shop, where Kaya scattered a few colorful trinkets on the floor before falling in love with a soft-tusked wooly mammoth doll. Ten minutes later she was sound asleep in the car with a mammoth in her arms. A full afternoon, and we never even made it to the aquarium! Good, we have to go again.