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Inside Outside Having climbed its hill, why should I enter the Asian Art Museum except to enjoy, admire - and fail if I tried to emulate - work so far beyond my powers? Outside, the green hilltop park: lakes with ducks; wide, far vistas to sea and mountains; old trees, surely the town’s widest-spreading cherry tree - speak directly of what, inside, several eras of Asian arts celebrate fully, modestly. All outdoors presses on me its beauties - grandeurs, even, worthy of the art indoors, give or take a buffalo or two. The wholesome artlessness of the natural! - the well-planted, tended, pruned and watered real! Locals with earnest easels may well lurk where just now I can’t see, rendering each their honest view. (Strollers exempt themselves from fresh attention, as their cellphones flash.) Mainly I feel these land- sky- sea- scape panoramas unframed are unframeable, certainly way beyond the current verbal resources at my disposal. A middle-distance silver flash shapes itself into a squirrel. Outdoors provokes art appetite, stirs ambition, only to beggar the impractical artificer. Let it all pour in on me, pondering the Puget-Sound tsunami my wife assures me will follow the due-any-day (or worse, -night) Great Quake. Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’ frames a safe exquisite Fuji; quake and great waves, she says, will take most of Seattle. Though from here I can’t see it, shapely Mount Rainier awaits on its near horizon whichever cataclysm may come first, its own fated eruption sure, except its date. What pours in on me - too phlegmatic to imagine ruin - is sunlight merely, brightening all the ponds, lightening the evergreens’ cones, tinting my self-darkening specs. Everything ungraspable moves faster than eye or aging mind - or calligrapher’s hand? Well, an old culture has its codes and formulae, confident stilled re-presentations of the quick. I’d better go inside, flashing a smile and Senior’s card.