Well, now it is officially 40 years since the move from Beacon, New York (50 miles south of here) to Tivoli. Clay Hill Road was a dirt road then. For that reason, the school bus would not come down it, so Maria, who was in Kindergarten, was escorted to the end of the road at 9G with our neighbors Tony Staffiero and Michael Barrett, who were a few years older. Within the next two years the road was paved, but the school now thought it too windy for the bus to come down so the kids still had to wait at the corner with no protection in bad weather and no supervision. Two things happened that made both Mrs. Barrett and myself avid letter writers to the school, demanding the bus to travel Clay Hill and pick up the children at their homes as was done on all the other streets in Tivoli. At this time I had Maria and Laura and Jan Barrett had Lisa and Michael and along with Tony, they all waited at the 9G intersection. With such a group boringly waiting for the bus, things were bound to happen. First, we heard about lunches being thrown into the road for the passing cars to run over. Apparently, a banana was missed and one of the kids was almost run over running out to retrieve it for another throw. Then, on a cold, frigid day, Lisa was urged to put her tongue on the Clay Hill Road sign (just like in Christmas Story) only she ripped it off when she found her tongue stuck and the bus arrived. The little trouper got on the bus, but the school nurse called her home to report her swollen and sore tongue. Now we had safety issues as our main letter writing concern. Either the letters worked or some morning commuter called the school about kids throwing bananas at cars, anyway the school decided the bus could make the detour onto Clay Hill Road and it still does today. My grandson Solomon lives next door and every morning I go and wait with his mother and brother Henry to put Solomon on the bus. The kids still look the same as they did 40 years ago, staring vacantly out the windows, sometimes raising a hand to wave or just giving us disgusted looks as the bus pulls away. I could tell them it's my fault the bus has to come down Clay Hill Road, but I don't think they'd care.

Well, today is the last day for people at the B&B until 2008. For the last two years, we have been closing after Thanksgiving. It used to be too hard to keep the steps and driveway shoveled when it snowed or when there was ice. We used to close after New Year's and reopen in March but now do it earlier. I'm just glad it's over for awhile....4 people for the Holiday, visiting family in Tivoli. 4 people, 3 beds (they used the pull out couch), sheets, towels, tablecloths and napkins - I'm on my third load of wash right now. I hang out the sheets. It is something I enjoy doing, and it really makes a difference. Some people think its "low class" to have clothes hanging in their yard. It used to be everyone hung out their clothes. When I was first married, I lived in a four-family apartment building. I did wash almost everyday but Monday's was especially a wash day, and it was a race to hear who's line was being pushed out first. You could tell who had a baby, when a line was filled with diapers, or who had the flu, when you saw sheets, blankets, etc hanging out on a cold wintry day. Now, it is only myself and Mrs. Lemon that hang out clothes on Clay Hill Road. Mr. Lemon died a few years ago, and after the funeral when I saw her wash blowing in the wind, I felt relieved, like she was going to be all right. There's an art to hanging out clothes, you don't do it haphazardly. Washcloths all line up together, and socks like to be hung with their match. Sheets and pillow cases stick together, just as shirts and pants do. White clothes one line, dark clothes the next. For years I didn't have a dryer, so in the winter, when it started getting dark, I would bring in the clothes, some still stiff and frozen. The pants and shirts looked like people, legs sticking out, arms in strange positions. I would put them on the heater to dry, and soon the house was filled with (what I still think) is the wonderful smell of clean laundry. In Ireland, everyone hangs out clothes....I even saw clothes hanging on hedges, a sight that made me smile. One time in Ireland, my friend Chrissy and I stopped at a B&B. The daughters in the house asked if they could do our laundry, and we were delighted to say yes. We went out to a pub, laughing thinking about the girls wanting to see what kind of clothes we had from America, and after a few pints went back to our B&B. But, we couldn't find it, we had neglected to take one of their business cards, and every other house in Ireland has a B&B sign in front of it. We drove from street to street, starting to worry that this could be serious, when I said, "Hey Chrissy, aren't they your white pants? And there's my IBM shirt". Sure enough, there in the yard, drying in the Irish breeze were our clothes and our B&B. Our laundry saved us that day. Well, anyway, today I am rejoicing that there won't be B&B laundry for a while, no making sure we have all 3 types of bread and English muffins available, that the milk and yogurt have "good" dates, etc. School is out...let the summer vacation begin.

In the 1970's and 80's two things happened that helped start Tivoli back on the road to recovery. One was the purchase of Callendar House, an old Livingston Estate in Tivoli, by Count Jean de Castella. He started a horse breeding farm and bought several of the Tivoli homes for rentals which he offered to his employees. He employed several of the Villagers to work on his farm, including my daughter Laura who "sat up" at night with the pregnant mares when it was near their time to deliver and my son Paul, who cleaned the stalls and checked the fields for animal holes. The horses, especially the unborn horses, would be worth a fortune so they didn't want any broken legs from the woodchuck holes. He hired an Irishman, John Quaid, who had worked on a horse farm in Ireland to oversee the place and soon horse trailers were coming to Tivoli for the services of Count Castella's famous stud horse on a regular basis. The other occurence was the opening of a Mexican restaurant. David Weiss, a former Bard Student, opened the Santa Fe in half of Dino's old store on Broadway. It was tiny, just eight small tables, but right away became a favorite spot. Within a few years, David bought the building and enlarged the restaurant. Like the Count, David also began to purchase property in Tivoli, including the Laundromat, located across the street from the Santa Fe. Previously, just called Tivoli Corner Laundromat, it was a hangout for the local kids, some who would pay an adventurous person a quarter to get into a dryer and go around a few times. The building was given a coat of paint and renamed "the Lost Sock Lauderette". Santa Fe Restaurant is still going strong these days, popular as ever. The horse farm, however, is gone, replaced by Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, a facility used for students in the summer. Some of our guests at the Bird's Nest have been here to see their children dance. This year Griffin Dunne of the New York Times called Tivoli, "Brooklyn on the Hudson" and wrote "the local crowd has an effortlessly hip and creative edge about it, as if it fled Brooklyn before the rest of us ruined it...the women all look like Dylans' girlfriends from his early album covers.." I guess he didn't see me, gray haired, wearing sweat pants and sneakers, going in to the Post Office to buy stamps.

How do you start a B&B? Good question. Pretty basic I thought, Bed and Breakfast - an idea I had had for some time for the apartment over the garage. In the summer of 1991 I took early retirement from Kingston IBM and also evicted terrible tenants from the apartment, so the timing seemed perfect. Now for a little research. There were several B&B's in Rhinebeck at the time. My friend Chrissy and I thought we'd visit three of them right in the Village, and take a look around. We didn't think we should announce what we were doing, so instead, we would tell the owners that Chrissy's daughter was getting married and we were looking for places for the guests to stay. I've known Chrissy since 1981 when both us attended a Financial Aid Workshop at Well's College. At that time I was working for Bard College and she was working at Marist. Back then I only had one grandson, Jeremy, who was one and he called me Loggy Linds. Originally, his two grandmothers were Grams (not me, the other one) and Groggy (me). That evolved to Loggy Linds, a name that only Chrissy still uses for me. Anyway, we set off on our adventure. The three B&B' s were pretty much the same. The single rooms, some with private baths, were all upstairs, with a sitting room downstairs for the guests to use. The homes were beautiful, one very ornate, with heavy draperies on the window, flowered wallpaper and a four poster bed. The bathrooms showed the age of the houses, claw foot tubs, one tub sitting right in the middle of the bathroom. "Loggy," Chrissy whispered to me. "This is nothing like your place." She was right. I didn't have a traditional B&B. I had an apartment. We went to Foster's for lunch to think about this. "I'd rather stay at your place then one of those fussy rooms," Chrissy said. And I believed her. I would too. I had two bedrooms, large living room, kitchen with full size stove and refrigerator, modern bath with a tub and shower. And it was private. Nobody else would be watching tv with you or sharing the bathroom shelf. "Can I call it a B&B?", I asked Chrissy. "Why not! Once they know they're getting a whole apartment to themselves, they won't care. Do you think they would rather have a place to themselves or those awful drapes on the windows?" She was right. So what if it didn't fit Rhinebeck's version of a B&B. Research successfully completed, we agreed.

Now a little about Tivoli. I moved to Tivoli 40 years ago this month..the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1967. Then there were 3 children, Maria 5, Laura 3 and Paul 2. We chose Tivoli for its beauty, but mostly for the Red Hook School system, which even 40 years ago had a great reputation. The house was a small one, open porch, big kitchen, living room that had completely covered walls and ceiling with knotty pine paneling, bath downstairs and 3 bedrooms upstairs, one so small only a child's bed would fit. Uncle Phil came to the house before we bought it to give us a carpenter's view of its condition. He told us not to buy, even though it was quite a bargain at $10,000. The bank, likewise, refused a mortgage on the unsafe condition of the house. We were not discouraged by this news, in fact the price went down to $8,500 and another bank gave us the ok. So 40 years ago we bought a house for less than you can buy a car or even some lawnmowers today. The yard was a little more than half an acre and we had four apple trees, two on each side of the house.
Tivoli was almost a ghost town at that time. Stores were boarded up, the population had dropped to less than 700 since the train station had closed and the ferry from Saugerties stopped. You had to go Red Hook for a pizza and Kingston for Chinese food. It took a while to get use to the isolation. There was a store in Tivoli, Dino's at the intersection of the entrance to Broadway. Broadway is the main street in Tivoli, running from 9G to a dead end at the Hudson River. Dino's was half grocery and half liquor store. Divided in the middle, if you wanted a bottle of wine, Dino would get the key off the wall, put on his jacket (you had to go back outside) and unlock the door on the other side of the building. Across the street from Dino's was Bailey's, a beautiful old hotel, unused now except for the bar downstairs. Mr. Bailey was a handsome Irishman, tall with white, white hair. He made a Bloody Mary that people still talk about - tall glass topped with stalks of celery, piece of tomato and maybe even a black olive. His fruit drink was also noteworthy. So, I got used to living in our new home, and enjoyed the excitement of exploration and discovery of all the new places and the sense of the community of the Village .
The locals called us "the new people" and it probably took almost all of the last 40 years to lose that title.

This is my first posting. The reason I wanted a blog was to share some of the experiences of running a B&B for the last 14 years and also relating what living in the Village of Tivoli for the last 40 years has meant to me. The B&B is actually an apartment over the garage, with two bedrooms, full bath, kitchen, living room and a large deck that overlooks the gardens. We are located about five minutes from Bard College, so we get a lot of parents and students visiting the school, New York City residents on a weekend away and Tivoli families who have their relatives stay with us. I thought of a slogan "we put your family up when you won't" but you have to be careful of the guests' feelings. I don't call them guests, I call them "people". I will warn my grandchildren if they are getting too noisy. "Be quiet - there's people upstairs" or I will tell Timmy ,"The people will be here about six. " Timmy is my partner in this undertaking. He has been my companion for the last 21 years and he as Chef Tim cooks the omelettes and makes the fuit plates and carries the enormous tray up the stairs to the Bird's Nest. He also likes to clean the kitchen, especially the sink so there is not one water drop to be seen. When we first started the B&B, I was told by a Poughkeepsie B&B owner, "You have to be nuts to be in this business." At the time, I thought he was referring to having complete strangers stay in your house. But after all these years, I know there is more to it than that. My Uncle Joe who is 88 will look at my brother, sisters and myself and knowingly say, "You know, there is insanity in our family." So I guess that's why we've lasted 14 years....most B&B owners call it quits after 5 years.