I Remember When These Were a Thing

A friend of mine who works in a museum shop knows that I am a sucker for renewable shopping bags, so she obtained for me a bag promoting Museum Shop Sunday, a counter to the ubiquitous Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and a companion to Small Business Saturday. It's a nice little bag that conveys the message without flash or fanfare:

I remember when museum shops were a thing... indeed, when museums were a thing. I haven't taken a trip to a museum in about a year... no dinosaur bones or sculpture or archaeological material for me. I used to be a big museum nerd, I still would be if things weren't shut down. How civilized this Earth used to be. It's these small, humanizing trips, journeys of the mind as well as the feet, which spice things up... it's their loss which contributed to the interminable stretch of this year. 

As the daily number of cases nears 200,000, it seems as if museum trips aren't coming back for a long while.  I miss the quirky shops, usually staffed with charming, witty people like my friend, and I sure hope that the smaller museums, often on unsteady financial footing to begin with, will survive.  I bummed out enough about the dinosaurs being extinct, it would be unbearable if museums go extinct.