A Mental Cruise of U.S. Cultural Mix

Among life’s most fascinating phenomena are the crazy hops one’s mental football sometimes takes.

I just returned from a two-day river-rafting adventure on the Tuolumne, where I’d been joined by a friend from New York. During a break spent on the river bank, my friend told me about a restaurant he had seen in either New York or Boston--or maybe it was London (my friend is extremely well-traveled, salting his conversation with tidbits about Singapore, Durban, Rio, Marrakech, and other such exotic haunts). This New York-Boston-or-London eatery was called the Old England Pizzeria. Not a name to inspire confidence. Makes you think the specialty of the house must be Yorkshire pudding pizza garnished with steak and kidneys; or maybe bubble-and-squeak calzone.

The Old England Pizzeria reminded me, though, of a pizza joint in Hollywood called the Kosher Nostra, where the pizzas are actually kosher. They’re not bad, for kosher. You can’t get mozzarella and sausage, but they’re big on mozzarella and anchovies.

My mental football having bounced, not surprisingly, from the Old England Pizzeria to the Kosher Nostra, I next traveled across the country on a perfectly understandable trip inside my head to a kosher Chinese restaurant in New York (again, not bad, for kosher) called, believe it or not, the Moishe Peking. From there, I hopped almost instantly, but for a far less obvious reason, to the sports department of Sears in Santa Monica.

The linguistic and ethnic mix in this rich and varied land can be quite unpredictable and often stunning. Here’s the strange tale of why my thoughts leaped from New York and its Moishe Peking to Santa Monica and its Sears:

About 10 years ago, my wife and I returned from Nova Scotia to the United States by way of a ferry across the Bay of Fundy to Portland, Me. Arriving in Portland, we decided that the one thing we’d like to do with the remainder of our vacation was to find a small, pleasant New England inn that offered canoeing, bicycling, and tennis. That’s a tall order. It’s not hard to find places that offer those sports, but most of the places that offer them are rather imposing; the “small, pleasant” requirement was something else.

By a great stroke of luck, we discovered an ad in a throwaway paper in the Auto Club in Portland saying, “The Echo Lake Inn in Tyson, Vt.--small, pleasant, and offering canoeing, bicycling, and tennis.” We phoned to make a reservation, then we remembered we hadn’t brought our tennis rackets. At a local Sears, we bought two copies of their bottom-of-the-line rackets, which I think cost less than $10 each, and headed for Vermont.

The Echo Lake was exactly what we wanted--old, picturesque, somewhat rickety, rustic and clean, just across the street from a beautiful lake of exactly the right size for canoeing while lazily casting a futile fly on the water.

We started whacking a ball about on their autumn-leaf-strewn tennis court, having a lovely time. The ball crossed the net perhaps 10 times before my wife struck it a mighty blow with her bottom-of-the-line racket and the handle snapped completely in two, the racket head clattering ignominiously onto the red clay. End of tennis.

We packed the two sections of her racket into the large Sears bag it had come in, and when we got back to Los Angeles about a week and a half later, we took it to the Sears in Santa Monica. A very pleasant young clerk waited on us. I told him I’d bought Sears rackets--though never the real cheapos--in the past, and I said I had always been satisfied with them, and “I was amazed that my wife could have done this to her racket.” With a dramatic gesture, I dumped the contents of the bag onto the counter. The young man, an American of obviously Asian--almost certainly Japanese--ancestry, picked up the two sections of the racket, examined the broken ends, and, in wide-eyed astonishment, cried out, “Oy, vay!”

From the Moishe Peking to the tennis racket counter at Sears? A reasonable bounce, I think.