Lines from the Bronx.

Spring--maybe even summer--appears to have arrived in New York. According to the thermometer on the dashboard of my car, the temperature as we highwayed through New York's only borough which is attached to the mainland, was 79. "That's almost 80," I astutely observed and 80, to me, has always demarcated summer.

We drove through small pock-mocked streets lined with crooked little houses fronted by large SUVs. The laughter of children was missing. It was still too early. But the traffic on 95, blithely called the New England Thruway, though it's far from New England and far from providing a through-way.

The trash on the side of the road was deep. There were the usual legion of cigarette detritus. I saw the frayed cushions of an old sofa and enough old hubcaps and lug nuts to open up a specialty shop in College Point.

The forsythia were in bloom. In bloom in the Bronx. Along the highway there was a stretch where they blazed yellow for forty yards. They brightened the borough. They would not have been out of place in Kauai, Hawaii.

I thought of Ogden Nash, my favorite poet when I was a kid.

In 1931, "The New Yorker" published these lines.

The Bronx?
No, thonx.

Thirty-three years later, a dean at a division of City College, Abraham Tauber, wrote a letter to Nash, complaining about his earlier epigram.

Nash wrote him this back, which was published in "The New York Times" in 1964.

Dear Dean Tauber,
I can't seem to escape the
sins of my smart-alec youth;
Here are my amends.

I wrote those lines, "The Bronx?
No thonx";
I shudder to confess them.

Now I'm an older, wiser man
I cry, "The Bronx? God bless
them!"

Seeing the forsythia girding New York's grittiest precinct, driving through the litter and the rickety, I thought of Nash's later lines.

I wrote those lines, "The Bronx?
No thonx";
I shudder to confess them.

Now I'm an older, wiser man
I cry, "The Bronx? God bless
them!"