Hundreds crowded the steps and spilled onto the sidewalk, waiting. It was opening day at what was touted as the finest art museum in the Midwest. The Museum of Artwork and Vision, MAV, had been six years in the making; from the first meeting of ideas, to argumentative meetings regarding design, to the ground breaking, to more meetings filled with debate, to the final MAV committee private tour. As opening day visitors paused in front of everything from hand thrown pots to busts to paintings, two children wandered from one room to the next. Their steps led them in an arbitrary tour of things that held little of their interest until they stopped in unison in front of a painting. Small and hung in an obscure spot, it had garnered little attention from most in the crowd. It, however, held the twins with an unaccountable pull, as though they could not move from their spot had they wished. The two understood, in that fuzzy place between mind and heart, that the story behind the painting was one that could change a life. The story had at the very least changed the lives of the ones who lived it, the ones who were in the small painting hung in an unimportant spot in one of the finest museums around.

to be continued . . .

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