CARRISHKEIT

I need to buy a new car -- or do I?  Our 2003 VW Passat, the best car we've ever owned, has 117,000 miles on it, and things are going wrong:  mysterious warning lights on the dash, like "Check Brake Pads," which the dealer's service department told us had appeared not because our brake pads were faulty, but only because they weren't made by VW, and, more alarmingly, "Check Engine," which usually means that the catalytic converter is failing and that the car won't pass inspection unless we spend thousands of dollars fixing it.

And yet . . . it runs like a dream.  It's totally comfortable; in fact, I bought it because its driver's seat had so many possible configurations that I no longer have to stop, get out and stretch after an hour at the wheel.  It has all-wheel drive, a necessity in the winter for our long, steep driveway, but it still gets 26 mpg on the highway, and its 6-cylinder engine, coupled to an automatic transition with manual passing gear, is smooth, quiet and powerful.  And I love its bells and whistles:  memory buttons that adjusts the seats and mirrors for each of us when it's pushed; a computer under the speedometer that can tell you how long you've been driving, how far you've gone, how many miles till you run out of gas, what your current gas mileage is, and the sex of your unborn child.

It looks a little stodgy and old-fashioned, though, and parking it in the city has covered it with scrapes and dings, so for the past year I've found myself looking at other cars.  I'll be driving the Passat down Hands Creek Road and a brand-new Subaru Outback or Acura RDX comes sailing past, and I'll be filled with carlust.  And here's the thing:  I feel guilty.  As if I were married to the Passat but surreptitiously checking out younger, hotter women.  Shopping for a trophy wife.  I know what you Freudians are thinking:  that this is really about Nancy, not the car.  That's utter bullshit.  I look at other women all the time (they're lined up outside my office every morning) and never feel any guilt at all.

Nancy and I have gone so far as to test-drive that new Subaru, and in many ways it's terrific:  roomier, better gas mileage, more ground clearance (we got stuck in our own parking area in January when the snow was over the Passat's bumper), and a jaunty style.  But will I be happy with the 4-cylinder engine, which is a little buzzy and doesn't have quite enough oomph?  Will I be able to adjust the front seat to cradle me in the manner to which I've become accustomed?  And do I want to nick the piggy bank to the tune of $30K+ when I might get a year or two more out of the Passat?

                      Old Faithful                                                             Young Honey


I stay up nights worrying about these questions.  It feels like a life-altering decision, though it never has before; we've bought six new cars in the past 25 years, and nary a panic attack have I had.  Maybe my OCD is kicking in.  The salesman at Riverhead Subaru calls every couple of days, and I keep putting him off with lame excuses.  Someone, please, tell me what to do!

NARRISHKEIT

“Narrishkeit” means “foolishness” Yiddish (from the German “narr,” as in “narrenschiffe,” ship of fools)  – not quite “folly,” like investing with Madoff, but more the kind of  idiosyncratic nuttiness of which everybody has a few choice examples.  One that Nancy and I share is the way we play Scrabble.

From the beginnings of our relationship (back in what I think of as the early modern era), we’ve both enjoyed games, but there’s always been a problem.  When we were engaged, I tried to learn bridge, which Nancy had played in college; we had another couple as partners, a tyro and an old hand, and the whole thing was a disaster.  I’m a terrible card player and couldn't learn the game, and the other couple broke up over the acrimony and general fecklessness it engendered in them.  Nancy and I tried chess, but she was carrying around a lot of emotional baggage:  her father was the senior champion of the state of Michigan, who delighted in thumping his eldest daughter, and playing with me brought those repressed memories back with a vengeance.  Whatever we tried, ego intruded and bruised feelings ensued – except when we played Boggle with Danielle who, from the age of 17, has kicked both our butts every time.  (Not because of her enormous vocabulary; more because a big part of the game involves spatial relations, seeing various combinations, at which she excels).

But lately, Nancy and I have been playing Scrabble.  Well, not Scrabble – a variant called Lexulous, which is offered on Facebook.  The difference is that there are eight letters instead of seven and – most important – no challenges; if you make a word that’s not in the game’s “dictionary” (I use the term derisively and loosely), it doesn’t accept it and you can recant and make another word.

Where does the foolishness come in?  We could easily set up the Scrabble board and play face to face, but it works better for us to play online.  So Nancy sits downstairs in the living room on her Powerbook and I sit at my desk upstairs on my iMac, and when one of us has moved, he or she shouts, “OKAY!”  Talk about the machines turning us into machines!  But because there’s no eye-contact, no audible grumbling, no muttered imprecations, there are no hard feelings.  And we’re about equal in skill, so games are usually decided by who gets the good letters – the right combination of high-powered consonants and vowels. 

What’s next?  Computer tennis?  Virtual sex?  Stay tuned.

CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER

I love living in East Hampton -- or at least I did until this winter.  In the 30 years since we bought our first house, there have been snowfalls, some of them major, but nothing like what's been happening here.  In the past month, we've been plowed twice, and still, when we arrived on Wednesday night (after a 45-minute dig-out from our parking space in the city), we got stuck at the top of our driveway and had to call AAA the next morning.  The freezing rain is worse than the snow; first it melts the surface of what's already there (the base is almost two feet thick); then it turns to slush.  It's like
Groundhog Day -- nine storms in five weeks, dig out and watch the new snow obliterate your everything you've just finished clearing.

When we bought our house, we never gave a thought to the fact that our driveway was 100 feet long and at a fairly steep angle.  For that past two months, that's been the central fact of our lives; all our travel decisions are based on it.

For the first time, I'm considering Plan B:  quit teaching and spend the winters in a warm, sunny clime.  We'll give the Northeast one more winter, but if it's anything like this one, very possibly, we're outta here.

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.