Spring Evening at the Met

Tonight we ate with friends in the Directors' Dining Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This was the entrance hall as we left--I had never seen it so empty.

It was the climax of a marvelous day--the really high point was when I arrived with my wife at a downtown restaurant for lunch, to be completely surprised by two of my three sons and their families, who had come from Baltimore and the New Jersey shore to celebrate my birthday (a major one). It was a total surprise--the first of that kind that I had ever experienced, and it was a wonderfully warm and emotional experience, after our three months away in Europe.

At the Met we saw a fabulous exhibition of drawings by the Renaissance artist Bronzino, and in the morning a superb show of surrealist photography in Paris, at the International Center for Photography