Dog Bites Man by James Duffy Page B

State Fair in Syracuse, just before Labor Day. She had half-promised an appearance by the mayor and he felt, albeit reluctantly, that he could not refuse.
    Edna declined to accompany him. She had recently volunteered what spare time she had as a dermatologist at a Bronx AIDS clinic, where she quietly and without publicity undertook the unpleasing but necessary task of treating the raging skin eruptions of HIV patients. Eldon could hardly argue that this work was less important than an excursion to Syracuse.
    The mayor asked Commissioner Henriques to accompany him, along with Jack Gullighy. The latter was not overjoyed at the prospect—he claimed he broke out in a rash once more than 25 miles outside the city limits—but as usual he acceded to the mayor's wishes.
    The mayor was not encouraged by the hour's delay on his commercial flight.
    "Would have been faster to go by the Erie Canal," he muttered.
    He was not comforted by the briefing sheet on Syracuse that Esther handed him once they were in the air: industry leaving, population falling, family income well below the national average.
    "You sure the citizens aren't rioting in the streets?" he asked.
    "No, Eldon. Be calm," Gullighy said.
    "We go directly to the fairgrounds. For three hours. That's it," Henriques added.
    At the fair, the mayor was greeted by a band from a Queens highschool. He pronounced the band members' performance "magnificent" though he knew it wasn't. (He'd played the clarinet in a school band back in Minnesota that was the pride of the state. We played Sousa, for Christ's sake, he thought to himself, not this simple do-re-mi stuff.)
    After the ruffles and flourishes there was a tour of the fair exhibits and a picnic lunch with the local mayor—a Democrat, Eldon was pleased to note, though the area was known to be very Republican.
    Then came the event that memorialized the visit. On the way back to his car, the mayor's party walked through the tents where prize cattle were on show.
    "Can you milk a cow, Eldon?" Jack Gullighy asked casually.
    "Of course I can. I'm a farm boy from Minnesota, remember?"
    "Bet you can't."
    "Dammit, I'll prove it."
    It was late afternoon and the cows' udders were full. Jack, to call his friend's bluff, told a young farmer watching the visiting celebrity pass that the mayor wanted to milk a cow. Magically a stool and a pail materialized and Jack pointed to the docile Holstein in front of them.
    "Watch now. I'll show you!" Eldon said. He sat down on the stool and, to the wonderment of the crowd, began stroking the cow's teats and, mirabile dictu, produced milk.
    This unusual event did not go unrecorded. A photographer snapped a beautiful shot of the mayor, hard at work but smiling. The photo even showed the milk dribbling into the pail.
    "See?" Eldon said to Jack, getting up. "Some things you never forget."
    The rest of the trip was uneventful. Describing it to Edna, he somehow forgot to mention his prowess in dairy land. So the next morning she let out a shriek from the dining room that Eldon could hear upstairs while he was shaving. He rushed down, half dressed, to see what had set her off.
    There, in living color on the front page of
The Times,
was the picture of Eldon, seated at the side of the cow, who was apparently named Florence. The same picture even made
The Post-News,
though on an inside page. The City Hall clipping service later found out that the picture had appeared in papers across the country, and the following Monday it was on the "People" page of
Time.
    The Times
ran a somewhat facetious editorial but concluded that "Mayor Hoagland, with this one gesture, probably did more to humanize the face of the city to upstaters than any local politician in memory."
The Post-News
called it "grandstanding" and wondered how Eldon had been able to "spare a day away from his duties for this publicity junket."
    The mayor's e-mail about the picture was heavy. City dwellers loved it—"You sure showed those