My Turtle Story

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My wife and I never had a daughter. Our daughter Rachel died in utero of a cord accident about a week before her due date.

God gave me a daughter in another way -- when the Vietnamese family moved next to us years ago, I think in 2004, their 4 year old daughter, little Nhu, introduced herself to me, and in short order we were "as thick as thieves." I loved that kid! I still do. I regarded her as a daughter. She sometimes jokingly called me "Dad." She was such joy in my life, and I still thank God for having known that little one.

One day, I was driving her past my house to her own, when little Nhu said, "Mr. Peter! Look! There's a turtle walking away from the tree on your lawn! For Vietnamese, that's bad luck, Mr. Peter!"

We jumped out of the car and ran to the turtle, and picked it up to keep it from going into the street and being squished by a car, and put it in my wife's garden.

I took Nhu to her house. She went back to her bedroom to change, while I stayed in the living room, tinkering with her family's piano.

Suddenly I heard an urgent knock at the door. My son Josh saw that I was calm, and said, "Dad, didn't you hear the thump?"

I said, "No, Josh. What are you talking about?"

He said, "The giant oak tree on the front lawn just collapsed and slammed into the front of the house!"

From her bedroom Nhu, who had been listening, yelled, "There's your bad luck, Mr. Peter!"

It was bad luck, all right -- about $16,000.00 in damage.

Nhu's parents roared with laughter, when they heard about the turtle followed by the bad luck.


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Nursery Rhymes: Not Such a Nice Thing

Most in America have heard that the song that goes with the America children’s game, “Ring Around the Rosie,” is really about bubonic plague, the terrifying disease that killed about a third of England’s population beginning in the 1300s.

Ring around the rosie [referring to a bulls-eye rash on the skin of plague victims, looking like a ring around a rose]

A pocket full of posies [referring to the flowers and herbs frequently carried to try to keep the plague away, by smell]

Ashes, ashes [“Achoo! Achoo!” -- the plague victim sneases, because he is getting sick!]

We all fall down! [Everyone dies of plague]

We all fall down!

It just so happens that many British and American nursery rhymes for children are actually hidden references to horrible, bloody events in history.

Every American child knows this song…

Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down
And broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

It’s not such a happy little rhyming song when we insert the interpretation…

Jack and Jill [French king Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette]

Went up the hill […walked up the steps of the neck-chopping guillotine.]

To fetch a pail of water. [Referring to the pail which caught the heads chopped-off by the guillotine.]

Jack fell down
And broke his crown [Referring to King Louis XVI’s head being chopped-off so that it fell into the pail]

Jack fell down and broke his crown!

And Jill came tumbling after. [Then, Marie Antoinette’s head was chopped-off].

Another very well known nursery rhyme is even bloodier…

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

How could such a nursery rhyme possibly be a reference to bloody events in world history?

Mary Tudor was the only surviving child of Henry VIII of England, when he was still Catholic, and of his Catholic wife from Spain, Queen Catherine of Aragon.

After her Protestant half-brother Edward VI of England died in 1553, Mary Tudor took her seat as Queen of England, and ruled for five years, untill 1558.

Because Protestant leaders despised Mary, they overlooked the tens of thousands murdered by her Protestant father King Henry VIII, and the thousands of Catholics killed by Edward VI, and enormously exaggerated the religion-based murder of a few hundred as Mary Tudor struggled to end the killing. As a consequence, the nursery rhyme growing out of the Protestant hatred seems to mean the following…

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, [“contrary” in the sense that she tried to reverse England’s drift to Protestantism]

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells [a nickname for thumb screws, used for torture by slowly crushing fingertips], and cockle shells [devices for torture applied to certain important parts of a man’s privates],

Silver bells

And pretty maids [the nickname for a type of neck-chopping guillotine] all in a row.

Smells Like Hell, Tastes Like Heaven

Supposedly Mark Twain said, "If one person calls you an ass, ignore him. If two people call you an ass, check for tracks. If three people call you an ass, buy a saddle."

Well, two families of people from Vietnam speak to me with words of hate, and so implicitly are calling me an "ass." And so, I guess that I should go and buy a saddle.

But I still love those people very much -- a little girl named Nhu more than any of them. They enriched my life so much, and I miss them all.

One of the things I learned about during my relationship with little Nhu's family, before I began to be ostracized, is the strange fruit of the Vietnamese people called sau rieng, or durian fruit, in English.

Sau rieng grows wild and on farms in Southeast Asia. The fruits are big and covered with large, nasty thorns. If, when ripe, they fall upon a passerby, they can inflict quite an injury.

The sau rieng is is an extremely sweet fruit filled with sulfur. The sulfur content is so high that sau rieng fruit can give off quite a pungent odor -- so strong an odor that the Vietnamese smile and say, "It smells like hell, but it tastes like heaven!"

Once I was invited to a birthday party for one of little Nhu's cousins. As I sat at the dining room table, someone in the kitchen unpacked the cake made in part of sau rieng fruit, and cut herself a slice.

A minute later I smelled a very bad smell, and I thought with alarm, "Most of these people are immigrants! They may not realize that the gas company mixes an odor into natural gas, so that gas leaks can be detected!" So I jumped up and said, "I think that the oven here has a leak -- and it smells like a big one! I think that we have to take care of this, friends!"

My Vietnamese hosts all burst out laughing, because they knew the source of the problem.

"No! Really!," I persisted, "I think that you have a gas leak!" That made them laugh even harder.

Nhu's great aunt, a beautiful lady with perpetually sad eyes with the American name Sandy, took me aside and gave me a piece of the cake responsible for my reaction, and told me about sau rieng.

"...where the deer and the WHAT play??????????"

"Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play."

No antelope ever lived in the wild in North America. Some have been imported into zoos, here. That's it.

An animal called a pronghorn is native to America, but it is called "pronghorn" to focus-in on the characteristic which distinguishes them from antelope -- prongs, or branches, on the horns.

So, the song got it wrong.

"I went down to the lake and caught a ghoti !!!"

A "ghoti"? What in Heaven's Holy Name is a "ghoti"?

Here's a picture of one, just after after it was caught with a ghotiing rod.

Be careful to pronounce the name of that animal very carefully...

"gh" as in "tough."

"o" as in "women."

"ti" as in "premonition."

Ghoti!