Homewood native bringing home stories of 10 years spent as guard at The Met in New York

Like many Chicago area natives, Homewood-Flossmoor High School graduate Patrick Bringley is coming home for the holidays with plenty of stories.

But unlike most of his peers, he has put some of his stories into a book.

Bringley’s book “All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me” has been published by Simon & Schuster.

It is about his 10 years as a watchman at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or The Met, in New York City. It has won rave reviews from The Times of London and others.

Bringley will be signing copies of his book starting at 7 p.m. Dec. 27 at The Rock Shop, 18109 Dixie Highway, Homewood.

A tragic loss, the death of his older brother, led Bringley to write the book.

“While I was at ‘The New Yorker,’ I was working in the events department, my brother Tom, who was two years older than me, got sick and died of soft tissue sarcoma,” Bringley said.

After losing his brother, the last thing Bringley, 40, wanted to do was “rush back to some office job where I had to care about office politics and corporate ladder climbing.”

The “shellshocked’ Bringley instead took a job “in the most beautiful place I could think of” and found it quite therapeutic.

“It’s a place where you can reflect,” he said. “So, it was sort of comfort to be in a place like that.”

Bringley worked there until 2019.

“I loved the job. It was a journey in a way,” he said. “I love art, so I got to be in this place where my main responsibility was having my head up and keeping watch of my surroundings, drinking in the beautiful art, talking to people about it, one day in this section, one way the next.” he said.

At roughly 2 million square feet, “you never run out of things to look at, things to contemplate” in The Met.

He especially liked how every day was different.

“One day it’s Egyptian art. The next day it’s Picasso. Not only different things to learn but a different atmosphere. The Egyptian wing? Tons of tons of kids. The masters wing? An older crowd,” he said.

With about 30,000 people coming through each day, he was bound to meet a few characters.

“We’d get some regulars who come every single week. Art world characters dressed in somewhat outlandish things,” he said. “Things happen. A man once slammed into the frame of Woman in White, a Picasso painting. It swung on its copper wires, back and forth.”

Some confused guests ask “where are the dinosaurs” and “if we have the Mona Lisa, things like that.”

Art museums typically don’t house dinosaurs, and the Mona Lisa is at The Louvre in Paris.

The Met’s Mona Lisa is probably the popular Washington Crossing the Delaware, he said. Unlike the relatively small Mona Lisa, “it’s a huge, billboard-sized painting.”

While the book reflects a bit on his late brother, it is more about The Met and its impact on him over the decade.

“There are sequences where I explain why I came to The Met. Also, the book is partly using the art to reflect on life. It’s not an art history book where I talk about schools and styles.

“It tries to be very straightforward that the art at The Met is about life and death and suffering and the gods and the cosmos and everything else,” Bringley said.

Yes, writing a book is a challenge, especially for a first-time author.

“I’ve always written. It wasn’t lost on me that I’ve had this interesting point of vantage and it would be fun to try to write something from that point of vantage,” he said.

His first idea was to write “a guard’s guide to the Met” where he’d hop from artwork to artwork, interspersed with anecdotes.

“They give you the advice to write the book you’d want to read. It occurred to me that what is not written about is the experience of looking at art, what brings us to the museums in the first place, the charismatic hold the artwork has over people,” he said.

Art lovers can “see themselves in my story because they likewise feel quiet and (get) lost inside this great museum.”

While telling that story, “I also explain who I am,” he said.

Bringley, who spent years scribbling notes for his book idea, said “once I found my literary agent, we were off to the races. And we had good success finding a home for it (with Simon & Schuster).”

Looking back to high school, Bringley, who was in the class of 2001, said he enjoyed his time at Homewood-Flossmoor.

He grew up in Homewood where his parents Jim and Maureen still reside.

“That’s why I’m doing this event. We’ll be visiting with them for the holidays,” he said. His wife, their son, 10, and daughter, 8, are returning with him.

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“It’s always fun to be home. We’ll be going downtown, seeing ‘A Christmas Carol,’ doing the Chicago things,” he said.

Besides being a tourist in his hometown and seeing family and old friends, he’ll also be chatting during the book signing session with Rebecca Healy.

Healy was his AP art history teacher in high school when her maiden name was Gaz. She still teaches art there.

“I had her in her first or second year of teaching, her first year of teaching AP art history at HF, so that will be really cool. It will be great to see her again,” he said, adding: “If it had not been for that class, who knows?”

Yes, Bringley was asked that question, the one all first-time authors can’t avoid: Does he plan to write a second book?

“Yes, I do, but it’s very early. I think it will involve art again, but maybe not exclusively,” he said. “Yes, this book is doing well, so it seems I will get another bite at the apple.”

Steve Metsch is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.