Farewell

It is with a heavy heart that after living here for 40 years, my husband and I must bid Maryland farewell. We can no longer afford to support fiscal and social programs with which we do not agree. We moved here in 1973, bought a home we could afford, sent our children to Maryland public schools, worked for Maryland companies, paid our share of property and income taxes, and lived within our means. And now that we have retired, the state of Maryland feels it is entitled to increase the tax burden on our hard-earned retirement income.

CLAUDIA COFFEY hadn't slept for a whole week. She tied a white handkerchief to her wrist to dab the tears."This is really heartbreaking," she said as she checked coats for people at the Pimlico Restaurant, which closed last night after more than 40 years.Regular eaters know her as the living legend who created one of Pimlico's favorite dishes, the Coffey Salad. It's ''a Pimlico exclusive created by our own Claudia Coffey,'' said the menu. "A garden-fresh medley of lettuce, tomato and onion accented with anchovies, hard-boiled egg, garlic and freshly grated imported Parmesan."

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Baltimoreans were saddened to learn this week of the death of Blythe, the female peregrine falcon who since 1985 had nested with her mate Beauregard on a 33rd-floor ledge of the USF&G Building in downtown Baltimore. A maintenance worker discovered her body on the roof of a building half a mile away during a routine roof inspection. The apparent cause of death was injury and starvation.Blythe raised more than two dozen chicks in her downtown aerie, helping to replenish the nation's depleted falcon population of which there are fewer than 100 nesting pairs east of the Mississippi River.

For all her combative hardheadedness, in the end Margaret Thatcher left with all the grace, style and wit that characterized her 11 1/2 years in office -- the longest tenure of any British prime minister of this century.She came to power in 1979, at a time when Great Britain seemed to be faltering, and became a sort of national nanny, a super-Mary Poppins, so to speak, who disciplined her children -- firmly but with love. The problem was, her children grew up and began to disobey her -- with love but firmly.

A few years ago there was a popular TV series called "The Lou Grant Show," in which Ed Asner played an old-fashioned managing editor of a big city daily newspaper. The program glamorized the newspaper business -- gathering the news involves mainly the grunt work of dialing the phone and pounding the pavement -- but the character portrayed by Asner was genuine: cranky, impatient, tough-minded, skeptical if not cynical, but ultimately a compassionate and revered father-figure all his staff.

IN NEW YORK we rode in a taxi whose driver was allergic to smoke. It brought back old times when it was almost impossible to find in all New York a cab driver who was not allergic to smoke. An allergy to smoke seemed to be the main requirement for anyone seeking work in the taxi trade.Ignorance of English didn't seem to matter so long as you could pass the allergy requirement. This produced eerie but smoke-free cab adventures in exotic languages.Once we hailed a cab in midtown to go to SoHo.

According to a recently released poll, 32 percent of Americans are crazy. At least, that's how I read the data. What the poll, conducted by Associated Press-GfK Roper Public Affairs and Media, found is that an astonishing 32 percent of those surveyed are confident that they are secure in their jobs. How can anyone today feel safe? Many industries - automobile manufacturing, media, the retail sector, financial services and construction, to name a few - are in free-fall. And now even technology giants such as National Semiconductor and Dell have begun laying people off. So has Microsoft, which recently announced the first major layoff in the company's history.