This post was written by Victor Hazan and originally published on Facebook.
If Marcella had been with me in Houston last week, she would have turned into a pillar of ice. Whether you are in a hotel or a car or a restaurant, the air conditioning is insanely fierce. Marcella was easily chilled and hated it. When we left Venice to return to the States, we chose to live in Florida, yet even there she was rarely without a loose wool vest or cashmere shawl slipped over her. We had been in Houston several times in the past to tour for one her cookbooks, which left no time to indulge in personal interests. There had been one small exception in 1986, when Marcella would allow no business to prevent her from watching the Mets, when they beat the Red Sox in the World Series. She had become a passionate baseball fan the year we were married, shortly after her arrival in New York. She hadn’t yet begun to work and with no Italian-speaking friends, she spent her days alone at home. To help time pass for her, I had explained how baseball worked and taught her some of the vocabulary. The first English words Marcella learned were ball, strike, out, walk, hit, home run. I was in Houston to see the Braque exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts before it would be forever dispersed. Braque, the inventor of collage and, painting side by side with Picasso, of cubism, became one of my heroes when I first began to look at art in my teens. Looking at art with Marcella, who had an extraordinarily keen eye for it, as she had for almost everything else, was from the beginning one of the great pleasures of our relationship. While in Houston I also visited the Menil Collection that is housed in an exquisite sanctuary for art built by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. From the deceptively austere exterior one enters a spacious interior illuminated by overlapping cement louvers in the ceiling that filter cool natural light to the galleries. Marcella would have been enthralled, to an even greater measure, perhaps, than she was by those champion Mets. Victor
May 18, 2014 · Longboat Key, FL
Photo chosen by Gustiamo