Bard and Muse: A Love Story

Like the best minds of my generation, to quote Allen Ginsberg, former Altadenan Richard Ash, a songwriter-composer-arranger-instrumentalist-singer steeped his musical sensibilities in wry, dry wit.

With this as context, it’s sometimes hard to tell if he’s kidding.

Regarding a jar of gritty debris that he and his wife Rocio collected from their deep-fried property, which they shared for nearly three decades, he quips, “I can say with utmost confidence that we are the only people on planet Earth that can say ‘ashes to Ashes.’”

When he strums a plaintive surviving ukulele and sings “Blue Skies,” surrounded by the devastation, a disarming sweetness underlies the seeming sarcasm.

Among his other compositions is “I Loved You More When You Didn’t Speak English,” a sentimental ditty written for his wife Rocio, a native of Atlixco in the Mexican state of Puebla. A fan of the late Leonard Cohen, Ash says, “I like a good depression now and then.”

The January experience of Richard, Rocio and their 26-year-old son Lewis is now familiar to the point of being iconic. The hummingbird feeder beloved by Lewis, who is intellectually delayed, lay cruelly melted on the driveway, while Richard’s 2005 ragtop Mustang was spared. 

Richard says, “Rocio misses making sugar water for the many hummingbirds that came to visit.  As for myself, I miss hiking the trails and the neighborhood, talking to my neighbors and also missing the cafe I frequented daily where I met so many people.” 

The family had recently hard-scaped the property and planted a paradise of fruit trees and exotic succulents. An especially hard loss was the five-burner Weber gas barbecue.

Family treasures, including the collection of stringed instruments he had collected over his 77-year lifetime, were torched. Richard says “Other gut-punches include binders full of typewritten lyrics dating back to the 70’s, as well as various accessories such as strings, microphones, harmonicas, cables, etc.”  Family and friends gifted Richard with a guitar and a few other helpful items which he now uses to create poignant youtube videos, assisted by Garage Band and imovie apps.

“I was too casual about the whole thing,” he says over a springtime-pink iced sugar cookie at Panera. “I thought we’d be back in no time. But we lost a lot, including our wedding rings, my tallis and yarmulke from my Bar Mitzvah, my birth certificate, and even my beloved B-25 Gibson guitar, a high school graduation gift from my Mom.”

Small wonder that he and Lewis duet so sweetly on the hauntingly seductive Cuban classic “Quizás,” which translates “Perhaps.”

Richard says, “Despite his challenges, among his wonderful qualities Lewis can be quite friendly, loves to socialize, is comical and has a photograph memory so you’ll always be recognized by him.  He can brighten up anybody’s day.  Quite frankly, there’s a lot he can teach me.”

Rocio is less than sanguine about the destruction and, nibbling at the edge of a tulip-shaped cookie says, “We are lawyered up.” She describes the firestorm and its fallout as a tragedy of civic negligence versus simply the whim of our amoral Mother Nature.

“Why were the wires not buried a long time ago? Why was the brush not thinned every year? Because the budget was cut, that’s why. And during the wind, the fire, there was no announcement, no warning. It was all very inconsistent, how it was handled. When the power went off, I said to Richard and Lewis, ‘Let’s go.’ And we just left.” 

Yet, spring has come again. Relentless, mindless, fearless new green shoots push up through the scarred soil as though nothing bad ever happens here. Familiar birds, including the hummingbirds so beloved by mother and son, dart, rustle, croon and call among the emerging leaves. Love, or at least the avian mating dance, has conquered the destruction of the year’s shocking baptism by fire.

Richard calls his bride a “Young Heart with an Old Soul.” When they met, she spoke a little English and he (very) little Spanish.  Love transcended all boundaries, as it does.  

Can it be mere coincidence that “Rocio” means “dew” in Spanish? In 1817 a few weeks after the death of his infant daughter, Haiku master Kobayashi Issa wrote:

This world of dew
is a world of dew,
And yet..and yet...

Of their bond that endures even as everything proves painfully temporary, Rocio says, “It was Father’s Day in ‘95 when I met Richard. From that day we have formed a lasting relationship.  We had similar interests including music and hiking. Richard is a songwriter and listening to one of his songs he played me was a very romantic piece entitled, ‘Mea Culpa.’ Listening to him sing made me fall in love with him. The other quality that attracted me to him is that he was, and still is very family-oriented. Though miles apart from his roots, he always made sure to call his Mom regularly.”

Richard adds, “I was in my mid-40s in 1995 when, as a patron of a local Italian restaurant in Pasadena, I met Rocio who worked in their bakery. I had mixed feelings about having any romantic notions with her due to the age discrepancy, she being 23 years younger, as well as language and differences culturally.  

As it turned out, they were mere myths of my own invention and as I got to know her those myths were cast aside. Case in point, early on in the relationship I recall being in a local record store and I suggested she pick out something for herself.  

Being only in her early twenties I thought sure she’d find something reflecting her generation. I was surprised when she returned with a CD of the great classical guitarist Andrés Segovia.  I thought, Hmmmm…there’s something more here than meets the ear. Over the years she has enriched my musical palette in many ways.  

We were married on Valentine’s Day, ‘97 in a quasi-European courtyard of the now shuttered Market City Cafe in Old Town, Pasadena.  The ceremony was performed by a Rabbi, and only a handful of people and relatives were in attendance. We honeymooned in Carmel and began our lives together. We initially lived in a studio for several months, and then on a tip from one of my co-workers, we found our lovely home nestled in the hills of Altadena and had our son, Lewis, in May of ‘98.”

As we go to press, pragmatic Capricorn Rocio is fiercely navigating the snarling quagmire of agencies and entities that will help make the ultimate decisions regarding the property and damage.

Richard says, “As in dancing, one person leads, the other follows. I usually defer to her decisions because she gets it right 99 percent of the time.” Although the idea of rebuilding seems to tap into Richard’s inner curmudgeon, which is not exactly hard to summon, he says “I have a relatively young family, so we have to create a future for when I’m gone.”

As a Sagittarian, in spite of the caressing allure of the poetic dark side, Richard acknowledges silver linings with songs and humor.

“There has been an outpouring of humanity toward us,” he admits. “Many people have been so kind and so generous with us. And so, to them, to everyone, I say, don’t get stuck. We all grieve and mourn in our own ways, I get it. But we’re here. Again. I hate to see people paralyzed by regret, fear, anger, all of the feelings around what happened. But, my meter is running. There is no time to waste. Actually, there never is, never was.”

Meanwhile, Lewis is chatty, sunny, bubbly, easily befriending strangers, what Richard calls a “goodwill ambassador,” while the family decamped at a Pasadena Marriott before finding their current apartment, and charming everyone else he meets including this reporter. Perhaps the young man masks his despair to spare and uplift the rest of us.

Richard says, “Our son has had problems processing it and refuses to go up to the property. He keeps asking when we can go home. We pretend we’re on vacation.”