Part 4 of 5 in A Love Letter to Fairmount

I run with my son in a stroller to the Art Museum steps most days.

He likes it. I like it. The route is about a 0.64 miles (according to Google Fit) from our house. We sometimes stop at the brass giant dog statue at the end of Fairmount, surrounded by a circular rose garden. My son loves to walk around in that garden and climb the dog statue. When we get to the museum, we stop, I take him out of the stroller, and I put him down at the bottom of the first landing, sometimes without shoes as he loves taking them off & throwing them out of the stroller secretly - if you see shoes/socks along Fairmount ave, they're probably mine!

Sometimes he crawls up the steps, other days he walks up, mostly depending on how much stuff or people distract him. His record is 3 minutes and 14 seconds! When he gets distracted, its usually by stuff that he can put in his mouth - and I have to run over to stop him. Usually its either bottle caps or pieces of rock, not poisonous like cigarette butts but certainly choking hazards.

I walk up and down, coaxing, proding, hand-holding him up to the top. We do the Rocky pose and then I carry him down because he never likes coming down. And then we continue the rest of our run. This happens almost every day.

I don't get fine art. Never have. I see most paintings and ancient statues and think, so what. There are exactly two exceptions: The Gates of Hell, and The Castle of the Pyrenees. And the former, I am very lucky, has an original copy here in philly - freely available on the outside of the Rodin museum, and is literally on my daily walking route.

During college, I was in France doing an internship in Rouen, a city about 3 hours from Paris. One weekend, the weekend where big museums are free in Paris, I went to Paris to see the Musée d'Orsay (that's one of the big 3 museums there). Somewhere while wandering in there, I discovered the Gates of Hell (La Porte de L'enfer, in French I think). Made of bronze and standing 30 feet tall, carved with all sorts of demonic figures, either trying to escape from hell or to drag you in. I late discovered it was inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, but that didn't matter. The thing that hit me is here is this surreal, heaven & hell, giant piece of art made by a human hand. It wasn't just the size, it was how there were hundreds of demonic figures, each doing something uniquely evil.

The Gates of Hell are literally one of the two pieces of fine art that I get. I've seen the Mona Lisa and didn't get it.

Here's the cool part, the Rodin Museum is a fifteen-minute walk from our house or a 7 minute run and it's on my running route. The Gates attached to the front door of the museum - entirely free. You can walk up and touch it anytime, and I probably do that once a month.

I once heard a line in movie "I have touched the face of God" - well, I've never had a chance to touch the face of God, but I've touched the Gates of Hell plenty of times!