2of3Nine-year-old Sara Strawn plays on a swing at the park across from the Menil on the first day of spring in Houston.Photo: Michael Paulsen, Staff / Houston Chronicle 3of3Menil Park provides a perfect space to take advantage of Houston’s sunny afternoons for yoga or letting dogs off the leash.Photo: Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

I knew I was going to move into the first neighborhood in Houston that I visited: Montrose. To be clear, this is no sign of my good judgment. To me, in 2016, it was just the neighborhood that housed the Rothko Chapel.

Like most outsiders whose vision of the U.S. is held fixed by images of California and New York City, I was willfully ignorant — even suspicious — about Houston. I knew I wanted to see the Rothko — and that I needed to do so quickly enough to get back to my hotel room at the Texas Medical Center, swap outfits and go for a work dinner that evening. I didn’t spend too much time worrying about what else might be worth noticing in this seemingly oppressive, hostile and oil-drenched city.

Freshly checked in from the airport, I took a cab and arrived at the strange, off-kilter heart of the Menil Collection’s campus. From the window, I could tell there was something unusual in the air, but it did not shake my resolve. My attitude was purely instrumental. Mercenary, even. Get in to the chapel, watch the light move against the blackness of the paintings, feel alive for a moment, get out.

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But I emerged from the cab into the hazy Houston light and was confronted by a scene that reminded me of San Francisco, the first American city I fell in love with.As has been known for a long time by anyone paying attention, that city would soon be gasping for air. But here, in Houston, in 2016 - something in Houston seemed alive. People — old, young, black, brown, yellow, white, all higgledy-piggledy — laughing, day-drinking, strung out, squeaky clean, drums, hula hoops, cigarettes, dirty yoga, yuppie yoga, running from the past, brushing the hair out of each other’s eyes. Oak trees cascading down on top of you with children balanced on each limb. A fig tree lusciously baring all for anyone interested. I didn’t need to know anything else. I felt at home.

It was difficult then to completely grasp that this park was surrounded by sweet bungalows all painted a distinctive gray. This gray seemed like a kind of magic: Something I couldn’t fully explain to my friends who lived up north or out west. I would try to describe it all and fall short. I would be completely tongue-tied. I would start up again and use too many words, all of them wrong. I would send photos, but always with the small pain of realizing that they could not show what I could see.

Of course, these were all classic signs of falling in love. Odysseus tied himself to a mast to resist the sirens’ songs. I surrendered, almost entirely, to the Menil campus.

Three years later, it now seems just exactly right that neighborhoods should have world-class galleries in them that you can casually walk into, and that they are frequented by every kind of person imaginable. There should always be people dressed with style but no pretension or irony, fathers describing paintings to their children in languages you haven’t heard in years, if ever, and women hosting bachelorette parties with the full ambition of a highly produced music video — dresses sparkling like starlight in the sun. Being in love raises one’s standards. One sees the world as it was before, understands that it is perfectly fine, but wonders: Why now accept anything that doesn’t seep into your bones and jolt you awake?

Nearly every day I am at the Menil’s park with my dog. I people-watch as she runs around saying hello to all her friends, new and old. Generously, the parks do not prohibit her from living off-leash, nor do they explicitly invite her to be off leash. This lack of regulation is a foundational element of the campus. Americans coming from more fastidious or neurotic cultures may attribute this to a lack of rational planning — and would be justified in generalizing from the rest of Houston. But here, this lack of regulation, even if irrational, is courageous and vital.

The parks do not even attempt to coordinate their usage in prescriptive ways, or even in clearly advisory ways. Yes, there is a bright-red swing that hangs from one of the oaks — but isn’t it just slightly too big for a child and slightly too slippery for an adult? Where exactly does one get a meal or a coffee around here? The new field outside the illustration gallery: What is it exactly, other than a beautiful field with scattered trees and wildflowers and one of the best sunsets in the city? One is left having to improvise, to figure out on the fly what to do (where to lay out the blanket, or set up the speakers, or pass out the banh mi). What else brings people together better than clumsy, happy guessing in the warm light?

In 2016, I thought I would love the famous Rothko Chapel the most. But it is the Twombly Gallery, in all its strangeness and sadness, that has crawled into my heart. I have a longstanding affection for the women who work there. I don’t mean the curators or the docents (who I am sure are all very interesting people). I mean the women dressed in black slacks and blazers, typically of East Asian descent, who spend large portions of their days in utter silence. “Guard,” or even worse, “security guard,” does not capture what they are. First, they are generally too physically small and too good-natured to really resemble anything like a guard. And second, there are rarely people in the galleries to guard the paintings from. They are not the guards of the intolerably crowded galleries and museums of New York or D.C. — or even the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. They watch the almost always nearly empty halls of the Twombly on a Wednesday morning or Thursday afternoon. Most of those hours, it seems, these women spend in quiet, whispered conversation with one another. Alternatively, they seem to sit in complete stillness and isolation.

These women are saints. Once I walked into the new addition and caught one just slightly slouched over — the way that one might sit on a bus after a long but good day of work. She immediately straightened up and blushed, but other than a brief moment in which she sent me a laughing, knowing look, she showed no other signs of falling short in her duties. Keep in mind that unlike the sentries who guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or the Queen’s Guards, these women are not soldiers. They did not go away to be trained to do this as young men, and I doubt were told explicitly that they were serving their country or their countrymen’s values. I doubt they were told, explicitly, that the tedium and stiffness and silence they must experience day in and day out are for the greater good — maybe one of the greatest goods.

I would like to ask them, but again, this would intrude on their duties. So all I do is imagine that these gentle, persistent women sometimes tell themselves and one another that they do this for the good of the people, for our sake. I imagine that some of them tell themselves that they do it for the good of the art itself. Because both of these things are true.

I have sat, by myself, in a hall in the Menil for nearly 30 minutes, as I self-indulgently tried to “get” a particular Miró (I still do not). I have erratically moved between the rooms at the Twombly, laughing and wiping away tears. And both times a polite woman who looked like my auntie had to stand in the back of the room, to watch me, to make sure that I did not take photos — all the while surely aware that in fits of madness, human beings have been known to kiss or stab what they love. If you do take a photo, they will be tender and remind you (again and again) that photos are not allowed. If you stand too close (as once a friend, in a showboaty mood, did deliberately), you will then feel the full power of these women coming down upon you, breaking the silence of the halls and shouting with such a commanding voice you wonder how the physics could allow for it.

And if you are kept at a safe distance from where you can gaze at what you love without touching it — and if this auntie has been the one who kept you there, tied you to the mast when a love threatened to get out of hand — be sure to thank her for her service.