Jane and I are back from a trip! The exclamation point recalls eighteen months of orthopedic misadventures, which kept us far from airports and often housebound. Decay is only poetic if it’s not yours. While we bless the genius of prosthetic joints, titanium plates, and pharmaceutical palliatives to forestall decrepitude, the bad news about such good news is one must endure the ordeal of recovery. When our grandparents shattered bones, the jig was up, they took to bed to await au revoirs. These days, diagnosis commences a recuperative odyssey, with its hopes, frustrations and wracking pain. Yes, life is sweet, but it’s also work. The reason oldsters gab about aches and docs is we’ve got lots and their stories enthrall. The “organ recital” is the soundtrack of our days.

So yes! – punctuated for emphasis – we could take a trip – finally! – after this anxious interval when we doubted whether we ever could again. We opted for Dallas and Fort Worth, two cities we knew only from airport lounges and meeting rooms. Five days away would apprise us whether we were fit for more strenuous outings – abroad, say – if any of earth’s civilized nations were still willing to welcome loathsome Americans. (And yes, like it or not, for our leaders we’re all to blame.)

When Jane and I travel, culture’s the draw, not nature, weather, history, theme parks or Margaritas. We’re greedy for beauty. We enter an unfamiliar museum or auditorium with the tingling intensity of kids Christmas morning: what’s Santa brought! This appetite, compared to most, is mysterious: why should beauty be nutritious? (For another day.)

Fort Worth enticed us with three museums in its culture district – the Kimbell Museum of Art, Amos Carter Museum of American Art, and Museum of Modern Art -- and Dallas with three – the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Trammel Crow Museum of Asian Art, and the vast Dallas Art Museum, plus the opera. Architects who designed these contemporary cathedrals included Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Norman Foster, and other luminaries of their profession. Lavish edgy public buildings are one way modern plutocrats flaunt, bless them – better this than moon flights or dismantling democracy to make a splash.

The more we know, the more we discriminate: this is the downside of experience. Education fosters elitism, a sense of better and worse. Bach and Handel cast a pall on, say, Telemann or Kuhnau; Michelangelo and Raphael on countless capable contemporaries; Shakespeare leaves all English-makers in the dust. So do Jane’s and my home museums – the Metropolitan, Frick, Whitney, and MOMA for starters – cause us to deprecate other cities’ as provincial. I do not mean to sniff – I estop myself in company – but how can one help it? As the World War One song put it, “How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm/ After they've seen Paree’?”.

There was plenty to admire in most of the museums we visited. We enjoyed the opera though it wasn’t our beloved Metropolitan. (Gluck’s tender Orfeo ed Euridice was the fare on offer.) One museum, which we visited twice, is as excellent as any small museum anywhere – the Kimbell. Pretty much every work on display is a stunner, peerless of its type – and Louis Kahn’s building right-sized, right-hearted, and imbued with tragic magnificence (am I gushing here?). My typing fingers levitate remembering. Likely we’ll never return – time’s short and the world wide – but if we could…

Best of all about our five days away, we could do it! Without (too much) pain! Bless science, medicine, modernity! And oh, how dog-pal Henry welcomed us home!