WHAT WERE THEY THINKING OF?

                                                                                  MAXIM.  I MEAN MAX.  OR IS IT MAXINE?

King Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril, seeks his death.  Of course, so does Regan, Daughter #2, but I can better understand Goneril’s point of view.  What were the monarch and his queen thinking when they named their first-born after a venereal disease?  (Yes, the word was current as far back as 1547.)

I’m attuned to this topic because I don’t particularly care for my own name.  I think the two rhyming syllables – Richard Horwich – sit awkwardly on the tongue and in the ear.  Nothing to be done about "Horwich," which I heard a lot about when I was in school:  "I love to go to Dick's house because of the whore which is there."  And there's that other problem, but of course, how were my parents to know that “Dick” would acquire its present colloquial meaning, obliterating its history as simply a name to the point where, when I wrote to one of my editors, his magazine's e-mail filter would send my messages to the Trash unless I signed them “Diq.” My Aussie friend with genteel sensibilities changed it to Ricky (another bad choice).  For the first ten years of my life my parents called me Dickie, which I hated,  and which I still hear sometimes from people Who Knew Me When -- though that has a kind of charm.  My friends the Dicksteins told me several years ago that their daughter thought one of the benefits of marrying was that it would free her from their family name.  She got her wish.

My daughter Danielle will, on or about March 12^th, deliver into the world a baby girl whose name will be . . . nobody knows, and the expectant parents have gone from telling me it’s none of my business to asking for suggestions. Anything in Shakespeare?  I mentioned to her that the Bard had a fondness for dactylic female names, so that she could, belatedly join that '90s fad that spawned an illegitimate verse form known as the Double Dactyl; the kid could be Perdita Bellenoue, Beatrice Bellenoue, Rosalind Bellenoue, Viola Bellenoue, Cressida Bellenoue, Helena Bellenoue (but not, of course, Goneril Bellenoue) -- though double dactyls or anything rhetorically doubled, for that matter, smacks of gimmickry.  They’re naming a person after all, not looking for a catchy book title.   They called their now-three-year-old son "Maxim," partly because my son-in-law is French, and, oddly, because he and Danielle were under the impression that “Maxim” couldn’t be shortened to a nickname (they don’t like nicknames).   If they ever move back to the States, they’ll find out how wrong they were.  When he’s here on visits, people either mispronounce the French "Maxim" as the English "maxim" or just resort to the inevitable and to my mind perfectly OK “Max.” (Hey, if they name the little girl Minerva, their kids could be Max and Min – isn’t that cute?)  Almost as cute as the scholar Sacvan Berkovitch  being named for two executed anarchists, or the lawyer I met in Grand Rapids whose mother had been reading Gone With the Wind while she was pregnant and who has gone through life with “Rhett Pinsky” on his business card. 

What prompts this reflection on parental naming sins is that there’s a girl on the roster of my Spring course with what at first seems a perfectly serviceable name, which I'll disguise except for the initials  – let’s call her Andrea S. Smith.  I guess her Mom never envisioned that monogram on the towels.  NYU assigns e-mail addresses to its students by the following algorithm:  initials of first, middle and last names followed by a number.  So this kid is stuck with ass000@nyu.edu.  What must high school have been like for her? 

There are a lot of ways for parents to screw up children.  Conferring a name that you haven’t tested out loud, or thought much about, or is appropriate to a toddler but terrible for an adult, is such an easy way to do it, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen even more often. 

LAW-ABIDING CRIMINALS

Representative Mike Pence of Indiana was quoted in the Times ("A Clamor for Gun Limits, but Few Expect Real Changes" by Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Steinhauer) as asserting,  “I maintain that firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens makes communities safer, not less safe.”    That’s what the NRA keeps telling us.  But "law abiding citizens" is not a fixed and stable category.   Jared Loughner was a law-abiding citizen (albeit a troubled one) who had never committed a felony until he bought a pistol and shot a Congresswoman and a score of bystanders.  In Mike Pence's version of a perfect world, the victims in Tucson would have protected themselves by unholstering their own weapons and executed Lougner summarily. But none of them was armed.  The vast majority of Americans reject, in principle and in practice, vigilante justice.

THE HORWICH/BELLENOUE 2010 NEWSLETTER!

No, that’s not this year’s beachwear in the Hamptons, but it is de rigeur in the Sahara.  We spent two terrific weeks in Morocco last March, on a walking tour that covered Casablanca (there are as many Rick’s Cafés there as there are Original Ray’s Pizza parlors in New York), Fez, Ourzazate, Marrakesh, the Atlas mountains and of course, the desert (spent a night in a tent, and Dick got to jam on drums with the Berbers).   We made lifelong friends whose names we have already forgotten – or never knew, like this guy.

Other trips:  the annual pilgrimage to Utila, the gem of the Caribbean, to visit to the kids, where we participated in a variety of activities above and below the water – diving, picnicking on Water Key, drinking with 30-somethings in ramshackle bars.  Nice to trade New York taxis for water taxis for a few weeks each year, though the drivers are, if anything, even more reckless:

And of course, like many little boys, Maxim is fascinated by airplanes, and has a large collection of model and toy aircraft.  Not too many 3-year-olds, however, get to fly real ones:

Then there was Las Vegas in November, where DEMA – the SCUBA convention that Benoit attends every year – was held, and where we spent a lot of time gawking like the tourists we were at the Strip.  Here’s Maxim (who loves hotels) contemplating Steve Wynn’s latest from the monorail. . . .

. . . and even more fun, having room-service breakfast with Papa.

 

(Nancy made a video of the Las Vegas sojourn which can be viewed on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps1st8tjtZQ)

The big news, though, is that Danielle is expecting a daughter next March.  She and Ben have a name picked out but they won’t tell us.  And, as if another baby wasn’t enough life-change for one year, they’re building a house, which has been said by many of their friends (who hope to freeload meals) to be the nicest on the island:.  As you can see below, it’s almost finished.  It will have a thoughtfully-designed soundproof room for grandparents, though we don’t know why the door locks from the outside.  Here’s an aerial view:

Danielle puts the finishing touches to the porch:

Everything else remains pretty much the same:  Nancy is still potting, and enjoying a certain vogue among fanciers of bowl and vase; Dick is still teaching at NYU, and just has finished one of his most satisfying semesters ever.  In short, life is good. Plans for 2011 include a trip to Utila in March for the birth of our granddaughter and a possible African sojourn next winter.

So, from all of us to all of you, here’s to a great 2011!

Nancy, Dick, Danielle,Benoit and  

UH, WANDA, ABOUT YOUR CHAIRS. . . .

Some years ago, my godmother Wanda gave me and Nancy a pair of antique chairs she had no further use for.  (That was always her rationale for gift-giving; her high-school graduation present to Danielle was a used Rolex that was appraised at $400 and cost $500 to recondition.)

These chairs, spindly and often mended, were never my favorite pieces of furniture, but we needed them in our NY apartment, so that's where they ended up -- until last night.  Our friend Michael Rosenthal (pictured above) came to dinner, to cheer up Nancy (who was on crutches due to a bunionectomy she had just endured) and me (who had just lost 12 straight games of squash to him).  We were eating Chinese takeout.  I was sitting in one of Wanda's Chairs.  I leaned back slightly and with a startling report, the horizontal strut across the back splintered and dropped to the floor.

I couldn't meet Nancy's gaze for some time, though Michael's laughter was clearly audible.  But instead of justifiably reproaching my famous clumsiness, Nancy laughed too.  "Oh, well," she said.  "I never loved that chair."

Twenty minutes later, Nancy labored to her feet and seized her crutches.  For the first time, they failed her; she toppled backward.  Michael sprang catlike to his feet, caught her, and they both sat heavily on Wanda's Other Chair.  Crack!  The whole back snapped off.  Michael was aghast, but we reassured him:  what good was one chair of a matched set?  And anyway, he was clearly the agent of fate.  I shlepped the remains of both to the basement, leaving the staff to deal with them, and somehow, it felt as if a burden had been lifted from us.

WIE GEHT ES, PASSAT?

My grandmother Yetta came to Saskatchewan from Odessa over a hundred years ago, speaking not a word of (what the Canadians call) English.  She eventually learned English, imperfectly, a rough-and-ready, heavily accented speech that enabled her communicate with the taciturn farmers who were her neighbors and later on, when she and my grandfather retired to Vancouver, the more cosmopolitan types whom she encountered.  But as she aged, her English left her.   She remembered her Russian perfectly, but at the end, she could neither speak to nor understand her children or grandchildren.

Similarly, my Volkswagen was born in Germany and emigrated to this country in 2003.  At the time, its various displays spoke English flawlessly.  But lately, as it's aging, the same process that made my bubbi revert to her native tongue seems to be taking place.  It's a European car now.  The readout above was in Fahrenheit until last week,

VEGAS

 Danielle, Maxim, and Maxim's new friend

What happens in Vegas doesn’t necessarily stay in Vegas.  We met up with our kids and grandkid there (Benoit had a DEMA convention to attend), and though I summoned my most imperious scorn for the occasion, it wasn’t half bad.  Since we were last there (23 years ago), big changes – the old, tacky town of run-down ex-luxury hotels has been razed and rebuilt, and the new places – the Bellagio, with its fake Eiffel Tower, Wynn and its new neighbor Encore, Bally’s – are monumental in scale and opulent in amenities.  The people are still pretty tacky, though, especially those poor souls who sit all day in front of slots, endlessly pulling the lever with no hope in their eyes.  We did very little gambling.  The hotel gave us $30 in free chips, just to get us hooked; Nancy put them all on Even at the roulette table; 16 came up; she took her winnings and walked away.

The food was a revelation.  We ate at a Thai restaurant called Lotus of Siam, which we learned about from the Times article heralding the opening of its sister eatery in New York, and it was, as promised, the best Thai food we’d ever encountered – in fact, some of the best food we’d ever encountered.  And Sen of Japan was as good as it gets, too:  wonderful, inventive sushi at a third the price of Nobu.  The reason we went so heavily Asian is that Danielle, living as she does in Honduras, goes without for months at a time, and being pregnant, she has cravings we’re only too happy to satisfy.

And there was a terrific golf course across the street from out hotel, where I played three successive days.  I think the whole city must be economically depressed; resort golf at only $80 a pop is almost unheard of.  So, all in all, one of the best family vacations ever --- even if, unlike our better-connected friends the Patells, we did have to fly coach.

Craftsmanship

My friend Deborah challenged me to revive my blog by posting every day for a month.  I won't be able to do that (we'll be computerless in Vegas  later this week), but le't see how close I can come.

Last night was Nancy's birthday, and we went with the aforementioned Deborah and husband Cyrus to Tom Collichio's much-touted Craft.  Daughter Danielle ate there a couple of years ago and raved.  But it seems Craft has strayed from its original concept -- create-your-own-meals by huddling with someone who functions as a sous-chef -- and now offers, simply, an a la carte menu, which is another way of saying very expensive food.  What's new and different about choosing an app, a main course, and sides?  The short ribs were terrific, but at $38 the portion was a bit skimpy, and needed to be fleshed out with cippolini onions and roast potatoes, each about $11.  Things start to add up, and though the ingredients are top-quality and the preparation faultless, we left feeling a little empty, both in the stomach and wallet departments.  .