Yesterday we did our duty as grandparents and what a pleasant languorous day it was. Our daughter the dog groomer texted in a panic: twenty-five baying clients and no babysitter. So we got up early, heaved old Jack into the car, his husky pride hurt by now having to be lifted, and headed out.
We stopped at Todaros, the best deli in New York. They had just roasted their wonderful coffee and the aroma was wafting onto the sidewalk. New York breakfasts have to be the most generous in the world and fill you with a sense of wellbeing – you can dine like a millionaire for 99c. We picked up coffee with lox and bagels to go and heavenly orange blossom and cappuccino muffins. As we zipped along the FDR we had the road to ourselves, New York was sleeping and drowsy, the sky was a perfect blue, the East River sparkled. We dove into the Holland Tunnel and under the Hudson emerging on the other side into bright rays of sunshine.
If you’ve ever made the mistake of flying in to Newark, or watched The Sopranos, you will know that the opening scene - is an accurate depiction of the New Jersey Turnpike on a grim day – a bleak and ugly desecration. But in spring, Nature fights back vigorously - New Jersey becomes verdant and lives up to its licence plate moniker "New Jersey - The Garden State"!
By 9:00 o’clock we were sitting in the shade of a pair of beautiful sturdy old magnolia trees. The day was a lullaby of pleasantness, the sun warming your skin, the aroma of charcoal grills being fired up for summer cookouts.
After Skyping Gt. granddad in the rainy handle of Cheshire’s teapot, Baby Graham lay on the dog bed in the dappled sunlight taking in his first sight of leaves wafting with a gentle lilt and flutter in the breeze.
The dogs, displaced, slumbered nearby and Dave snoozed under his newspaper……
As the lazy afternoon wore on we left poor old Jack, his legs too shaky to walk, to sleep next to the grill, dreaming of steaks gone by and willing more to come, and took a stroll down to the park. Bayonne is an old working town on a thin peninsula of New Jersey, a finger pointing towards Staten Island in the middle of New York Harbor. From one side you see the back of Lady Liberty holding her torch against the New York sky-line. The opposite side presents vistas of Bayonne's strange iron bridges linking to the main land and New Jersey’s docklands in Elizabeth nestled by the airport.
The dock cranes on the NJ shore always make me smile, standing like giraffes or bent over like giant grazing dinosaurs.
