Quality Champagne   This first item for 2003 starts four hours before the year does. We had extended our December stay in New York through January. I love to watch the days shortening to the solstice, and then lengthening again. Often, although not this year, winter sunsets out our windows are beautiful. Nippy? Of course, but we also enjoy the winter coziness of places like I Trulli on 27th Street, one of our favorite restaurants. For the first time, we were there in the winter and were able to take advantage of the two-sided fireplace they have in the middle of the room. When we got there, Nicola, the owner, said he'd throw on another log for us. But I digress.

We've had New Year's Eve in Florida for several years, but this time it was to be on Long Island. Sister Pat was out of town, but sister Chris made reservations for the four of us, including my mother, at a local restaurant in Malverne, the Cork & Board. Of cawss, I like to joke that a Noo Yawka would call it the Cawk & Bawd. Standard speech is great, but be proud of and defend local dialects. But I digress again.

I just loved driving out in the winter blackness. We got to the Cawk & Bawd early, had a very enjoyable dinner, and watched Times Square at my Mother's. But that's not the point of the story.

Keep in mind three things, all factors in our adventure. This was a small, neighborhood restaurant. People feel sorry when they see a wheelchair. We arrived 20 minutes early for our reservation, hoping to be seated early, but ended up being seated 20 minutes late. The owner, seeing us wait 40 minutes, joked about wishing he had an ejector button for people who wouldn't leave.

If my father had lived 26 years longer, New Year's Eve would have been their 65th anniversary. Keeping that in mind, I looked at the Cawk & Bawd wine list for champagnes. The list was modest. They offered two domestic brands, and, surprisingly for a local restaurant, an imported bottle of Moët et Chandon for $60. We'd never had any Moët (mow-ETT), and considering the occasion, I ordered a bottle. The waitress took the order, but asked "Is it on the wine list?" The evening was already getting more interesting.

We waited about 15 minutes. We later found out that they were out of Moët, and actually ran down to the wine store a few doors away, but it had closed at 9:00. The waitress finally came with a bottle of champagne, in an open box, lying the length of her arm. She said they were out of the Moët, but would we be willing to accept this at the same price. There wasn't much light as I looked into the dark box, which seemed lined with what resembled something like blue velvet, as I recall. The bottle itself was black, with a black label and white writing, which made it hard to read. But one thing I could make out. It said Dom Perignon.

I smiled at the waitress and said, yes, we'd take that gladly instead. Most champagnes, even the best, are usually a mixture of different vintages. This one said clearly Vintage 1988. I'd never had Dom Perignon before. I explained to my Mother that this bottle is at least twice the value of what I had ordered, and probably went for one-and-a-quawta.

I had learned last summer in Reims that the upscale version of Veuve Cliquot is called La Grande Dame and retails for about $165. I had always thought that Dom Perignon was a separate brand, but from the label I found out that it's the corresponding upscale version of a regular bottle of Moët et Chandon, and therefore also put out by them.

We toasted the New Year and my Mother, never overly interested in champagne, said "This is g-o-o-o-d". I should hope so. We never found out why the owner had that particular bottle available, maybe it was his private bottle, but when he stopped by to ask how things were, I thanked him, but had to ask what that bottle would go for. A hundred-and-a-half. We got two-and-a-half times the value of what we paid for. It gave every indication that it was going to be a Prosperous New Year. Actually, we had occasion in Florida to drink La Grande Dame on two occasions.

Using Our Languages   People often have asked us if we "use" our languages at home, and I have to tell them, no, not as they think. The atmosphere has to be right. On arriving in Germany, we would start speaking German, perhaps, but rarely at home, when there usually wasn't any need to. Under normal circumstances, the languages have to fit into the situation.

What Bev and I have always done, however, is to readily pepper our conversation to each other with appropriate expressions, as they fit in. For instance, Bev now has to have general anesthesia when she needs more than the simplest dental work, most recently in January. After 2½ hours in the chair, Bev was trying to wake up, and I was sitting next to her, nudging her and patting her hand. The dentist came back into the room, and, knowing our background, asked the usual language question. I laughed and told him I had just said to her "Wake up, Spal'nyaya Krasavitsa", and then explained that that's the Russian name Tchaikovsky used for his ballet, Sleeping Beauty.

I neglected to add that I had also just used one of the lines in Italian we had always enjoyed using from La Bohème, from one of its most famous arias "Che gelida manina":

It has to fit into the occasion. Listen to Pavarotti sing it on YouTube: Luciano Pavarotti: Che gelida manina

Ice   The Arctic came to the City this winter and it was beautiful. The upper Hudson froze, and they had to send icebreakers upriver to free ships caught in the ice. Jamaica Bay near Kennedy Airport froze over, I heard, as did Raritan Bay south of Staten Island, disrupting ferry service out of Atlantic Highlands NJ to Manhattan. Of course with all the ferry service being revived that had disappeared for years, there was a lot of ferry service to be disrupted. Ice floes started coming down the Hudson, which I only remember seeing once before. They were maybe 20 or 30 feet across, with lots of "ice cubes" in between. Every once in a while you'd see a seagull catching a ride on a floe. As the sun would start to lower in the sky, there would be a line of white light from it to the viewer, glaring alternatively over water and ice floes, in what I would imagine to be a very Arctic manner. The west shore would appear only in silhouette. The floes continued for a week or two until we left.

Flo...ri...da   But leave we did, to spend at least a few months at our Florida place. We often put the car on the Autotrain, and take a sleeper, but this time I decided to drive. It's 1100 miles from New York to the northern Tampa suburbs, the distance from Berlin to Naples. That's two 8-9 hour days of about 550 miles each, and nowadays, of course, I do all the driving.

I used to think that I alone had discovered Fayetteville, North Carolina, on I-95 at the halfway point between NYC and the Tampa area, and the logical place to stop overnight. But lots of people in Tampa are connected to the metropolitan New York area, and know about Fayetteville. Unfortunately, we had slow traffic leaving Washington and ended up stopping in Wilson NC instead, 72 miles before Fayetteville, so there was that much more catching up to do the second day.

When we got in Saturday night, we stopped off first for groceries. At the checkout line, Bev was in her chariot with a shopping basket of groceries on her lap, and I started to chat up the gentleman behind me, saying we had just driven in from New York. "Did you make it to Fayetteville?" he asked.

The next day we were sitting at the table, and I was reading the paper. Bev doesn't talk much any more, but sometime at the table she'll suddenly say something out loud in a hoarse, raspy whisper. Often, I think, it's just a phrase she's noticed in a headline over my shoulder that she repeats, but when I ask her to repeat it, she never does. Anyway, this next day at the table she said something, and again I didn't understand it. Again, I asked her to repeat it, and this time she did, raspy, but loud and clear.

"Flo...ri...da" she said.