Bluefus' first venture outdoors

Bluefus enjoys his first al fresco breakfast in Cornwall. (SP Tiley photo)

For a while--a very long and unfortunate while--I was married to a man who had virtually no discernible sense of humor, little appreciation for the cultural aspects of life, and absolute disdain for those small ceremonies that seem to cement relationships, as large ones cement nations. Thank goodness, that's in the past.

Moving on...I am now married to a man who delights in all the little ceremonies we have, in the six short years to date of our marriage, invented. I thought it was his Britishness; my father once told me that the British are sentimental, and if I didn't want that, don't marry a Brit. (He also told me that the Irish were unreliable, despite the fact that he was half Irish and the most reliable person I've ever known...but then, he was of a generation that tended to generalize facets of a race into the entirety of that race. He can be excused for that. And he would have liked Simon.)

For his birthday, the first year we were married, I gave Simon a spitting fountain made of metal and in the shape of a dog. We named him Rufus, and put him in the gazebo, where he held sway until we moved to England. He was pretty bunged up by then, what with water splashing his little metal feet continuously for about seven hot Maryland months a year. So we buried him, up on the hill behind the house we've since sold, surrounded by the cats, one of whom--Tootsie--existed into my time and whom I loved dearly until he died of great old age.

When we bought this house in Cornwall--or not long after anyway--I saw an advert online for a metal dog sculpture, not a fountain this time, but a planter. Corny. Yes. Corny. But the animal face looked so much like Rufus, the name of our late gazebo fountain. So I ordered him, have filled his planter with lobelia, and given him a shady spot to guard beneath the hedgerow out back. Of course, his name is Rufus II.

Today, he had a visit from another non-canine dog in our house, Bluefus.

Bluefus is a coffee cozy. For a bit more than a year, since we found him in a store in Padstow, Bluefus has been keeping our morning pot of French press coffee warm. Today was the first day it was warm enough to have breakfast on the deck. We hadn't breakfasted outdoors since at least mid-September 2009, a couple of months before we moved to England. While there were days warm enough when we lived in the flat in Devon, and we had a small seating area behind our living room windows, the table was uncomfortably close to the windows of the Gorgon who lived next door, so we simply didn't do it. While I don't mind if people know about our relative nuttiness...or possibly British-style eccentricity--I didn't think she needed to hear our early morning secrets, or natterings as the case may be. So we didn't, simply didn't, use the table more than three or four times for afternoon coffee and a time or two for cocktails.

Bluefus quite liked his excursion. He is hoping for another one tomorrow, and the weather from the Met Office says he will probably get it. And possibly...just possibly...Sunday as well.

And then it appears that March will return. No matter. I'm sure Bluefus is better off for his serving of fresh air, bearing today the scent of new-mown hay from across the Tamar Valley. I suspect we all are.

Gods of New York: Ed Koch, Moonstruck and yellow snow of a different kind

Cher's neighborhood in Moonstruck...and mine for a year or so in the 1980s.

New York City is where my heart lives.

It’s true.

I was born there, lived there for many years of my youth and again, even longer, as an adult.

I loathe the NY mayors one is supposed to loathe, chief among those Abraham Beame and David Dinkins. I love those one is supposed to love, chief among those Edward I. Koch, but also including Rudy Giuliani.

I know. Giuliani has recently been tarred with a lot of brushes, and possibly his feet are more certainly of clay than many others’ feet. Still, after he became mayor, the city became liveable once again. So, for that―no matter what else emerges that tarnishes his glow among New York’s mayoral glitterati―I will continue to love him.

But my true hero is Ed Koch. Koch served for 12 years, virtually all of the time I lived in NYC consecutively, having moved back to the city during the preceding Abe Beame administration (I shudder to think) and remaining until the minus-4 temperatures and tornadic winds blowing through Manhattan’s canyons one Christmas Eve convinced me to seek sub-tropical temperatures in Florida. But then, we’re all entitled to the occasional mistake.

Anyway, Ed Koch―bless his little soot-and-Nedicks heart―used to stand at the subway steps at 86^th Street and Lexington Avenue when I first moved to the Yorkville neighborhood, saying good morning to people scurrying down that hole in the ground in the darkness of the Nixon ban on daylight savings time.

I was using the subway to get from Yorkville to my first real publishing job, as an editor for Prentice Hall business newsletters. Unaccountably, the offices were in Midtown, on Fifth Avenue at 54^th Street, almost across from St. Thomas (Episcopal) Church, which shortly became my lunchtime refuge as I realized the managing editor I worked for was N-U-T-S. I lasted a mere six months in that asylum before quitting to freelance, an enterprise that could only be undertaken because my husband had a job reverse commuting to the Stamford, CT. daily newspaper.  This meant that one or the other of us spent a minimum of one hour a day cruising the streets near our apartment to find parking for the car. We couldn’t afford a garage, and needless to say, on-street, legal parking spaces in NYC are always at a premium.

I wish I had had some more seasoning as a writer back then. If I had, I might have written a novel like Tepper Isn’t Going Out, a fictional account of parking in Manhattan by Calvin Trillin.

Or maybe I’d have written it later, when I was living in Carroll Gardens, the area of Brooklyn made semi-famous in the Cher vehicle, Moonstruck. The year I lived there, in a converted munitions factory at 505 Court Street that had the grandest 3-BR apartments with views of NY harbor you can imagine, it snowed almost as much as the blizzard of 2010. It took weeks and weeks for all the snow to melt and all the cars to be freed from their ice sculptures.

One car, very close to the corner on one of the blocks where we took the dogs to poop, had a 3-inch stack of parking tickets on it, as it hadn’t moved since right before the snow, and alternate-side parking was in effect.

When the snow did finally melt, the car began to drip. Not water; the snow was GONE.

It was dripping bodily fluids from the “missing wife” of a minor mafioso and her boyfriend found in the trunk with one bullet each in their brains.

As I said, it was the neighborhood made famous in Moonstruck.

As for me, I was glad we had found cheap, safe, permanent parking under the el a few weeks before the snowstorm so we hadn't had to do the New York parking mambo. Indeed, since we had joined the parking aristocracy, it was a wonder we even noted the stack of tickets on someone else's car. No longer our worry!

It was lucky, too, that my dogs were both Type A and very goal-oriented, basically only interested in smelling other dogs’ peepee, and not any other sort of light yellow liquids they noticed on the street. But I’ve always wondered whether we might have brought some human genetic material into the apartment on our shoes, or on eight furry paws. We always crossed right about there….

But it doesn’t bear thinking about. Not when I have all of NYC left to worship, and might travel down this holy path again soon.