I enjoy the contradictions that the passage of time creates. Things remain the same materially, but they change socially, and that process is the sort of history that I love. Thoughts like these were drifting idly through my head as I lounged on the lawn outside Crane Castle, right here in Ipswich. Crane Castle was built at the beginning of the last century, by Richard Crane, a hugely wealthy man. These days, we’re all too familiar with hugely wealthy people, and they’re not too high up our popularity scale, and rightly so. But at least the mega-rich of a century ago made their wealth by producing real objects that actually made life better for the poorer people who bought them – with Crane, it was bathroom fixtures. Think of the difference between a flushing toilet and a sub-prime mortgage, and you’ll get my point. Actually, Crane made so much money from these “Castles of Convenience” (as a witty book on the history of sanitation calls them) that he could afford to build Crane Castle twice: His wife didn’t like the first version, an Italianate villa, so he tore it down and built the current version modeled after an English manor. She liked that, so it stayed. In the shadow of this stately mansion, I sat listening to the Beatles—OK, a tribute band if you must be fussy. How about that, working-class lads from Liverpool claiming the territory of the American upper crust! Certainly not what dear Richard had in mind when he built that great stone terrace from which the crème de la crème could sip champagne while looking down the Grande Allée to the ocean. The Grande Allée, where we’re all picnicking while being reassured that she loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah, is a wide grass strip, lined with classical statues and dark trees that show off the whiteness of the marble. It sweeps down to the ocean a mile away. Crane copied the idea from the great palaces of Italy, and this is the only allée of comparable scale in America. One hundred years later, it’s being restored, the statues are emerging from the overgrown branches and tonight it’s packed with local people. I wonder what that toxic bond bundler will leave for future generations to enjoy? And we sure do enjoy Crane Castle – it’s popular in every sense of the word: Once for the elite, now for the people. A good change. The Beatles have changed, too. Do you remember how aghast middle-aged people were when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show? The decadence of their hairstyle, the corruption Page 90 ■ Antiques Journal ■ September 2010 A Yours Sincerely of their brain-washing music that was seducing our daughters and destroying American civilization as we knew it! Now, equivalent middle-aged people have dug out faded T-shirts urging “Make Music Not War,” and are leaping around, waving their arms in the air and twisting their thickening bodies into awkward renditions of the dances they used to do so lithely. But we still bellow “Give Peace a Chance” at the tops of our lungs, and the Martian circling overhead in her flying saucer has radioed back to base that human beings all live in yellow submarines, and seem remarkably happy to do so. Whether that will make the invasion more or less likely, I leave to the Pentagon to decide. Oh yes, the songs, the Castle, the Grande Allée, they’re all the same, but they’re all different: They’re not frozen like a mammoth in an ice sheet. History is a living force, and we’re all the better for it. Castle Hill on the Crane Estate, as it is properly called, is a property of the Trustees of Reservations, www.thetrustees.org.