A State of Excelsior

The relationship between New York City and New York State has always been full of rancor and jealousy. The city drives the state, and those due north don't like it. New York City is like the stem of an atom bomb and the rest of the state is the mushroom cloud hovering over it. Without the bomb, the cloud simply wouldn't exist. It would just be a forgotten extension of Pennsylvania and Vermont.

But you'd never guess this from looking at the New York State budget and the state's various mascots. The upstate minority gets most of both. Do you know what New York State's beverage is? With all the German, Irish and Latinos that have called this state home, you'd guess beer. But our state beverage is milk.

The state tree? Sugar maple-another bow to the upstate crowd. This is not New England, for God's sake. We are not out in the spring tapping trees for some dribble of syrup. We buy our syrup in a bottle, full of corn syrup and ready to pour. Our state tree should be the London plane. NYC's Park Department uses the leaf of the London Plane as its symbol, those huge trees with the peeling bark that are legion throughout the city. Hardy buggers, those London planes. Able to withstand smog and car crashes. Survivors. And, like the city, slighted by state lawmakers.

The state fish is the brook or speckled trout. If you count the numbers, more blues and sea bass are caught in our waters than any trout. As a nod to the downstate fishing crowd, the state shell is bay scallops, but they only gave us that because there are no shellfish upstate.

As for flora, the state fruit is apples. I guess that's about right. Given that most of our prisons are upstate and the correction officers who work those prisons are referred to as "apple knockers," we can live with apple as our state fruit. Apples are so prevalent in New York that our state muffin-yes, we have a state muffin-is the apple muffin. Roses are our state flower. That too is fine.

But then you get to the fauna. The state animal is a beaver. It should be a dog. How about the brown rat? I have lived here my whole life and have been in every county of this state, but the only beaver I have ever seen was in Pennsylvania. The state insect is a ladybug. If you go by the insect census, it would have to be the cockroach. What bug do you think of when you think New York? La cucharacha.

The state fossil, Eurypterus Remipes, is also wrong. Everyone knows that 85-year-old Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau is our true state fossil.

-C.J.Sullivan