A couple of weeks ago, our friends Ben & Rebecca came back to Houston for a weekend, and we made plans to go to brunch together Sunday. As Bill made us reservations at America’s, it struck me as odd that we were going out for Mother’s Day brunch with our friends, instead of our mothers.
Only later did it dawn on me that Rebecca is a mother, and now I am, too. So we celebrated my first Mother’s Day together. And we enjoyed a lovely meal!

Rebecca and Miranda

Ben and Bill
It’s always fun to catch up with Rebecca and Ben, and their daughter Miranda is engaging and adorable. We had a good time!
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Later in the afternoon — after a much-needed nap! — I met up with my Mom and Gran’mom at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston to see an exhibition of Impressionist paintings that were visiting from the National Gallery in DC. We borrowed a wheelchair from the museum so Sarah could save her energy for enjoying the art.

Jean and Sarah admiring a still-life by Paul Cezanne
The three of us have enjoyed seeing Impressionist art together many times in several cities. This time, we moved leisurely through the galleries and I played personal docent, identifying the artists, summarizing the placards, and then highlighting some tidbit to get Sarah talking about the art.

Claude Monet’s “The Water-Lily Pond”, painted in 1899
For example, Claude Monet produced this painting of the Japanese bridge over his water lily pond in Giverny, a small town just northwest of Paris. Not only did Sarah and I visit this place together in 2006, but she also visited it in the 1980s with her late husband, Roger, and she hung reproductions of Monet’s water lillies in her dining room for many years. I was delighted that she still remembers visiting Giverny with Roger and she declared delightedly, “It really looked like that!”
With other paintings, we talked about composition. Sarah used to paint, and as a clinical chemist, her still-“life” work was more likely to include beakers and flasks than fruit and flowers. While her hands tremble too much to paint now, her neurologist observed that the part of Sarah’s brain that understands spatial relationships is still remarkably intact. As a result, she’s still interested in and able to talk about the underlying geometries, massing, and spatial arrangement of the compositions we saw, and observe differences between the styles of different artists. That’s pretty cool.

Sarah and Robin at the MFAH

Sarah and Jean back at Belmont Village
After two hours of gallery gazing, Sarah and I were both exhausted, and Mom took each of us home. But we really enjoyed our afternoon together!