Remarkable how the 2010s are receding so quickly. How is that possible? The tumults of the early 2020s, with the prospect of more to come? A kind of red-shifting of past years that gets more pronounced as old age sets in?

After all, the more moments you’ve had, the less any particular one might count, even relatively recent ones. Or does it work that way? No doubt there are TEDx talks about the plasticity of memory, all erudite and maybe even persuasive — until some future decade, when they’ll be considered wrongheaded if they’re ever watched, which they won’t be.

These thoughts occurred as I was looking through my picture files for February 2015, when I spent some high-quality time in south Texas. One evening during that visit, I popped over the the McNay Art Museum, one of San Antonio’s lesser-known treasures.

I’d been visiting the museum for years. Decades. We went there on field trips in elementary school in the early ’70s. It helps that it’s conveniently located near my mother’s house and the school I went to — no more than a mile away.

“Ohio-born heiress Marion Koogler first visited San Antonio in 1918, shortly after her marriage to Sergeant Don Denton McNay, who was called to active duty in Laredo, Texas. Later that year Don McNay died from the Spanish flu,” the museum says.

“In 1926, Marion moved to San Antonio, where she met and married prominent ophthalmologist Donald T. Atkinson. The following year, she purchased her first modern oil painting, Diego Rivera’s ‘Delfina Flores,’ and the Atkinsons commissioned San Antonio architects Atlee and Robert Ayres to design a 24-room Spanish Colonial-Revival house that would one day become the core of the McNay Art Museum [which opened in 1954]”

There was a later addition (2008) to the house to expand the museum, which now has about 22,000 works, mostly 19th- to 21st century, many regional, but not all.

I’m especially taken with the gorgeous courtyard. I’ll bet more than one proposal of marriage has happened there.

The courtyard features a few works from the collection, such a Renoir, “The Washerwoman” (1917).

The heart-wrenching “War Mother” (1939) by Charles Umlauf (1911-94), a sculptor originally from Michigan, but living in Chicago and working for the WPA when he created it.

The work is credited with helping him get a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin in the early ’40s, which he held to 40 years.

Another Umlauf: “Cruxifix” (1946). 

A remarkable talent. One of these days, I want to visit the Umlauf museum, which is in Austin. And of course, I want to go back to the McNay again.