ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN…
AND TELL WHAT’S HIS NAME THE NEWS!
This is a genuinely perverse delight for an etymologist like me. Words are my life. And so, when I hear someone completely decimate the English language, either out of stupidity, illiteracy, or guile…it often makes me smile. (No rhyme intended. Honest.)
I was recently at some dear friends’ home at the New Jersey seashore, sitting on the porch of their charming beach bungalow, listening to a great old Chuck Berry tune on my iPad, “Roll Over, Beethoven.” In the song, when Chuck tells the great classic composers to stand aside, he says, “Roll over (in your grave), Ludwig van Beethoven…and tell Chakowski the news as well!” So old Chuck told the world’s great composers off. Terrific. I suppose he felt that rock and roll had at that point in time so far surpassed the music created by these maestros that……..wait a minute! Who’s Chakowski?
He can’t possibly mean Tchaikovsky? Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Could he? If that’s the case, does Bach now become Boch? Does Chopin becoming Shopping? Does Handel become Handle? And Lord knows what Chuck Berry would do with Felix Mendelssohn or Dimitri Shostakovich’s last names? “Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Big Shosty the news.”
I love Mr. Berry’s careless flippancy, his casual nonchalance and his absolute disregard for historical accuracy. Chuck is telling a story, he’s making a point, and if - by God - he chooses to spell Chakowski’s name wrong, who really gives a rat’s hind quarters? I know I don’t. (Since I’m sure Chuck did it on purpose.) It’s like this: now that we all know who really shot Liberty Valance, are we going to rat Jimmy Stewart out? Of course not.
MAKING PLANS
My wife Vikki loves to plan trips. She has a knack for it and has been doing it for years. Vikki makes a great adventure of investigating, diagramming and mapping each vacation. Her in-depth research will take her to the furthest realms of the internet and stretch Google to new limits. Over the years, she has organized our own vacations as well as cooking trips to the Vaucluse in Southern France, Umbria and Tuscany in Italy and Sonora, Mexico. We are now in the midst of planning a large family holiday. This Christmas, we have decided to duplicate an experience we greatly enjoyed when the girls were barely teenagers… spending a traditional English Christmas in the Cotswolds. Only this time, we are taking our daughters, their husbands, and our grandson Wills.
When our daughters Stacey and Jillian were 12 and 10, we took them to a manor house in the west of England, in the tiny village of Castle Combe. This is the place that’s been called “the prettiest village in England” and was the site of the original Rex Harrison version of “Doctor Doolittle” as well as many scenes in the recent film “War Horse.” Originally a British hill fort which was occupied by the Romans and later built up by the Normans into a castle, the storybook village is only about 20 miles from the ancient, breathtakingly beautiful old Georgian city of Bath.
And so my bride has all her maps spread across the dining room table. She has made us our reservations at the same wonderful manor house in the Cotswolds we stayed in so many Christmases ago. She has locked in all the various dates with our Phoenix contingent and our Atlanta gang. We will spend Christmas in the Cotswolds and New Year’s Eve in London. My wife has prepared detailed charts showing comparative airline rates, waiting cautiously, like a stockbroker, to pounce on the tickets when the price is right. Her studio is littered with data about all the possible excursions we could take. A day in Bath. Lunch in Malmesbury. A tour of Stratford-upon-Avon. A visit to Chipping Campden. Of course, a stop at Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain. Breakfast of kippers and those amazing roasted potatoes in Chipping Sodbury, especially pleasant on market day. She has multiple lists of restaurants, each with its own specialty, and each marked with an L for lunch or D for dinner. I can almost taste the scones and crumpets.
My goodness, we’re having such fun! The delight, for now, is in the planning, the pursuit of information, and the anticipation of the actual trip. But true delight it is.
At Christmas time, we will reap the rewards. I can hardly wait.
SAN PANCHO
Everyone has his or her own little patch of paradise. A cabin in the woods. A beachside bungalow. A condo in Vail. Or a man-cave in their basement. A teepee in their backyard. It varies based on cost, desires and that ultimate luxury - time. My good friend Ed Tarsavage turned the living room of his modest home in Allen Park, Michigan into a movie theater. Eddie loved to watch movies. And this room was where he escaped from the real world and enjoyed his own piece of paradise.
Back in the late 1980’s, I promised my bride a vacation house on the water. The big water. Not a pond. Not a lake. Not a creek or stream. The big water. An ocean.
It took me quite a while, but I finally…almost…got there three years ago. We had been vacationing in a little Mexican village along the Nayarit coast, about 60 kilometers north of Puerto Vallarta, for the last five years. We’d fallen in love with this little town whose proper name is San Francisco but is universally known to all the locals as “San Pancho.” Pancho, as you may know, is the standard nickname for Francisco. Pancho Villa’s real name was Francisco. The name “San Pancho” is the townspeople’s way of telling their blessed Saint Francis how much they love him, and how they consider him a close friend. That is why they feel free to call him Pancho.
After seeing how peaceful and laid back the rhythm of life was in San Pancho, how positively charming the place was, how uncommercial it was and is, how relatively little it costs to rent a home on or near its magnificent beach, Vikki and I concluded that it would be ridiculous to actually buy something in this town. We could rent here forever.
So naturally, in yet another example of our grand lunacy, we (and our great good friends the Matthews) paid cash for a house that is two blocks from the ocean. The one you see here. It’s on a noisy Mexican pueblo street, diagonally across from the town’s best “mini super,” an oxymoron that represents the short form of “Mini Super Mercado,” a decent grocery store with an inflated opinion of itself. The north side of our house directly adjoins a tortilla factory. And right across the street is the San Pancho Surf Shop, where you can get your board waxed, purchase a new one or add a tee shirt with the shop’s logo to your personal ensemble. To say that our home is a modest place is the quintessence of understatement. It aspires to being modest. And yet, it delights us so.
This small, simple Mexican home was bifurcated by the former owner in order to generate additional income. She rented nearly one-half of her space to an Italian bakery. But the entire building, both sides, now belongs to us. You can see the house in the photo above. We had originally contemplated buying or building one of those vacation houses that hangs over the side of a cliff and overlooks the ocean. There are such homes in this town. But frankly, that’s not living in Mexico. You can find houses that hang on the sides of seaside cliffs all over the world. We were in San Pancho, Mexico for the express purpose of being in San Pancho, Mexico. So we chose to live in Mexico, with the people, right in the heart of the village.
The appeal of San Pancho is palpable. You need only be a bit idiosyncratic. It is not for everyone. It is too quiet for many big city Norte Americanos. The year-round population is barely 2,500 citizens, plus several dozen ex-patriot Americans and a handful of retired Canadians who live in town. What tourists there are come in from Guadalajara.
But little San Pancho’s appeal is undeniable. It has a mile-long crescent shaped beach with hardly any people on it. It has sunsets that will take your breath away. It is one of those rare places in the world - in this case the entire Nayarit coast - where the ocean beaches meet the jungle. Real jungle. Jaguar jungle. Spiders as big as your hand jungle. It has four or five good restaurants, three of them superb (and the price of dinner for two, including drinks, appetizer, an entrée like Red Snapper, Shrimp or an amazingly good flank steak called Arrachera, and a decent tip, is under $50 US.)
San Pancho also has a polo field, believe it or not. And a 9-hole executive golf course. So how did these things happen to a little pueblo of 2,500 souls?
There’s always a reason. Several decades ago, a former Mexican President named Eccheveria retired with his family to this little town. He built a compound of four houses on a promontory of land surrounded by ocean on three sides, called Presidente’s Point. And, oh yes, he saw to it that San Pancho had a proper hospital, plus cobblestone streets, city water and sewer and a beachside malecon. These are rare civic amenities in small Mexican pueblos.
And so San Pancho prospered. It was home to a mango processing plant for several decades, and survives today as a self-sufficient little village whose citizens, many of them, have jobs in Puerto Vallarta or larger towns along the Nayarit coast.
San Pancho is a place where a female can walk the streets at night without a care. It is a place that is mainly devoid of crime. A sweet, quiet, easy-going but continually interesting little pueblo with some uniquely appealing municipal improvements.
And so, having fallen in love with this town, we bought our friend Connie’s house, the one you see above. We got a building permit with the help of a local architect and are in process of rehabilitating the house and finishing off the second floor within the next year.
And if you are standing on a 6-foot ladder on the roof of the to-be-built second floor, and you look due west, you can - by jiminy - see the Pacific Ocean.
I kept my word, Vikki. And it gives me indescribable delight to say so.
IRONY
Irony is saying one thing when the world really knows it’s total buffalo chips. The words don’t match the reality. The words, well, do not convey the truth. The words are contrary to what is actually happening, and often to humorous effect. In the end, irony is supposed to be funny. But a kind of weird, feckless funny that ends with a crooked grin and quiet resignation. Irony, in its bass-ackwards, catywompous way, is supposed to point up a truth.
While there are countless examples of irony throughout literature (Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and O’Henry’s wonderful short stories, for example), I could find none better than the sign, above, in this hapless church. Whenever I come across something like this, I chuckle to myself. Then I wonder about the person responsible. And for an immeasurably brief moment, I experience a scintilla of absolutely perverse delight.
EATING SUSHI
The first time I actually ingested sushi was on a dare.
At the time, back in the 1980’s, sushi was still exotic fare, only for the very adventurous and the avant-garde. People who might enjoy the taste of raw zebra, for example. My Exec VP, Gregg Praetorius, and I were in a little Japanese restaurant around the corner from our Madison Avenue offices. It was around 6:30pm and we were relaxing after a particularly hectic day. We were drinking sake, the Japanese rice wine that is often served warm. We were on our 3rd half bottle. Gregg asked if I wanted to have a little sushi, as an appetizer, before we both went to our respective homes - me to New Jersey, and him to Long Island. I remember my response as if it was yesterday, “Raw fish, are you insane? Gag me with a spoon! No way.”
Gregg, ten years my junior but far more mature, said nothing. He just ordered a California roll and something else with actual raw tuna on it. Then he ordered another carafe of sake.
The sushi arrived and I will say it looked colorful. But there was no way on earth I would eat raw fish any more than I would eat raw chicken.
Praetorius started eating, with chopsticks no less, and started to make yummy noises with his entire upper body. All the while, we were sipping our sake. Finally, Gregg turned to me and said, mildly, “Do you know why you’re not willing to try sushi?” I said, “No, why?” He drilled me with his eyes and said, “Because you don’t have the guts!”
That did it! I was half “in the bag” from the warm rice wine, and this kid knew exactly how to push my buttons. After all, we’d been working together for a decade at that point. And he knew me, damn him!
“No guts, huh?” I growled. “Gimme that raw fish, you son of a bitch!” And I started eating. The rest is history.
Years later, I would tell this story to my friend Elijah Blair, an Indian Trader from Cortez, Colorado. Lige looked at me like I had one large eye in the middle of my forehead. He said, “Rick, why would anyone in his right mind eat raw fish and hot wine. You got it completely backwards, son!”
Cooked fish. Cold wine. What a concept.
After losing my sushi virginity with Gregg Praetorius, I became, well, addicted. Sushi was delicious, actually. It was filling. And it wasn’t really fattening. On my drive home from Manhattan to our suburban New Jersey home, I would often stop at a little Japanese place called Ichi Raku and pick up some sushi to go. Then Vikki and the girls got hooked. Now sushi is one of our favorite foods. Go figure.
These days, every Tuesday night is Vikki’s and my night for sushi. We go to a little place on 44th Street called “East.” Their fish is fresh and they are very nice to us. And every time we’re there, I’m sure to have a cup of warm sake or two before I eat the sushi.
Sorry, Elijah, I do love this stuff.
SEEING HISTORY WITH YOUR OWN EYES
One of the great blessings of my life is that Vikki and I have had the wherewithal, and the time, to travel extensively. Even when our two daughters were growing up, we either took them with us or left them with Grandma Dorothy and the nanny. And while we traveled, we saw history before our very eyes.
We saw the old church in Waterford, Ireland - the town where they make that exquisite crystal - which dated from 1150 AD or something. Then we continued our walking tour of this spectacularly picturesque Irish city and made our way to the “new” church. It was built in 1759, or somewhere around then. That, my friends, is history. Anything from the 1890’s is consider ancient in the United States.
When we traveled to the Middle East and saw the sites in Israel, Egypt and Jordan, we were looking back in time to the days of Christ and before. I remember being at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, home to three great Christian religions, and seeing where Jesus himself walked. I actually touched the giant slab of stone, now inside the cathedral, on which He was laid. To say it took my breath away is an understatement.
I felt history when I inserted a prayer, handwritten on a tiny scrap of paper, into a slender crack at the base of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall.
History was all around us when Vikki and I found ourselves in the center of the most ancient part of Istanbul during the Ramadan Festival. It was an experience I shall never forget. Uncountable thousands of devout Muslims bursting upon the streets of this indescribable city of 20,000,000 at the same time, sundown, finally able to break their day-long fast. All of them doing a walkabout on their way to the restaurant, friend or relative’s home at which the feast would be served.
One of our young Turkish guides - who toured us through the Topkapi Palace, the ancient cisterns that provided fresh water for the city, the rug factories that are part of the fabric (no pun intended) of this extraordinary city, and skyscraping minarets from the several thousand mosques everywhere you looked - was so devout that he ate neither food nor drank any water throughout the entire day during Ramadan. I had the utmost respect for him, for his self-discipline, and for his faith.
When Vikki, my old pal Dave Orgel, and I climbed the Masada Fortress, in southern Israel, we were breathlessly ascending a sheer cliff to the site of one of ancient history’s greatest stories of faith and bravery, the climax of the Jewish-Roman War. Here we were, overlooking the Dead Sea, in a place where 960 members of the Sicarii Jewish community at Masada commited mass suicide rather than be conquered and enslaved by the Romans. And we were there, when we finally scaled the fortress, right where these brave people fought, and then chose to die. On the very same ground. It makes you breathless.
Everything about our trip to Greece was about history. You can’t walk down the street in Greece without passing something, a building or relic, that’s at least a quadrillion years old. Our hotel had a direct view of the Parthenon and the entire Acropolis. These Greek temples were built around 450 BC. (BC means “Before Christ” by the way. But I reckon you knew that.) In other words, a way long time ago. History. Right before my eyes. Right in front of me.
We were in Marseilles, France for the celebration of their 1,600th anniversary as a city. Sixteen hundredth anniversary! That’s older than Cincinnati, Ohio. I remember Marseilles as a singularly delightful town with an incredible central harbor and marina, right in the heart of the ancient city. It was lined with seafood restaurants, and at the foot of the harbor fishermen would sell their exotic deep-sea catch to the myriad passersby each morning. Our hotel room overlooked the entire harbor and I would take my coffee at a window-side table each morning and stare at that genuinely awesome, beyond-postcard view.
And then there was Ephesus. This is the ancient Greek city, and later a major Roman city, on the west coast of Asia Minor, near present-day Selcuk, Turkey. Ephesus was one of the “seven churches of Asia” that are cited in the Book of Revelation. The city was famed for the Temple of Artemis, completed around 550 BC, and was recognized as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League during the classical Greek era. And here we were. Vikki and me. In the place where, as history tells it, the Blessed Virgin Mary lived out her life. I found it surprising and touching that the Muslims I encountered through Turkey held the Virgin Mary in great esteem. They called her “Mother Mary,” and spoke of her with great reverence and affection.
I really hope I am fit to travel for the rest of my days. Because there is much of the world, and therefore so much history, that I have not yet seen or experienced.
Travel, to me, is one of the most fascinating, rewarding and pleasant pastimes available to modern man. And so, I look forward to every upcoming journey. I can hardly wait to sally forth in new directions. To new continents. Seeing history, living it, standing on the spot where Washington stood, or Christ, or Pizarro, or Napoleon. What delight!
About me
This is where I write about all the little pleasures, the small, humble delights that make my day, and my life, especially happy.
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