Marching with fine madness

Part-time New Yorkers don’t always take advantage of the best the city has to offer. Whether you’re a commuter from Westchester or a downtowner like me who escapes to the country on weekends, playing in the city’s best playgrounds is often the last item on your busy agenda.

On Monday mornings I take my dog Aengus to Central Park. Although it’s miles from our city loft and there are dog runs in our neighborhood, the park allows dogs to run free until 9:00 a.m. It is puppy paradise. Dog walking in Central Park is just one of the many sub-cultures of this quirky city.

Weekday mornings find a fascinating cast of regular New Yorkers exercising their pooches, pedigreed and not, opposite the Heckscher ballfields, where teams from the Broadway Show League play baseball in season.

The dogs are as varied and interesting as their owners. They range from the two perfectly clipped Royal Poodles who like to gang up on Aengus, to a few indistinguishable mutts rescued from death row. In Manhattan, of course, not everyone walks his own dog.

I sometimes wonder why the well-groomed woman with the high society voice has a different dog every time I see her. She is either a Good Samaritan who walks her neighbors’ dogs out of kindness, or she makes a few bucks on the side to cover her manicures. Polite dog-walkers don’t ask questions, so we may never know.

During the recent illumination-via-orange known as The Gates Project, we dog-walkers got to share the park’s midweek pleasures with thousands of people who would have otherwise eschewed the park on a winter day.

As the Gates were going up in late January, I wondered what effect they would have on the canine population. Would the dogs be frightened by the strange orange soldiers overhead?

In fact, they hardly seemed to notice. Aengus was more interested in the ducks on the pond than the hundreds of billowing sails à l’orange.

To celebrate the opening of the event, my friend Trina planned an outing. She and her Schnauzer, Eloise, and me and my Aengus, would dress appropriately and spend a morning in the park together.

Orange is not a theme in my wardrobe so when I found an orange scarf that was long forgotten by my daughter, I thought I was all set. Trina had offered to fashion some dog collars for our companions. She’s handy that way.

When we met that morning, Trina was dressed from head to ankles in shades from persimmon to apricot. Jacket, sweater, tights and skirt all glowed like the lit tip of a Lucky Strike.

Aengus was offered a handsome new pumpkin-colored ribbed turtleneck collar that he graciously accepted, and Eloise wore a frilly version of the same.

Our get-ups paid off in attention. At the entrance to the park we were asked to pose for a photograph. On the winding path by the frog pond, a dapper banker-type in impeccably tailored black cashmere commented that we would make a great picture, but he hadn’t time to take one. Still, we put a smile on his face.

We took dozens of photos of each other and of the gates as they followed the gray undulations of the Olmsted paths with their saffron punctuation marks. “Saffron” was the color Christo and Jeanne-Claude preferred to orange. The gates were more Con-Ed orange than exotic saffron, but that did not detract from the wit of the project.

Imagine the scene: scores of volunteers holding telescoping rods with tennis ball tips to untangle errant banners, to a couple being married under a bower of orange gates. Even the city cops were amused by it all.

The weekend after our visit, Trina called with the news. Our picture was in the Sunday Style section of The New York Times, headlined “Saffronistas.”

The best part came weeks later, while the gates were coming down. Aengus and I were taking our Monday stroll when we met some tourists from Texas. When they heard from a park employee that he had been in The Times, they had to have a photograph with the “celebrity dog.”

Oh, what a fine madness!