On Friday my green tablers were busy so I traipsed up Fifth Avenue, averting my eyes as I passed Trump Tower, and followed the hexagon-paved path to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Chris met me in the American Wing café where we sat in the eerie, pale opal evening light, as a custodian emptied the trash bins and swiped our table with a cloth.

“Where should we start?” Chris said, as we took turns sipping a cup of Earl Grey tea.

I tried to summon enthusiasm for the vast holdings Chris loves so much but felt tired after my four-mile walk and just... tired. A museum visit reminds me of car trips with my parents. My mother would periodically notice we were not noticing and appreciating the world, and say, all peppy, into my reading silence, “Kids! Look outside! Look at the sky/sunset/sea!”

I thought about sitting there with my bird embroidery while Chris walked around the museum but that wasn’t very friendly and the café wasn’t hygge for hanging out.

The embroidery gave an idea though: What about a quest for birds? Chris was game so we tried to figure out where in the museum the most birds might be. Greek and Roman Art? Japanese Art? American Decorative Arts?

Walking through the American Wing we came to a vast, low-ceilinged room of glass cases filled with chairs, Shaker baskets, cabinets, glassware, ceramics, tin lanterns—the "visible storage" room, a giant, open closet of objects not currently on view in the main museum.

We found birds drawn in fanciful, gestural lines on teacups, plates and shallow bowls. Chris sketched them and I snapped photos. Then we made our way to the Japanese scrolls, passing underneath an ornate gold eagle hanging from the ceiling, and by sculpted birds, jewelry, and birds in ink and oil. I had never seen so many feathered creatures in the museum before, like a scene from Hitchcock's The Birds, but of course I had never looked.

On our way out we stepped into the Greek and Roman galleries and were drawn to the black and red Athenian vases. There we saw puffed-up roosters crowing like Donald J. Trump in the year of the rooster, but I preferred the beautiful and resilient sparrows.