I remember President Reagan pointing out the proximity of San Salvador to Houston, closer he pointed out to a geography-phobic nation, than Houston is to DC, and thus he started on a ruinous war to destroy Sandinistas in Nicaragua supplying guerrillas in El Salvador, on the grounds that soon they might be knocking on our own southern border. It was a continuation of the "Domino Theory" of the projected march of communism across south east Asia. Everywhere one looked godless communists were on the march toppling states like dominoes, in Africa, Vietnam and in the US's own backyard on the Central American isthmus. The domino theory came to naught as godless communism was unable to sustain itself economically and the whole thing imploded taking the domino theory with it.
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It seems the domino theory is back and this time we find our economy toppling like a series of dominoes. We've seen the shifty unregulated investment bankers take a dive and become nationalised industries. Their collapse has led us to discover that main street banks, the places where you and I fiddle with modest sums of money, are taking a dive. Citi had fifty nine dollars of debt piled onto each one dollar in deposits, by the most conservative public estimates. Bank of America shows publicly around 38 to one in the same visible ratio. And now it seems B of A which bought Countrywide's mortgage mess may be the next to go. Auto makers are holding on, still waiting for more public money that taxpayers seem to resent paying more and more.
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Meanwhile there is another domino drifting along under the radar with scary implications. It used to be that if you wanted to rent a "Capesize" cargo ship (too large for the Panama Canal and thus required to steam round Cape Horn) you paid almost a quarter million dollars a day! Nowadays the quoted price is less than three thousand dollars day. Not only is trade drying up but bankers aren't releasing letters of credit to pay up front for the cargoes being transported, so ships can't sail without the money to back them. If you are wondering how your modest life is affected by shipping letters of credit you might want to check the labels on everything you buy or own and wonder how it got into your hands.
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A British newspaper has published a commentary on a report for CitiFX, a think tank hired by the bank. In observing the economic crisis and proposals for recovery, the report suggests that chaos might break out in many nations of the world if recovery efforts fail. It doesn't take some wild eyed survivalist in Montana clutching a gun in a redoubt or an Al Quaeda agent taking hostages in an Indian hotel to make that prediction. Now we have a western banker predicting dominoes falling around the globe as a possible outcome of this crisis. The Gold Anti Trust Action Committee has the report logged November 27th quoting an article in the London Daily Telegraph newspaper.
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The article suggests things will go one of two ways. Either recovery efforts will work at vast public expense triggering spectacular levels of inflation as the world economy gets back on track. Or, a less likely scenario but one that appears much more scary, the dominoes will continue to fall in a growing spiral of no confidence. In this possibility the dominoes trip and fall until "unrest" breaks out and governments tumble, Iceland and Thailand come to mind already. Then of course we reach the domino that tumbles in a country that has nuclear weapons. Pakistan, wedged between Afghanistan and India is at the top of that particular list. Pakistan is a good deal further away than Nicaragua, but what does that really mean in a world brought together in expansion, as in collapse, by the scourge of globalisation?
On the north side the front portico still looks the same as it did in the postcard, but the passage of time has given some trees a chance to sprout:
The passage of time may explain the apparent passive aggressive nature of the handicapped parking space. Give it enough time and the tree won't leave enough space even for a bicycle to park:
The Harris School started out in life as the equivalent of a high school I believe and ended it's educational career as an elementary school in 1980. Late enough to make mention of skateboarding which was quite popular back then as I recall.
The school building used to be surrounded by other cement structures of a 1950's or 60's style and they included the MARC house an acronym that has a rather dated flavor to it: Monroe Association for Retarded Citizens. They used to have splendid plant sales in back and I recall cycling Carstens Lane in the rear of the property and seeing rows of plants filling the back of the building. These days the land around the Harris School has been razed:
Somewhere over in the right side of the photograph there was also a culinary school and we used to get cheap high quality meals there, as guinea pigs for the high school chefs. It was a loss when they closed, and then there was the promise that the culinary school might re-open in the Harris building. That clearly didn't happen:
There were plans aired to hand the building over to a foundation for use as an "artist's colony" in the heart of the city but negotiations seemed to fall apart between Rodel and the school district. So the building languishes and sits there as sturdy as ever:
The walls look like they're made of stone are actually a kind of stippled cement. I've seen similar at the school district's facilities building on United Street. But for all it's solid Victorian air Harris School is sad and abandoned:
When negotiations were at their height a couple of years ago people standing on the sidelines expressed incredulous horror at the thought of the school being knocked down, as it needs huge amounts of work to be brought up to code and made usable. With the economy wobbling the way it is right now I wonder what possible use they can find for the pile. 
Modern libraries are so much more than simply book depositories it's hard to know how librarians manage their roles in society. The library in Key West, as it is so many towns is a refuge for people with no place to go, and as such it has become a sort of drop-in center for the dispossessed. It has computers to give everyone a chance to glean what they need from the Web:
The library is still mostly about books and reading, so we of course enjoy lots of heavily loaded shelves along with perhaps a seasonal theme:
But we have electronics to feed as well and the library is good place to stop by for a DVD, or if you are old fashioned they still have some video tapes:
They cater to youngsters and offer a room for their use, next to the meeting room at that end of the building which offers a space for lectures and movies and the like:
Despite the modern demand for electronic gadgetry the library holds firm on the no cell phone rule, pushing patrons out into the cold if they have to yell into the box in public:
The city-county library system in Monroe County has the usual problem facing public services in a county that is a hundred miles long and a mile wide in that there have to be lots of branches up and down the islands. I have used the Marathon, Big Pine and Key West libraries as well as the library at the Florida Keys Community College and found them all to be excellent refuges. And despite the usual lack of funds for a service that could improve the community immeasurably they do well with what they have.
I guess it is helpful for me that I work nights in that the hours do tend to serve the unemployed but library closings seem inevitable in our newly impoverished world.
In a city filled with retirees in winter the library is a hive of reading activities:
Some of my younger colleagues look at me in horror when I talk about books. "I don't read!" Belen announced proudly. So I looked at her and said: "The only difference between you and a dog is that the dog can't read!" which isn't original but she was annoyed enough to bring a book to work, on the Holocaust of all things. Illiteracy is something that is still often considered shameful but there's enough of it around that there are ads for volunteer reading coaches posted at the library bulletin board.
The library has always been a mark of civilization in a community and the fact that Key West's goes back in various guises at this location to the 19th century is a reminder that this was once Florida's biggest city. It seems odd nowadays to imagine that little Key West was the most salubrious town in a state plagued by heat, humidity, insects and illness. Key West was on the main shipping routes from the Gulf of Mexico and there was money to spare for a little culture in the town.
When I lived on the margins in Key West getting a library card was the ticket to comfortable living afloat. A library card offered free entertainment in a town that lacked NPR on the radio and that lost its free TV with the departure of the translator antennae up and down the Keys. I presented my card one day to withdraw a book and the librarian checked the address as they do. "700 Sailboat Lane?" I nodded holding my breath. " Hmm," she said looking dubious. "This sounds like a Cheryl live aboard special." I nodded acknowledging my address as the approximate location of the sailing club on Garrison Bight. I owed Cheryl a lot for her help and now she's died I can confess she weaseled me a library card at a most opportune time. She made the library a shore base for a lot of transient sailor and I think of her every time I visit.
The library is a handy place to park but overstaying one's welcome isn't a good idea. Its a county facility and there is usually a County Deputy hanging around ready to get scofflaws towed. On the other hand there is a rather decent little pocket garden next to the library which is a good place to hang when you do find somewhere to park:
The homeless population certainly seems to have shrunk this year. The garden was almost unoccupied much to my surprise:
How old fashioned.Not an electron in sight. We cannot however leave the library and this inadequate tour without a reminder that this is Key West, land of the million signs:
The notion that coughs and sneezes spread diseases seems rather quaint sixty years after the end of World War Two and it's public service announcements ("Careless Talk Costs Lives"). Someone at some point thought chickens were a public health threat and put up a sign to that effect. There are people who think chickens are a threat. Some controversies never die and happily the library will be there to keep us informed.
And i exemplifies the prettiness Key West is unique for in cities across North America. the fact is, its hard sometimes to remember that not everywhere is like this, narrow impractical and varied. The details make the lane worth noting: 
The contrasts are vivid. On one side of the lane there is this brand new development, of several units inside the refurbished building. My wife dragged me in for a quick look during an open house last year. Boy, were we shocked when the agent revealed an asking price of one and a half million US dollars. They appear to be sold, too:
And directly opposite we have this, on a more human scale altogether:
Johnson Lane continues the contrasting themes as it goes. Trim little Conch cottages:
And not one but two outdoor toilets awaiting removal. I figured apicture of one would be sufficient to make the point:
Houses awaiting the loving touch:
Parked next to renovations exhibiting all the refinements money can buy: off street parking...
...and carefully masked protuberances so vital to comfortable living but so visible in a crass way, normally. Not here:
Older key West:
And older Key West with a lick of pastel paint:
Off street parking is always valuable as you can tell from the narrow confines of a street like this. But what price an elderly tree like this?
I am quite fond of Thanksgiving in the pantheon of national holidays that have been taken over by mass marketing. Canadians take their new world holiday a month earlier than the US does and fair enough as they are probably a season ahead of us anyway by October. And this year it seems winter has come early and with a vengeance, so it seems right and proper to remind ourselves that Canada may have a national health system but does suffer from crappy weather.
No, I didn't take this picture on the shores of the Great Slave Lake last Monday. I was actually lurking around Higgs Beach giving thanks that the coldest part of the latest cold spell may have passed and we appear to be on the mend, with sunshine making the days bearable even though nights are still plunging below 70 degrees. Higgs Beach is home to the toasting tourist this time of year and even though it is firmly in the city of Key West it is run by Monroe County, and very strict they are too:
Well, they used to be very strict in the days when Monroe County Sheriff's Deputies were stationed here and patrolled this tiny county enclave on all terrain vehicles. Budget cuts killed them off, though the county does provide numerous deputies for Ocean Reef Club, an inaccessible millionaire's haven at the northern tip of the county. It's on Card Sound Road, surrounded by gates and private security guards in addition to a squad of deputies exclusively assigned to the inmates protection at taxpayer expense. More public support for private jet travellers. The problem at Higgs Beach is that the place has deteriorated somewhat with the arrival of the permanently unemployed who take over the barbecue shelters at the beach: 
It ends up being an encampment day after day of people with nothing to do and nowhere to go and so they spread their belongings out and call it home edging out any non belongers from this end of the beach:
It's not surprising really considering the amenities provided for beach goers, which include fresh water showers and restrooms. Besides which it's not illegal to be scruffy on the beach:
But this does have the unfortunate side effect of giving diners at the Salute restaurant a ringside view of the daily ablutions and dramas of the permanent residents:
The restaurant, Italian themed and tropical garish in decor...
...is going through a new ownership turmoil as the owners of Blue Heaven may be trying to give it a go. In addition to the restaurant and restrooms there's a volleyball net, pictured here with the resident frisbee artist seen around town in his very natty attire: 
A bandstand, which gives a deliciously old fashioned flavor to the beach but it would be too much I expect to ever hope to see the Marathon Band show up and give a deck chair concert on what is currently nothing more than a source of shade:
Further along towards the pier there is the Garden Club ensconced in the dilapidated West Martello Tower. There is another 19th century fortress towards the airport which houses a museum and has a proper roof that offers views across the water. This tower is more tumbled down as the artillerymen of 19th century Fort Zachary used to use it for target practice: 
And speaking of history, the African Cemetery has finally been inaugurated at the beach, a stark and simple monument to an earlier unexpected landing in the city:
It happened in 1860 that the US Navy intercepted a slave trader and about 1250 slaves came ashore in Key West. The Federal government promptly forgot about them and the city came together to try to keep them alive while a plan was developed for their future. They say 254 ex-slaves died, saved from the misery of the ship too late to live, but a thousand survivors were eventually shipped back to Africa and settled in Liberia which may not have been their starting point but was better than their planned destination. 
It's ironic they couldn't have settled where they landed, in the home of the free, but things on the slavery front were going through some turmoil at the time and it seems freedom was only available elsewhere. The refugee's perpetual story. All this history and much much more is on offer on the Conch Train which rattles through Higgs Beach as part of it's endless loop tours:
For most people Higgs beach is a place to come and do what one does on a beach. As I am not much of a fan of lying around getting sand into awkward parts of the body I have to take my cue from what I see:
And these people paid for the privilege of sitting comfortably on the sand by renting their accommodations:
I took the next picture to illustrate one reason why I dislike hanging around on beaches: that it's impossible to read a book in any kind of comfort. It was only after I downloaded the image I realised it might have been more illegal than just reading a book:
I had a debate with an eagle-eyed detective as to whether in fact s/he was topless but Darnell was as unsure as I was (he leaned towards "it" being a he) and he is paid to be a good deducer. His colleague Lee insists its a woman and he says he's a professional interpreter of the female form. So the jury remains out and you can decide for yourself, if you care. The point is, lying on your back and holding a book over your head is a pain. Sorry, but it is, topless or no!
And less so, though doubtless much more fashionable. It must be a fad because it looks so gruesomely uncomfortable:
No dogs allowed on the beach of course, which always used to annoy me because it implies, not without justification, that dog owners are slack about picking up after their pets. 
However there is a dog park across the street just waiting for a future essay I'm sure. And for those that want sun and sea air without the sand, a long walk off a short pier is available also:
I read a a comment on one of my recent posts remarking how full up the tourist bookings are in the Keys and I hope it stays that way. Cheap gas has to be good for something. and getting to enjoy weather like this at the start of what promises to be a long cold winter is certainly something to be thankful for. Unless you are one of those weirdos who likes snow flakes and ski runs and visible breath. It takes all kinds.
The Meadows got its name apparently from some developer who decided to expand the city out in this direction and started throwing up houses and gave them a cute suburban name. Some people like it enough their cars take on a gray insubstantial forms on the street from long bouts of inactivity. This is a bicycling neighborhood:
The Meadows is where people gather on the street and chat like old fashioned neighbors are supposed to do:
These streets have their own form of neighborhood watch:
The homes come in shades and shapes that one has come to expect in Key West:
I can't miss out on the opportunity to find another pink building, offset in this case by a bottle green door, no less. Very bold, very effective:
And if pink houses don't do it for you, The Meadows is where you can find pink bushes. This spot looked very well organized, my idea of a New England village gardening contest. Where's Angela Lansbury?
Someone took the time to trim the shrub and paint the picket fence and everything. In this next one they did a Class A over-size trim job on the tree that used to live here.Now it just looks like a class A Hawaiian lava flow:
Young love in the Meadows, all you need is a pair of skateboards and a full heart:
A Key West garage:
A lonely scooter on a side street, possibly Florida Street if I remember correctly. The Meadows is the area within Truman, Eisenhower, Palm and White: 
There is Art on the streets too. Captain Outrageous used to make artworks that were in general use, back when he was alive. Now that he's dead and no longer producing Art, his irreverent take on daily objects seems to be reserved for display, not use:
Granted this isn't your typical art gallery, hanging as it does from a palm tree...
It doesn't take much to find Art in Nature either:
But it's time for the sun to set on the beauty of The Meadows and Newton Street and because it's winter time that means it's getting close to six pm:
Which means start of the working day for me. Time to find the Bonneville and buzz three blocks over to the Police Station for another exciting night of sitting up and not thinking about my bed.
I've been looking forward to Winter for a while. Not because I like the cold or anything like that, but because the winter months offer different entertainment than summer. This is the time of year that rains dry up and the back country dries out. Which in turn opens up trails through the mangroves well off the asphalt:
I'd had my eye on Stewart Road on Little Torch Key since I'd discovered it last summer while out riding my bicycle. With the advent of winter and endless days of bright sunshine and cold winds I thought it was time, so I pedalled back out there.
Stewart Road is not very big and has four or five homes along its length, each house set back and surrounded by shrubbery for maximum privacy. Mind you they are a long way out at the end of the road on Little Torch in the first place. It takes a certain commitment to get this far out from Highway One...in the land of dead end streets:
But even out here the county organizes trash pick up, and it seems some people have lots of it:
In some ways I find these rural outposts bucolic and desirable,but then again I'm not sure how well I'd do this isolated, as I rather like living upwind of the highway (no traffic noise in an east wind) yet not so far it's a trek to find a packet of milk or a gallon of gas. However the Keys, contrary to expectations, do offer isolation for those that need it.
My idea was to park the bicycle and take a stroll but I'd forgotten to bring a lock. So I stood there dicking around wondering what to do. It seemed absurd to be worried about someone stealing my bicycle in the abomination of desolation but on the other hand...
When I was out sailing I developed a way of weighing the odds on a particular line of action and it went like this. What's the worst thing that could happen? Generally I'd be trying to figure out if it was worth taking off into potentially bad weather, or if I left the dinghy on the beach while I went inland what might happen? In this case I asked myself what if I left my bicycle here and it was taken. Granted there was almost zero chance it would get stolen...but how would I feel if the unthinkable occurred? Clearly I wasn't going to be happy so I decided to ride the bike down the trail and out of sight before ditching it in a convenient bush.
However the trail, which started out bushy and overgrown...
Opened up and became a freeway through the shrubbery... 
...so instead of ditching the bike I kept riding...
...until I simply ran out of trail...
And as there was no way to go further forward, on two wheels or on foot, unless I was ready to hack out a fresh trail through the mangroves, I stopped, listened to the wind and watched the wind waves on the water in the distance.Then I turned around and started back across the wilderness.
I wasn't completely alone...
But there were no bicycles thieves in sight so I expect I could have abandoned my ride in the bushes...
The drag was that the trail itself was probably less than a mile long and by bicycle it took no time at all to get out to the end. The good news was I had a few miles to ride home and despite the lack of gradients and variety in the view I always seem to enjoy myself in the back country pedalling the main roads.
I wonder when I will get bored with buttonwoods and mangroves and empty open spaces?
I had written in a previous essay, last April 17, about that part of the Bight that the city leases to businesses and I had thought it time, now the weather is cooler to take a look at the other half of the waterfront. It was a pleasant walk on a sunny afternoon to mingle with all the foreign tourists ambling along the boardwalk:
It was cold by local standards with a fresh north wind bringing the temperature well below 70 degrees (21C), as part of the week long series of cold fronts sweeping across Florida. Yet there seemed to be at least some visitors that were keen to take trips out on the water:
It was still cool and crisp enough for people to forgo what I call the Key West uniform of t-shirt and tan cargo shorts in favor of Arctic wear. I wonder where he found this bulky coat?
Schooner Wharf had wind protection up on the side of the bar facing the water and the north wind:
Conch Republic seafood did the same thing, with solid window panes.The last time my wife and I ate here it was raining cats and dogs before Hurricane Ike passed by and they half closed the windows then:
It was an absolutely glorious day to be out and about and near the water. I'm not that keen on eating cold winds actually non the water these days, I did too much of that in my past life. But this sort of view does me no harm at all:
The Key West Citizen ran a story a couple of Sundays ago about the lack of boats in berths up and down the Keys. Apparently the changing fortunes of our economy have reversed a trend that looked to be making a rich man's bauble out of boat slips in the islands. Nowadays it seems marina managers are worrying about how to fill the space available. Slips were available, the newspaper reported, even during Fantasy Fest, traditionally the week of no availability nowhere on the waterfront. I noticed a few empty spaces at the Galleon Resort docks:
The Galleon itself was looking splendid in the sunlight, towering over the harbor as a living reminder of why finally the city enacted a height ordinance:
And across the harbor one could see on the horizon the bulk of the Steam Plant condos, the former electrical generating plant now developed into three million dollar condos.
And even though it was cold, life has to go on for those that work on the water. I have many more unhappy memories of freezing in winter (so to speak) than boiling in summer when I used to work as a boat captain. Fiber glassing is probably as good a job as any in the cool of winter:
One has to expect that Lazy Way Lane, a one way street to the surprise of tourist pedestrians not expecting to meet a Triumph Bonneville along it's length, is worth preserving and promoting:
Handling a cold water hose in that weather needs dedication, in my opinion. By the time I walked back to the Bonneville at Schooner Wharf the sun was warming things up a bit and the bar was open to the landward side, away from the breeze:
Warm enough for some to wear t-shirts. This is 
At the Village end the street splits into two one-way sections. The part that takes traffic into the Village looks like this:
However the street off to the left, Geraldine is a one way coming towards my Triumph. Thus a vehicle heading into the city from the waterfront is obliged to turn hard right onto Fort Street behind the dead palm tree behind my motorcycle. It's a tight turn too...
I don't think there's any reasonable way a large commercial truck can make the turn, and even a large pick up or SUV handled by an unskilled driver would stand a good chance of making a mess of it, not least because the white car is legally parked in a space in front of the cottage! My Bonneville in this picture is actually illegally parked on the sidewalk. It's a tight turn. This is the corner seen from Geraldine.
Geraldine itself dead ends into Emma Street but it is in fact a one way from Emma to Fort so in its current configuration it can't be used to get to the Waterfront. My Bonneville is pointing the wrong way in this picture:
The curious thing is that Petronia Street which is the access street currently designated to connect with the waterfront access road is almost equally narrow but is in fact a two way street:
Petronia Street used to dead end into Fort Street but now there is an opening in the playing field fence which allows traffic to make a sharp turn onto the new access road. Petronia Street is along the white picket fence behind my motorbike in this picture:
My Bonneville is parked on the bike/pedestrian path, and the "No Entry" signs are trying to tell traffic not to take Fort Street towards Geraldine. The corner onto the new road is also quite sharp, and incidentally the two cyclists are riding the wrong way:
This portion of the road is also pretty narrow and again I don't see it as much of a choice for large trucks. The Bonneville fit just fine though.
And here looking the opposite way at the entrance to the military base:
And here looking back at Bahama Village with the soccer field to the right:
I am neither planner nor engineer but I could see somewhat better ways to route traffic if that were the intent. Frankly though a rational traffic flow would require using straight streets through the village, say Petronia and Olivia and angling the access road across the playing field destroying it entirely, which no doubt would be viewed as a poor decision by the voters whose children play soccer there. In the end I guess Southard Street will always be the straightest way in and according to the agreement it will remain open most of the twenty four hours each day. In the middle of the night we will have to wiggle onto the access road after threading the narrow village streets if we are moved to visit the waterfront. 
Eating out is a certified sport in the Keys, second only to drinking and getting pie faced as a recognized activity. People talk about restaurants and hold strong opinions and don't hold back. Myself, I've learned not to be so opinionated, not least because it's easy to have a bad day in any local business. A chef who's lost his apartment, or who's boyfriend has kicked her out or who may just have a neck wringing hangover may not be in the best mood to cook. So I offer up two new restaurants with some trepidation. On the other hand they both, though very different offer similar recession busting menus.The first place has a peculiar name and an eye popping color scheme. Help Yourself is a command to the customers to do themselves a favor by eating right and not adding to the Styrofoam waste stream. I think that's what it means. 
It offers noodles wraps and a mix-and-match array of ingredients that makes my head spin so I went for the eight dollar Ecuadorian soup made of vegetables (turnip? Who cooks with turnips?) and quinoa a fashionable legume of some sort, pronounced kwin-wah, full of nutritious Aztec nutritiousness and little grainy balls that get wedged in your teeth. The soup was quite good actually though next time I'm coming with my own bottle of hot sauce to give its some zip. Of course I had my own reusable utensils:
The kitchen at Help Yourself has been in use as a restaurant for a long time and the past couple of most recent incarnations didn't survive for whatever reason. This one bursts with energy and industriousness so I'm hoping they make it:
There again I liked the Monsoon Cafe, eclectic Indian food, that was operated by an opinionated Englishman who wasn't very find of motorcycles, unlike this lot who have the bumper sticker displayed at the top of the essay. The tough times for this location come in the summer when it rains and it gets hot and sticky and people eating out do like a little air conditioning. This time of year the outdoor tables are excellent in the weak winter sun:
The restaurant's street address is 829 Fleming but I still think of this location next to the laundromat as being "across from Flaming Maggie's" which was the gay/lesbian bookstore across the street named after the intersection, more or less, and which was killed they said by the Internet:
The other al fresco dining establishment that has popped up recently is a bit further up the Keys in a location that suits me perfectly on my way home, but with a very different menu:
Mad Dawg'z took over a defunct garden center at Mile Marker 21.5 on Cudjoe Key and turned it into a garden restaurant:
It's a brilliantly simple idea really, stick a trailer in the garden center, make the place look nice and sell excellent barbecue:
We took our half rack of pork ribs with two sides to go for $12 and my wife split the food onto two plates as there was plenty for both of us. This was my share (I took the picture at home. I don't carry my own Deruta pottery around for meals to go):
Barbecue is another of those touchy subjects that everyone has an opinion on, and I have enough experience of this as my wife's family lives in North Carolina, land of the endless debate with South Carolina over vinegar versus tomato. I liked the Mad Dawg'z version, not too sweet, tomato based but with a vinegar bite.
You can buy meat by the pound for twelve bucks, and they also encourage bring-your-own-bottle if you want to eat on the spot. If you forgot to BYOB there is the Kickin' Back store just across Highway One. All other considerations aside they like dogs here and that makes them all right in my book, Barbecue controversy notwithstanding:
And they offer sandwiches for just seven bucks apiece with one side. I'm thinking that some day when my wife's not looking a brisket sandwich with peach cobbler would make a man sized lunch. 
And on the other side of the street a guest house marks the corner with a particular paint scheme and plants:
I took these pictures on my recent early morning ramble around Key West so the sunlight was streaming low across the city and it gave a particularly lovely light to the street.
Conch housing in all its splendid variety, old and new, wood and stone. And the more modern styles, the 1960s or 1970s perhaps? With those splendid car ports:
And of course there are the picturesquely dilapidated next to the Yuppie renovated:
But there again if one walks the streets of Key West there are tons of things to see, homes dart boards and...feet?
These feet definitely weren't made for walking, but I like walking the streets of Key West.
I set off back into town from El Mocho where we had breakfast not quite sure where to go, so I gravitated south and took the scenic route along Smathers Beach. It was the obvious place to go if I was in search of a sunrise, and I noted some keen and well equipped photographers lining Dead Man's Curve on South Roosevelt. I left the tripods and massive telephotos behind and pulled over a bit further along unsure what I was chasing. And then I saw planes, pedestrians, cars cyclists and ships all coming together in one shot:
The big white blob steaming in the harbor channel means lots of people wandering Lower Duval later in the morning bringing, one hopes, lots of money into town. I was still seeking a higher purpose than mere commerce. All manner of things presented themselves, an expanse of deep blue sky, but the brown smear was actually a butterfly, I think:
Birds huddled along the seashore apparently waiting for the sun to get a move on and warm them up:
And a busy human being bustled by with a hand glued firmly to his head shouting apparently at himself:
The seasonably un-Key West clothing was prompted by a nasty cold front that swept through town and is supposedly going to keep on sweeping all week long.I can only imagine how cold it is in upstate New York or Wisconsin or wherever this holy terror entered the country from the frozen wastes of Canada:
Sixty degrees (15C) makes for a cold start in a town where local zero is measured at 70 degrees (21C). The beauty of winter in south Florida (45 degrees in Miami! 7C) is even though it can get cold,by local standards, this is not the rainy season. Cold fronts bring some rain with them, but on the whole it tends to be sunny and dry when these cold blasts hit. The rising sun bathed the pink block of Key West By The Sea condos:
Smathers Beach is where many of Key West's active population goes to exercise; they run, they bike, they roller skate and usually they do it in shorts and t-shirts, but this is a little too frigid for most people:
For some people the cold snap makes getting to work a trial:
And when the winds are honking out of the north, as they do in a cold front the fishing fleet ducks into the shallow waters south of Key West, waiting for things to get back to normal:
The boats lower their trawling booms to reduce the rolling effect of the sea and from a distance they look, to my naked eye unaided by the telephoto lense, like bison grazing the ocean as they sit and wait for milder weather. For me, riding the Bonneville is more of a trial than i might like but I console myself with the thought that at least its dry cold, and the sting of cold air under my helmet is a change from the many months of summer heat and humidity:
It was indeed a brisk ride home, though I didn't risk hypothermia and it didn't even really wake me up because when I finally rolled into bed at 8:30 I went out like a light, and it felt good. 
He's been with us a year and is just about ready to wrap up his training. He was working an overtime shift and I let him train on Channel One to help him get experience and learn some of my tricks of trade. We all dispatch slightly differently and trainees can benefit from learning which quirks suit them best.
I wonder if one day police dispatchers will become as obsolete as buggy whip makers with automation and digital communications. I view the self check out machines at the supermarket as unemployment machines, but so far police officers still depend on someone in the police station watching the calls and checking on their welfare. Noel likes running Channel Two, the channel officers switch to when they need background information or they need to have arrest warrants confirmed. He loves paperwork and research and sending intranet communications to other agencies; for some reason people on the run from all over the country love to come to Key West as much as any other tourist, so we end up asking jurisdictions all over the US if they'd like their people back. By five thirty in the morning the warrant checks are hopefully dying down, the bars are closed, its a cold morning outside and even habitual drunks have to sleep a little in preparation for another night of carousing. So Noel unwinds with his Crayola set:
When I was freshly trained and sent to night shift, I sat up quite a few nights with a very experienced woman dispatcher who huddled in her chair knitting for hours on end. Some of us read between calls, others text and a few sit and stare out the window thinking heaven knows what thoughts. I like operating the main police channel because there's almost always something going on and I enjoy the chess game of figuring out who to send to what call and how to decide which call merits immediate attention. Dispatching is a form of triage and I hope computers will never figure out how to read the immediacy of human need as efficiently as another human being can. And then Belen shows up and scans the room deciding which of the three channels she wants for the day: Fire/Rescue dispatch which takes lots of phone calls, Channel Two also takes lots of phone calls or Channel One and lots of police officer personalities and no phone calls. My luck! She wants Channel One... I'm outta here! 
The real first sign that the 12 hour shift is nearing its natural end is when we spot the day shift people pulling into the parking lot. It's always a crap shoot when you get to hand over control of your channel as the new arrivals drift in, some early, perhaps twenty minutes before six, and some notoriously late, thirty seconds before the witching hour. If you're on the channel Sleepyhead is going to take over in the morning you might as well resign yourself to being in the chair till the last second. One rule of our dispatch center is you don't leave until the next shift is sliding, literally, into your seat. Pushing the clock is an easy way to make yourself very unpopular but in the end even the slow pokes sit at the computers and take your place. I borrowed this image form Mad Jack's Blog Above Solaris Hill, a picture of the police station, showing the top left windows where I watch for the arrival of my relief:
Pink is a popular color in Key West, the color of Conch shells inside their whorls and whirls, it's a pastel shade like sky blue and lemon yellow, also popular, that emphasise Caribbean tropical decor. This one, illuminated by the rising sun, is seen from South Roosevelt Boulevard:
My wife has found a gym she likes to frequent on her way to work so she is up and away from home long before I am even setting out from work. That means I am less anxious to get away as there is no one to greet me at the hearth, and I can be more relaxed if I am stuck waiting for the slow poke to show up and relieve me. Indeed some days I will take a meandering course home now that winter time is in effect and sunrise greets my departure from the city. I've had the pleasure of some excellent views out across the waters on my forty minute ride home. End of day is a great time for me, a brisk ride home on a near empty highway, the silence of my neighborhood when I climb the stairs to my tree house and there awaits my deep soft mattress, and sleep as the poet described it "tired nature's sweet restorer." My bonus is that the end of my day is the beginning of most other people's. I like living in reverse. 
Going to photograph a residential street in New Town at around five in the afternoon is a trial for a shy person like me. It's absolutely the wrong time of day as residents are returning from a day at work and the street is starting to bustle with evening activity. And then a stranger on a scooter shows up with a camera pointing it in all sorts of odd places. 
It's that time of year again, when the Christmas lights go up and a self conscious man on a motorcycle (or his wife's scooter) starts to plan some night photographs of Christmas decorations in a town where frost is a stranger. Thank God.
One thinks of Key West when one is shovelling snow somewhere else and one thinks of narrow streets and piled up wooden houses and bars and crowds and all that stuff. But the backbone of the city are those streets where the downtown conchs retreated last century when they sold off their Old Town Conch cottages to arrivistes with too much money and too little sense. Out here they found wide open spaces, room to build a multi bedroom house with land to spare for a yard and a place to park a car or two. All modern conveniences.
Pretty they aren't by architectural standards but they are much easier to live in than some of the more picturesque homes downtown:
But landscaping and especially palm trees can give a concrete block home all the charm you need:
Some of the homes have a decidedly Caribbean air, pastel colors, whitewashed walls and they wouldn't be out of place in the Antilles. Perhaps the shutters indicate a snowbird reluctant apparently to fly south but undoubtedly they will be back soon enough:
This section of Patterson Avenue lies between a mangrove lined canal which extends from the Riviera Canal to the bight north of the island and splits New Town down the middle more or less, alongside Tenth Street here:
The canal could be quite attractive but it is what it is, which is a dump unhappily:
At the eastern end of these two blocks Patterson dead ends into the Professional Building, a Stalinist lump that was thrown up as an Awful Warning I suppose, to people anxious to avoid Key West's modern height restrictions:
I shouldn't grumble,my eye doctor lives in there and a very nice man he is too. He got displaced for a while when Wilma wrecked this massive impenetrable lump by pouring rain through the roof and melting the entire palazzo inside out. I was astonished it was such a feeble thing. Just like the old Soviet Union, impressive facades but feeble underneath the bluff exterior. I hope it was rebuilt properly because losing one's eye doctor to a hurricane is annoying and I doubt he'd stay on the job after a second drenching. But I digress. Patterson Avenue in these blocks is an extraordinarily convenient area to live in. Years ago we tried to rent a cottage out here when we decided to get off the boat and give our elderly Labrador a home ashore at last.
Behind the sound proof fence, more or less, lie the loading docks of Overseas Market, which can be an annoyance as trucks like to idle their engines here and waste valuable fuel for some reason.
However for those that like to walk, Winn Dixie, the Post Office and a pharmacy are close by, not to mention neighboring Key Plaza which houses Albertsons, K Mart and Radio Shack not to mention restaurants bars and a video rental. All the mod cons (modern conveniences). Also the gap in the fence has its unintended consequences: 
The mangrove bushes that flourish around here provide homes to the stubborn outdoors types who prefer freedom to the restrictions of the homeless shelter on Stock Island:
They just melt out of sight into the bushes as the people on the lowest runs of social ladders everywhere tend to do.The smart ones don't get loud, don't start fires and pack their trash, but there are those that like to draw attention to themselves. Look on the bright side, parking is easier in New Town and homes are bigger, traffic is lighter as there are fewer visitors and strange men on scooters bearing camera only rarely disturb the urban peace:
Of what is essentially an empty residential street. Perfectly placed in my geographic opinion.
The State took the railroad bridge over after the railroad went bust and built a narrow roadway on top of the thing in 1938 and that was how one drove to Key West along the narrow Highway. The Park had a card illustrating the old road:
All the land in the picture is now part of the park and the new road cuts across the bay to the right, a boring flat cement bridge with four lanes and a helpful 55mph speed limit, useful for those of us in a hurry of course, but not so scenic:
The new road was inaugurated in 1982, the year after I first came to the Keys so I must have ridden my Vespa over the old Bahia Honda Bridge but honestly I can't remember it. The Seven Mile bridge was much more memorable I guess, especially for people with four or more wheels as the old railroad bridges yielded a pretty narrow roadbed. But they sure do look spectacular those old piles:
The state very kindly cut out a chunk of the old bridge to allow sailboat masts to fit through the gap, as Bahia Honda ("deep bay" in Spanish) is a not just a state park but a nice little anchorage as well.
I have no idea what the work boat was doing but it was all terribly industrious chugging around the bay. The park is one of the more beach oriented locations in the Keys, it's got all the water related activities one might expect. It also has a fair bit of sand and these are islands that don't generally offer the strands that mainland Florida is famous for. The Keys are made of rock unlike the rest of the state which is a land built on sand as it were, and has long sand beaches as a reward. And in even in November people are flocking to the beaches of the Sunshine State:
We've had a succession of cold fronts lately, lots of north winds and temperatures frequently dipping under 70 degrees (20C) so it's long past swimming season for me. Not for visitors to the Keys it seems:
This time of year I like a ride to Bahia Honda, fifteen minutes from my house, for the pleasure of a walk not a swim. One of the most spectacular strolls is to the top of the old bridge. The approach road has become a tad overgrown with the passage of time:
The bridge itself has been smoothed over with cement and extra handrails have been installed for the benefit of visitors but it is more or less as it was, a work of art of compound curves:
The view from the top is glorious, vistas over land, the park itself to the east:
The power poles marching off to the north mark the track of the new Overseas Highway. To the southwest: sea and setting sun and not much this side of Mexico:
More towards Cuba there is actually a little land, though not much of it:
And there, across the divide lies the remainder of the bridge, untouched, unloved and unwalked upon. It's too bad really, as I think it would make a great bike path with unbeatable views. However I guess preservation wasn't worth the expense though you'd think corporations like to spend fortunes naming sports arenas after themselves, so why not an old bridge? One that still carries the old main water pipe in its nether regions:
As you can see the old road bed, laid on top of the railroad tracks, is a bit narrow especially for modern SUVs and commercial trucks. Old timers tell me that when two trucks met on these bridges they sometimes had to fold their mirrors and inch past so little room was there to spare. For my Vespa it was a different story of course.
And I will be back.
Emma and I, Punta Jutia, Cuba, February 2000
It was small, salty sailboat, a tried and tested cruiser on long ocean passages. From the same friends of Flicka website I found this picture that summarizes superbly the tight but very agreeable living conditions found on this micro cruiser:
Turtle Bay, Baja California, Mexico, October 1998. Baja Ha Ha Rally.
East Hollandaise Cays, San Blas Islands, Panama, November 1999.
Pretending to be a mechanic. Inside Belize's Barrier Reef. January 2000. 
Figuring out the laundry with Emma looking on. Puerto Corinto, Nicaragua. December 1998. 
Miki G, our Gemini 105 catamaran on the beach for maintenance. Costa Rica, January 1999.
Eugene Debs enduring another passage on Miki G. He loved arriving. I still miss him daily.
Welcome to El Salvador. Far nicer than US officials. La Union, Gulf of Fonseca. 1999.
A beautiful day turned within hours into a ghastly storm. And Punta Gorda, Belize, has no harbor. We sailed for our lives back to Guatemala. January 2000.
Ferries serving small villages between Colombia and Panama. January 2000.
Gas station, pull up in your dinghy. Rio Diablo, San Blas Islands, Panama. December 1999.
Technical sailing in the Panama Canal. September 1999. Three months before the handover.
Thanksgiving 1999. On a deserted San Blas island, and food flown in from Panama City!
End of one adventure, beginning of another. Miki G at Key West, February 2000. 
The full moon obliterates the stars in the night sky but they will get their turn in a couple of weeks when the moon wanes and makes way for their more subtle light. I read an article in a National Geographic at the dentist last week saying that there are millions of people in the developed world who never get to see a proper night sky. I hadn't thought about it really but being at sea on a small boat is still as dark as it ever was. When I was out cruising I'd sometimes turn the navigation lights off and sit in the cockpit and sea the night sky in all it's glory and it really is astonishing how many more stars one sees in a profoundly dark place on the ground. I got the idea that comets, before the advent of street lights must really have looked liked some messenger from the gods. I saw a comet, Hale-Bopp I think, about 15 years ago from a well lit street in California and it was so insignificant I wondered what all the fuss was about.
I should have been living on this street back then. There are no street lights where I live and the night sky from my home's deck is almost as good as being at sea, or in the prairie, or in the mountains, where human lights are held at bay.
And tell the truth, you want people to give you real all-American service-with-a-smile when you get to your hotel. And what if you were feeling poorly and no one answered 9-1-1 because the relief operator was STUCK IN SLOW POKE TRAFFIC? Exactly, the mad motorcyclist you are holding up could very well be the person assigning you your room after a long tiring drive, or the convenience clerk selling you expensive gas at the end of the road. So please don't forget Florida law allows only written warnings if the speed limit is exceeded by five miles per hour or less so if you risk driving sixty on the Highway in a double nickel zone you will not get a nosebleed from the g-forces, I promise, and you will make me happy. And that has to be worth it, right? The truth is, one doesn't really save any time at all by going sixty as opposed to fifty, but it is mind numbingly boring. There, I said it. Sitting in a line of cars at 47 miles per hour sends me to sleep and not paying attention really is dangerous as we will see.
The car was coming towards the camera in broad daylight, the motorcycle was coming from over my shoulder and was passing Rest Beach to the right. The car wanted to turn into the beach parking lot where my Bonneville is parked. The car turned, not seeing the motorcycle, which braked hard, leaving a long black smear on the road, hit the side of the car and the rider's unhelmeted head went under the rear wheel.
I didn't know the rider, he was a bar tender downtown, but his sudden death left a lot of people shaken up because he was a very popular decent guy by all accounts. His wife was devastated, and whatever his relationship with her, she expected him home that day and he never did show. That was a death notification I was glad not to be involved with as the news went down hard, very hard I am told. In these kinds of situations it is easy to get caught up in figuring how you would be smarter and avoid the death trap. I don't know anything more about the circumstances other than what people have said and the newspaper has reported. The investigation continues and other than the horror of the scene the investigator has told me nothing. But I will say even if the motorcycle was speeding or pulling wheelies the car should have seen him coming. And it apparently did not.
One person told me he laid the motorcycle down to try to avoid the car and as Irondad will tell you that is the worst thing to do (I'm betting he never took any training either). If he did slide the bike that action slid his unhelmeted head under the wheel. Perhaps a helmet might not have saved his life, because if he was going fast the impact could have broken his neck anyway. Who knows? I like to think I ride and pay attention. I go as fast as I dare when I deem it safe, and its never safe in crowded urban areas. I treat cars as unpredictable, I generally wear a helmet boots and gloves. I hope for the best, I pay close attention, I look ahead. But above all I tell my wife I love her every time I leave home and I am glad to see here when I get back. All actions reinforced, powerully by this horrid wreck. Oh and I don't pull wheelies, because I've never learned how. The self preservation of the fearful.
And some people pay good money to have other sweaty people keep them in good order on their streets:
Coconut palms are not native to the Keys, they are imported to give the required "tropical paradise" look to the islands. They annoy some people with their profligate ways, spewing fronds and nuts year round. They used to annoy me but I am becoming mellow in old age. Oh dear.
We had some friends over for dinner last weekend and tried out the fireplace I bought on a recent trip to Miami. Indeed this cast iron thing was the reason I drove the car to the Italian Consulate instead of riding up, so it had better work:
We had dinner upstairs, a collection of people I work with and their partners. Young Noel now forbidden forever by Amendment Two's voter approval from marrying Matt ("I don't want to get married like a boring straight!"); Belen who plans to marry Yeye in January; he wants seven kids, she wants six despite my warnings about poverty and stress and over population ("Yeah yeah; you aren't Cuban, you wouldn't understand, old man."). After dinner we went down to my wife's beach, or sand lot really, and started the fire.
Belen was mother and showed Diggy, our token Nicaraguan how to build a smoky cripsy melted marshmallow into a sandwich and we sat around and talked and poked the fire and watched the embers swirl up into the warm November night. Rachel, our token immigrant English speaker developed a taste for pyromania and was seen casting very dry, very flammable pieces of coconut matting into the flames and squeaking with fear and delight as they flamed up.
It was a good night, no one got drunk and threw up, we relieved some work related stress and I listened to the brown and the black and immigrant and native young Americans talk about Obama and their future. I think I may soon get Noel to finally register to vote; of course if he registers with the wrong party I'll have to kill him, but freedom comes with a price. It was good to be there and watch them all cement their one-ness with that perfect symbol of American-ness, a graham cracker, a melted marshmallow a square of Hershey's and a final slice of graham cracker to hold it all together. S'mores, the constitutional glue that binds us all together.
My wife's 150cc Vespa ET4, lurking behind Overseas Market one afternoon when I stole it for a ride. I miss my Vespa.
There is a funky area next to key West High School and it's name is Duncombe Street. Which sounds like it should be Done-comb Street, as in "I'm done putting a comb through my hair." Because this is Key West, that is not the case. Duncombe was, according to J Wills Burke a prominent man in Key West a century ago, but left no clue as far as I know how to pronounce his name.
So the little street off Flagler next to the High School is pronounced Dun-comm-bee with the usual Key West flair for getting the job done. Any time I have to dispatch an officer to Dun-comb (juvenile mischief? It is next to the High School!) I set my teeth on edge when I say Dun-comm-bee instead. But I do because no one knows it by any other pronunciation. In any case this street is easily missed even though it is next to the landmark thrift store on Flagler Avenue:
Duncombe is a utilitarian street and serves to connect the main avenue to the high school, but it certainly isn't all pretty:
There are a handful of dwellings along the west side of the street before it ends at the new High School campus after a block. The right turn at that point becomes the strangely named Venetia Street. The campus is no longer so new but it did replace in spectacular fashion, like a phoenix, the old run down collection of buildings that used to be the high school:
The auditorium is where I get to go each winter to enjoy productions the school puts on, and the excuse is to see offspring of friends but the truth is I enjoy the energy of the campus. Unlike so many high schools in cities across the US, the Key West campus is open and unfenced which I take to be a measure of the civility of the city. Perhaps too I enjoy the evident irony of the school's mascot, standing proud, and oversized in the parking lot:
"Key West High School, Home of the Fighting Conchs." I have spent many happy hours observing the antics of pacifist conch as they trundle across the sea floor in the shallow waters of Bahama islands, and the mollusc's rate of progress through the sand, under the gin clear waters is remarkable, considering how laborious is their means of locomotion. They get where they are going but the have all the speed and the agility of stoned tortoises, which makes a "fighting" conch a contradictory image in my over active mind. Nevertheless this is the island of conchs so the mascot has to be just that.
Oh and the campus is, for safety reasons, located right under the main flight path to the airport across the salt ponds (east winds prevail around here so aircraft land into them by flying across the city). Luckily they are mostly propeller aircraft feathering their way to earth so they tend to sound like ducks farting loudly overhead which is quieter than the occasional jet but noise, in my opinion is noise and I'd rather live with less of it. Perhaps the residents of Duncombe might agree, but there aren't too many of them. A block of flats:
And a couple of well loved and pretty little cottages:
And as the sun sets across Key West illuminating the happy hordes no doubt at Mallory Square a couple of miles away, this little corner of New Town is seeing the sun out of sight but doing what residential neighborhoods do every where in the side streets off mighty Flagler Avenue:
Same old, same old away from the tourist and drinking centers; dinner, bed, and up and at 'em in the morning. And I have to get the wife's Vespa back to her workplace before she notices it was gone.
The street, if that is what it is, isn't labelled or marked in any obvious way, and it may not even appear to be a public street at all, at first glance. This might be nothing more than an entrance to the surprisingly spacious Banana Bay Resort:
Even if the casual visitor finds the public right of way through the resort parking lots, Hilton Haven itself remains more of a suggestion than a city street proper:
I am a sucker for old coral rock walls, even if they are held together with modern cement and surmounted by modern hurricane fencing rusting gently in the moist seaside air. Old Key West is delightfully evident here:
Juxtaposed with modern Key West right next door:
Key West in general is too small for total neighborhood segregation and buying or remodelling an expensive home is a crap shoot when it comes to enjoying your neighbors. In most American cities you can define your ideal zone by taking a quick drive and finding where you are comfortable. Key West pushes those assumptions back at you, as it does so much else in modern life. Just because you want an all-mod-con stuccoed palace doesn't mean your neighbor is ready to sell up the tumbledown next door prior to a move to Micanopy or Ocala...Hilton Haven has one other enormous feature that sets it apart from most other residential streets within the city:
If you want a dock in your backyard for the most part you have to look at land outside the city, but not in Hilton Haven. This is the mixed up street of tear downs and McMansions, the sidewalkless urban agglomeration that is surrounded on each side by tidal saltwater. To the south Garrison Bight:
With the ever busy Boulevard in the distance:
And to the north we have the open waters leading to the Gulf of Mexico, by way of the Navy Base at Sigsbee, beyond the obtrusive power poles:
And to the west Hilton Haven dead ends into the gut that opens Garrison Bight to the north and across that narrow channel we see the US Coastguard Housing on Fleming Key:
Hilton Haven has a few houseboats tied up and I saw what appeared to be the odd liveaboard dinghy squished up in the mangroves waiting for their owners return from a day in the salt mines.
For some, waterfront living in Key West is a tad bit more palatial:
Though the ultimate symbol of suburban bliss, the lawnmower, here takes second place to the symbol of the joys of open waters, the jet ski:
I'm pretty sure I spotted one of the city's senior "deciders" (to coin a phrase) buzzing the winding street on his moped, while one of his neighbors,seen here from behind, taking a slow pedal made time for a cheerful grin and greeting for the intruder with a camera in the right-of-way:
There are lots of small curiosities to catch the eye of the camera, the length of Hilton Haven, far more indeed than could fit in one twenty picture essay on the street.
But I couldn't leave this corner of rural/urban Key West without a tip of the hat to the long history of slightly irritable sign posting this narrow, confined city produces to this day from, apparently times long past:
The sentiment, replicated today in garish plastic has apparently been around for quite some time. I walked the street and risked no tow, and that is what I would recommend to find yet another last corner of mostly old Key West.
My heart sank as we approached Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens Sunday morning. Traffic was intense, cars were parked at all wild angles occupying every inch of the verges of the approach road to the event, and Coral Gables cops were making some extra money working the detail to try and keep order for the annual Ramble Garden Festival. I am not much of a one for crowds, but my wife and I had been forced to scratch a long desired trip to the Dry Tortugas, thanks to strong north winds sweeping the Keys. "I don't get seasick," my wife remarked to friends who had planned to go with us. "But I don't like sharing a three hour, rough water boat ride with a few dozen strangers do suffer from it." So we cast around for an alternative and remembered The Ramble which takes place on the grounds of the magnificent Fairchild Gardens in Coral Gables:
The grounds of the Fairchild Tropical gardens lend themselves to this kind of thing as they are filled with all sorts of nooks and crannies overflowing with greenery and in each one lurked a specialised person with knowledge to give away, a plant to sell or a conversation to offer for the asking:
My wife is a member of the Fairchild Garden so we for in for free which is pretty cool as this is a special event and with a quick flash of her annual pass we were at liberty to wander at our leisure. At the entrance to the event itself someone had parked an early 20th century water organ, a hurdy gurdy mounted on vintage Renault truck and it was the source of the marching band we could hear from the parking lot:
There were food stands lining the approaches to the plant areas and we wandered in some bemusement.
Farmers markets were in their infancy when we left California and they have burgeoned everywhere- everywhere except Key West of course! Thus every time we see one we stop and take a look when we find them on the road. The Fairchild Gardens put on a magnificent spread for our edification, we small town hicks: 
Some stuff was more familiar to Key West resident:
And I have all the coconuts I need, thanks:
And even though I like a guacamole dip as much as the next habitue of Mexican cuisine, I was a bit taken aback to see a woman up to her elbows in the stuff, mashing industriously all afternoon:
There was also a food court offering everything from hot dogs to crepes by way of jerk and Asian cooking. 
We went for the one that doesn't ever rear its head in the Keys, as far as I know:
There used to be an Ethiopian restaurant in Tampa when I lived there for a very brief while, and mostly what I recall eating was gloppy sauces well spiced with no cutlery and a spongy sour tortilla type of bread for a spoon. We were offered plastic forks, even though I carry my own metal cutlery as I dislike plastic eating irons, but the food was as I remembered it more or less:
The weather was mildly sunny,mostly hazy and overcast with thin cloud cover and we found it quite pleasant to wander in the 80 degree temperatures (27C). For some it was bright enough to warrant shade:
I bought some garden tools which appeared to offer the benefit of folding up small when not in use and also of being built of materials likely to last a long while, a multi function steel rake and coconut frond pruner with a ten foot reach operated by a solid rod which should be easier to use than my spring operated contraption. I also got a rather powerful set of pruning shears that operate by ratchet action and are remarkably easy to use. All for $120, so we didn't get away scot free. My wife found the most elaborate hair pin for $20:
It's quite a hobby it turns out, turning wood on a lathe: 
They had a large tent filled with decorative bowls and the like with prices ranging from several hundred to over a thousand bucks. 
We quite liked one lightweight fruit bowl thing which carried a tag of $650 which seemed like it would have been nice in another more munificent era when our house was, say, actually worth money....This I could afford though, or at least a piece of it:
At $3 a pound Jak fruit was a bargain. I thought though, my wife gave me an old fashioned look when I asked for six bucks to take home a piece:
The seeds are encased in a lychee-like pod which is all held together by the toughest fibers you're likely to encounter inside something edible. After dinner I tore apart the fiber and we scarfed the lychee things inside. I really enjoyed it. She tried to.
"Oooh!" One of my wife's friends said over the cell phone as I drove the convertible home."If you'd have said you were going to Fairchild I'd have come too!" Everyone should feel the same way.
The beans are already substantially larger, one weekend after I photographed them and they are climbing like crazy. add a little water and up they go. I put that bed under the stairs so I could run string down to them to make a trellis. They seem to be thriving in partial Florida sunlight. Lettuce is another plant that supposedly needs less heat so i stuck that bed on the north side of the house, and with a mixture of lettuce plants and seeds we are seeing solid progress:
The largest bed is five feet by four feet and has a wide mixture of experimental plants. We kind of wanted to see what would grow and how, so we threw a bunch of seeds and plants and up they came, including eggplant, cucumbers, onions and and broccoli I think. They seem to be doing fine:
We put some more tomatoes into pots, threw in a ring of cilantro and watched them grow...Lisa gave us two pineapple cuttings so we stuck them in some pots and they are growing like gangbusters, and finally we potted a Key Lime, a mango and a pink lemon tree and they are doing nicely as well.
I find it mildly amusing that now after years of swearing off it i am once again come full circle and I can be found afternoons before I go into work, checking for weeds, watering and talking to the plants in an earnest effort to get them to grow. Victory Garden indeed, these are seeds cast in most unlikely soil, to paraphrase the Good Book. But they are growing, for now, with an apparent lust for life.
Gratuitous Bonneville photograph, under the house.
I read somewhere that ancient Egyptian mummies have been found to suffer from ground down teeth owing to the surfeit of desert sand blown into their diet accidentally. "I think I'd like to have been a barber," my dentist confided to me as we waited for the Novocain to take effect. "All that blood letting and teeth pulling. Of course people ate less sugar back then," he looked saddened by the thought of less dental work. After 16 years you'd think he'd be sick of it. Not at all. I'm pretty sure he bounces out of bed in the morning and can't wait to board his scooter for the ride to work.
We chatted for a while, of course talking about the economy and we compared notes on people we know losing their homes to foreclosure. It was a long list. "Well," he said philosophically. "He took a few years off and had some good times, but the bank is telling him to drop the price below half a million, and he paid nine hundred thousand for it." He looked glum for a moment. "I took two years off to go sailing and a couple more farting around, " I replied, a little indistinct thanks to the drugs, "but that sure wouldn't make up for losing my home..." a thought to ponder as I laid back and he went to work on round one of the protracted tooth extraction.
As he struggled with the recalcitrant tooth the dentist kept asking me if I was okay. "Fine," I mumbled, "it's just freaking me out imagining what you are doing." "Don't think about it," he commanded as pressed on with a fresh pair of needle nosed pliers. So I thought about this instead: We're lucky to live our lives in this modern era, and I don't want it to change too much. I have no idea why I was born into the middle class first world life, but I like it very much, I like cheap oil. I like having choices and I like having free time. I don't even mind riding to see the dentists from tiem to time. Getting a tooth pulled is no fun, but modern medecine makes it bearable, and heaven knows when something more serious or more painful comes along we haven't got the tools available to "Bones" of Star Trek fame but things are a lot better than they were. Even when I was a kid dentistry hurt, and it hurt a lot. Nowadays they don't use laughing gas anymore which I enjoyed when that original crown was put in my mouth, and I miss it, but it's nice to have a dentist that does stint the Novocain. I wonder what the pain relief for Economic Recession tastes like? A dead fish sliding down your throat perhaps?
I photographed him outside the police station during a little ceremony we held to honor the police officer and civilian of the quarter, and the latter recognition brought me some small measure of pleasure. Noel recently did a great job of research in the Communications Center on a case and as I was the shift supervisor, I wrote a letter of commendation up the chain of command, as one does, and the result was Noel getting recommended for civilian of the quarter. Which included a fat check from a civic group of business leaders here represented by noted realtor Rudy Molinet (in the green shirt) handing over the loot to Noel:
In order to surprise him, I had told Noel we were having an evaluation and he spent two days freaking out about his scheduled meeting with Lieutenant Ream (pictured above). She was in fact the Officer of the Quarter and had no plans to punish Noel, though he didn't know it. One of the pleasures of working night shift is that you rarely get to meet the brass, the disadvantage is that when the Chief does summon you it is usually for a reprimand. No reprimand for Noel who had trouble masking his feelings:
I compartmentalize my life as much as I am able, I enjoy my workplace but I like going home to my wife. And we have friends outside the department, so when I'm away from the intensity of the police station I really am away, even though I do enjoy being around my younger colleagues in dispatch. So it was I was sorry to see Noel's sister-in-law a feisty 20 year-old Cuban princess get moved from my shift back to days after a brief training period with me. Belen is a handful to train, sassy and finely honed in the art of answering back but I came to enjoy her company on the long quiet nights of Fall in the Communications Center. To lose her is to lose a friend and i won't see much of her (or hear from her!) as she is on the opposite shift completely:
With Belen's departure to Alpha Days, Noel and I soldier on alone on Bravo Nights with help from colleagues willing to put in some overtime. The KWPD dispatch center operates with three dispatchers, two to take phone calls and simultaneously operate the secondary police resource channel and dispatch fire/rescue, with the third Communications Officer operating the main police channel. Luckily Noel and I have worked together for a long time, more than a year and we make a good team. We used to rely on Diggy as the third member of our shift but he recently took off for greener pastures:
Digy has been invovled with the Police Department since he was a kid enrolled in the Explorers program. Since then he has worked as parking enforcement and as a dispatcher- and he is still only 24 years of age! He recently became a US citizen, he was born in Nicaragua, and that finally made him eligible to become a police officer so he left Noel and I to attend the Police Academy for the next six months. Diggy Noel and I were a tight team for 15 months and work was easy for me as we all meshed really well together, the Cuban, The Nicaraguan and the Italian, and they even enjoyed mocking my Italian accent when I spoke Spanish. Noel is my "Radar"(from M*A*S*H, a reference he barely understands) as it's his job to line up my paperwork and organize the shift's time sheets for me. We will miss Diggy's encyclopedic knowledge of the department, not to mention his intimate understanding of Parking Law, but I know he will make a fine officer. Seeing him and Noel together reminds me of two puppies from the same litter. Actually they are both graduates of Key West High School:
Separated, but not forgotten. Change is good I keep reminding myself, and Noel too, on our long lonely vigils alone together at the top of the police station. 
I am not a power sports kind of guy, though I did attend a few car races with my father in England in the 1960's, an era so far removed from the modern one I feel embarrassed to mention it, all goggles and leather gauntlets and cars that looked more like water beetles than racers at 
It so happened my instructor at the college had a field trip organized to check out the engine systems on a Marine Sanctuary boat docked at the Eco Discovery center , which it so happens put us in the front row of the warm ups for the races:
The boat basin at the Truman Waterfront has long been a Federal preserve used by the Navy and now by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And for the week, high powered race boats:
We completed our field trip against a backdrop of wildly revving engines and circling boats being prepped for the races. My young classmates were entranced:
The boats zipped back and forth in the distance between Sunset Key and the Key West seawall overflown by helicopters whether for photographic or safety purposes, or both, I know not:
The boats were flying across the waters but I don't think it's much of a spectator sport to watch the little colorful boxes splatting their way back and forth in straight lines:
I knew a guy who raced to the Bahamas on these kinds of boats. Consider its 200 miles from Fort 
The real live women wandering the paddock (or whatever it's called in boat racing slang) were a small compensation doubtless for the 
Times are tough everywhere and off duty work is a much valued source of extra income for police officers, especially in a town with a high cost of living, and off duty details are becoming scarce so officers grab them where they can. It's another way these events help bring cash to Key West. And women, let's not forget the women they bring:
Driving and talking simultaneously on a cell phone, just my kind of babe. Even if it is a golf cart it's still wrong. Of 
Some people think riding a motorcycle is dangerous but I can't say that I would feel any too good if I indulged in a sport that needed fire proof clothing. But there again the boat race women don't do much for me either. Add the noise, and this is clearly not my arena. Scooters though always appeal, however riding a scooter that matches your outfit is over the top for me:
If however the allure of racing fast boats cannot be 
I have no idea no idea what a 46-foot Skater is but I can say with certainty that 179 miles per hour is outside my comfort zone. The fastest I've ridden a motorcycle is 125 miles per hour which is an ample sufficiency. Going 150 miles per hour on the water would require kidneys made of rubber, and mine aren't. However if you haven't got a spare half mill right now (and who does these days?) there are bargains to be had:
Cut price too, however I passed. But there was one part of the boat race thing I could enjoy, a cheerful outdoor picnic with friends:
Cheapskates. We need them spending money in restaurants.
I watched a documentary recently titled King Corn, a lighthearted look at a serious subject. Two young men raise an acre of corn (maize) in the Midwest and follow the corn's progress through the American agro-industrial system to food processing and the export market. As unlikely as it sounds it was a fascinating film, which I watched by downloading it from Netflix. Modern corn is inedible in its natural state, it is grown at a loss with around $30 an acre of Federal subsidies to create a profit for farmers and most corn is produced in a genetically modified form that creates resistance to pesticides while at the same time stunting reproduction so growers have to buy fresh seed stock each season. It is wildly unnatural and economically inefficient. If this summary sounds unlikely check out the movie for the gory details.
It is winter now in the Florida Keys, a season barely discerned compared to many places further North, but here nevertheless. The easy way to figure it out is the fact that I am riding home from my job as the sun is starting to appear over the horizon. That's because four days ago we switched to summer time and moved sunrise from around seven am back to around six in the morning.
This change more than anything brings home the fact of winter being upon us. Highway One on the Boca Chica bridge is bathed in that peculiarly gentle light that comes just before the dawn. When I used to spend time at sea on my sailboat I was always anxious to see the first signs of dawn after a night out on the water, the gradually apparent waves in the gray first light were proof that another night watch was in the bag.
In the same way for me, the ride home is no longer the night time adventure it was, just last week. I am like a good many people I hear from who would like to see summer time maintained right through the winter but at these latitudes the difference between night and day is very reduced compared to places at higher latitudes. That also means temperatures are much more even throughout the year.
Yet blood really does thin and when I leave the police station at six, there is dew covering the Bonneville, and the air does feel cold on my skin even though the temperature gauge shows a hair under 80 degrees (27C). These are the temperatures that residents of the temperate zones consider to be ideal summer weather, low humidity, pleasant sleeping temperatures and so forth. The mosquito activity has plummeted of course, helped along by Mosquito Vector Control trucks buzzing round our neighborhoods, but I for one don't enjoy the lack of humidity so much. My hair feels like straw and my fingernails feel brittle and my joints aren't as lubricated; I miss the very humidity that frightens so many people away from Florida.
This is the time of year I enjoyed living on a boat, with the air conditioning turned off, the hatches open to the stars and that cooling breeze funneling into the boat so strongly one needed to sleep under a blanket. At home the tyranny of the closed doors is over for a while. No longer do we have to slide the doors closed behind us lest we let out that precious expensive, dehumidified air.
It's the paradox of summer: to enjoy the hot sticky air outdoors but to demand a dry cool atmosphere indoors. There's nothing quite like putting on warm clothes that have been stewing gently in your closet, or picking up a book bearing the deadly speckled dots of fatal fungus disease. Air conditioning solves those issues, and makes for a pleasant refuge, a place to duck into when the heat overwhelms, especially on those rare days when there isn't a breeze blowing across the Keys. This is the out door time of year. Mornings are fresh and cool and the sunrise is welcomed as it illuminates the tops of the trees.
For some people, weak people, wussies, this is the time of year to wheel out the motorcycle as the sun is lower on the horizon and has lost some of it's summer strength. My Bonneville doesn't get the luxury of a season of rest. It is under the house always ready to go:
18,000 miles (29,000 kilometers) in the last 13 months.
It's a funny old name for a park that might otherwise be known simply as "The Bird Sanctuary" but Indigenous is what it's called and the ubiquitous Sonny McCoy, the outgoing county commissioner was involved in this one too:
The park is located across from Rest Beach, which is the short strip of beach east of the White Street Pier. It is right next to the Southernmost 
And the access to the park is tucked away between some bushes next to the 
Indigenous Park is worth a visit for lovers of birds, particularly chickens:
The park has an expansive decked area, human restrooms and a bird recovery area for fowl discovered in need of help:
Indigenous Park is an excellent resource for people who find injured birds, they have boxes at the park where one can place the birds overnight and they will be picked up and cared for by the volunteers in the morning. And speaking of volunteers Karen is the leader on that front but she told me she is getting weary and needs someone to take over leadership of this intensive task:
I first came to appreciate the park when I came across a dazed and confused pigeon while stopping off for dinner in Homestead. I snagged a cardboard box, put the bird in it and dropped the bird off at Indigenous around midnight. Next morning I checked in and the volunteer told me the bird was 
The part I like best about Indigenous Park is the back area, an overgrown forest of greenery and light, with cement trails winding between the trees:
The stuff of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil...
And as I strolled through the gardens I heard an appalling screech out of the branches overhead. All I could see in the shadows created by the bright sunny day was a russet colored bird:
I had not a clue what the bird might be but I came across an avid birder, a man who fell in step with me and told tales of bird spotting across the Americas. He tweeted and whooped and 
He squinted at the picture in my camera and 
And we meandered back to the 
In the parking lot we parted ways with expressions of mutual good will and we never even exchanged names. It was enough to be in the right place at the right time. Check it out, Indigenous Park, you never know what you might find.
The smokestack of the carnival cruise ship is growing out of the Customs House roof. An hour and a half later I retrieved the Bonneville:
I also noticed this motorcycle, a machine viewed as excessively large by those that don't ride them and Allen madding introduced me to the term "Hondapotamus" to describe it. I noticed the orange tag on the handlebar which is designed to remind the rider (driver?) that there is an anti-theft lock engaged on the front disc.
Most two wheelers that are up for grabs in Key West tend to be popular scooters for which there is an obvious market, or Harley Davidsons which are popular with thieves everywhere. This is not a wildly extravagant motorcycle market down here.
The high visibility clothing, the flag, the cycling shorts, the orderly luggage, the helmets, they all speak to serious cycle touring. A Key West cyclist looks more like this:
The tourers I passed later on South Roosevelt heading out of town, while I cruised for photographs. A good while after that I rode past them again, still unflagging pedalling into Summerland Key, 25 miles north of Key West.
Lucky dog, lots of attention, lots of walks, and never abandoned alone, outside, in some suburban garden. Dogs are pack animals and they need to be part of the group. I only realised a while later, that this next guy was cycling around with three dachshunds inside this bizarre recumbent bicycle:
I saw him having a picnic and there were the three little dogs alongside the machine eagerly awaiting tidbits. I guess they get the front view as he pedals around. Lucky them.
Further up the street I found this dried up gourd. I tasted tamarind for the first time in Grenada, the Spice Isle, on my honeymoon. I found it unpleasantly tart and have never developed a liking for it:
Tamarind is a popular flavor in tropical countries where they make it into jam and ice cream even, not to mention fruit juice and the like. Soursop or custard apple is more my speed. I'd like to cultivate that one day.
I suspect they put this one here to prevent cyclists from mowing down pedestrians on this short cut. Here's a hint as to its location. The man in the picture was, I was amazed to discover, writing a check on his knee:
The alley connects Josephine Parker Lane (a city clerk of long standing) with Southard Street. very useful it is too.
I've heard mutterings against the mayor about this bong sweep, but would I be overreaching to suggest it might all be a storm in a...bong?
I've heard the cuisine is quite excellent at the Opera. Interpreting am I? Another sign I saw nearby looked decidedly old fashioned alongside the modern version of Italian cookery. 
Too bad there wasn't anyone out rocking gently in the chairs. But further downtown, next door to the Tropic Cinema I did come across outdoor sports:
I often comment on how Key West by night takes on a vaguely European, historical European flavor and two men playing chess on the sidewalk fills the bill I guess.
There are signs all round this town, and graffiti artists work to improve the simple command dictated by the hexagonal sign at our intersections. They want to stop all manner of things, but Aids? That seems like a tall order, perhaps they should put up a few signs with suggestions how. This next sign I liked partly because of the long empty street behind it
But the joke, the "No Wake" little black square didn't come out quite as legibly as I'd have liked. Winter is the time of year when visitors like to make large wakes in the canals behind the homes they rent. I blame them not, they know not what they do. Wakes can be a problem on land funnily enough. You'll frequently find people standing in flooded Key West streets after a heavy rainstorm and what they are trying to do is prevent cars from rushing through the floods and kicking up waves that can get into the nearby homes. Summer flooding can be severe:
We are definitely into winter now, with cool temperatures, in the low 80's by day and hovering around 70 in the early morning, so we probably won't see too much rain between now and the Spring. It's one of the pleasures that the cooler season is also the dry season down here. Winter is also election season and that's the job today, to go out and vote for those that haven't already done so. 
Florida is just another state with a multiplicity of amendments on the ballot, some of them obscure and some not. Amendment 2 wants to make constitutional, current Florida law that outlaws gay marriage. Just another way to keep government involved in people's private lives! Ah Irony, where is they sting?
I have been on Duval Street quite a bit lately, partly because Fall is the quietest time of year downtown, fewer people (outside of Fantasy Fest) clogging up the sidewalks, so I like to spend a bit more time down there until the flocks of busy snowbirds displace me, like chickens shoving aside the ibis. Then of course we all, except Hawaii, Arizona, Puerto Rico the Virgin Islands, half of Indiana, Guam and American Samoa, have to go through the brain busting time change. I like the fact that we are doing it a few weeks later than the rest of the world, and as a bonus Havana's Radio Reloj time checks match ours once again. The negative is that the sun is in my eyes when I commute into Key West in the evening, and it starts to get light as soon as I leave the police station in the morning, which give great dawns on the ride home but it's full daylight as I go to bed. It was even worse last year when they asked me to work days and I felt like a vampire, denied sunlight every workday through the winter.
"Shop keeper going to work" he joked as I snapped his picture. He's been working at Fast Bucks for thirty years, managing an environment that would make most people go mad with all the drama and difficulty of maintaining a capable work force. He seems to thrive on it. This guy looked like he was ready for a joust at the La Concha parking lot behind Fast Bucks. He was in fact making room for a cement truck to maneuver out of the parking lot: 
Actually it's a sensible way to keep the poinciana branches from dipping too low over Whitehead Street and he was going at them with a will:
It was a slow procession as he clipped, with co-workers on the ground feeding his clipping into a chipper that sounded like the advanced guard for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as it whined and shrieked as it ate the branches. I was glad I do my day time sleeping far, far away. When I hear the sound of a siren or I spot a fire truck "running code" my first thought is I'm glad to be enjoying my day off, but sometimes I see a fire truck waiting at a light and it's not one of ours: 
The Naval Air Station Fire department has specialised equipment that can come in very useful. They sent a truck to a fuel tanker that caught fire on the seven mile bridge and it was thanks to their foam truck that the tanker fire was put out as fast as it was (the bridge was closed for two days after that accident, which led to surprising numbers of shortages in Key West).
At $102 for an annual subscription (plus a Christmas tip to the driver!) I find the daily paper to be a bargain yes, but indispensable. And for those that denigrate the Citizen, "the mullet wrapper," you won't find me among them. I admire the level of reporting in our small town independent paper. The paper seems like a helluva deal compared to the cost of some fashionable eye wear, like sunglasses:
Street washing can't be much fun but they do get city benefits for their work. There are other corners where some clean up might come in handy too:
Complaints surface from time to time about noisy small motors in the city. Some people object to blowers and the like which add to the general noisiness of a busy small town and electric motors are much appreciated like the first one pictured:
This guy's big job at the start of the day was to organize himself a cigarette as he absorbed the first warming rays of sunshine:
I met a dog walker on Bahama Street as I made my way back to the Bonneville which I'd parked in front of Old City Hall. And as the dog walker and I crossed paths this guy popped out doing his job of guarding his upstairs landing:
And the last picture in my essay on workers in and around downtown I caught one of the Police department's motor units pulling over a scooter:
Always a healthy remind for me what it means when an officer clears a traffic stop over the radio with "One citation." And that's a crappy start to the day, for anyone.
My sister asked me to get a notarized signature on a piece of paper to clean up some pending land transfers that my family had failed to sort out decades ago - some of them extend back to the Kingdom of Italy when Mussolini was in charge and my grandfather was alive and selling property. She worried that if we waited too long these pieces of land might never get proper title for their owners in Italy and she wanted to have the power to sign off on them on my behalf. A notion that pleased me greatly as I have absolutely no desire to spend time in notary's offices when I am on vacation. However that did mean I had to make the effort to go and visit the Italian Consulate in Miami to get the job done. This was something I dreaded.
I had similar experiences in San Francisco when I lived in California, traipsing an hour and a half north to spend hours sitting around a Nob Hill mansion waiting for some extra-territorial clerk to languidly sign off on my identity and slip me a very expensive piece of paper that I could mail back to my sister for her ongoing battles over our inherited family lands. Every visit reaffirmed in my mind my decision to abandon farming, land ownership and dealing in any way whatsoever with the curse of Civil Law Notaries.
The notary in the Consolate was actually a very nice middle aged lady who smiled sympathetically when I told her I had emigrated almost thirty years ago and barely remembered the rules regarding franking, signing and stamping. She smiled wearily and read the document my sister's notary had prepared. "Let's hope for the best" she said. Speriamo bene...which is the approach one has to take with all Civil Law paperwork because none of the rules are linear and clear. Civil law takes the attitude that citizens are morons and not to be trusted and the State knows best; an attitude that would make any red blooded American boil with irritation. Getting irritated does no good; Civil Law government is not there to serve so patience is a requirement.
In the name of the Italian Republic, on this day, in Miami, etc...etc... Well, wasn't I surprised when Mrs Vilma had me signing the paper, had my signatures stamped and the fee paid, $55 dollars, cash only, and out of there in twenty five minutes, no muss, no fuss. Anglo-Saxon efficiency (!) and I had an hour and a half to go on the meter. I could hardly believe my luck. My head was spinning as I got in the car and tried to figure my way out of the maze of streets that is the Upper Class neighborhood of Coral Gables, wherein lies the Consulate.
My abiding memories of my sister are of a woman on the go, she carried a leather briefcase everywhere she went, a briefcase she still owns thirty years later, begging for interviews, pleading for consideration, signatures and patience. I compare that craziness with my recent ten minute trip to the DMV in Big Pine Key where my Florida driver's license was renewed for eight years, my photograph taken on the spot and my new document issued to me there and then. My wife has renewed by mail without even bothering to show up in the office, as she has plenty of lead time before her birthday in January. Such casualness with the Property of the State would be unthinkable in Italy. Happily I live in America.
It didn't take long for me to find my way through the extravagant suburbs of Coral Gables back to Florida's Turnpike and the road for home. Coral Gables is an exclusive place, the streets wind and twist in a most European way and street signs don't look like normal tinny signs seen elsewhere:
Italy is a great country to visit and I enjoy very much being a tourist, but daily living is just much more pleasant in the land of the free and home of the brave. I get annoyed sometimes when native born Americans assert the US is the best country in the world, because they really have no idea how good it is here. Sometimes I think the US is wasted on native born Americans, people who bitch and moan all the time about government interference and bureacuracy. I wouldn't wish Stamp Duties or Civil Law Notaries on my worst enemies. Hell will be an eternity of standing in line trying to line up the correct signatures on a piece of paper that has no relevance or meaning. I have come to deeply appreciate the value of customer service, and every time I leave this country I have to suck up all my reserves of patience as I remember what it takes to deal with surly clerks and disinterested public employees. Oh and there isn't much in the way of Mexican food in Italy either. But there is in Homestead:
I rewarded myself with lunch at Los Nopalitos on East Mowry Avenue; turn east at the Police Station on Krome Avenue in downtown Homestead. That's the yellow building barely visible in the photograph:
And for $6:80 I had lunch including a Coca Light, gracias, and a pile of steaming hot corn tortillas:
A quick stop at Lowe's to justify driving the car to Miami, and I shoved an outdoor fireplace in the trunk, on sale for just over a hundred bucks. My wife had admired our friends Lisa and Jacques fireplace and I figured she'd like one of her own.
"Have a nice day," the Lowe's clerk said cheerfully and yes, I thought to myself I really will. Nice of you to say it, I wanted to reply but she would have thought I was weird, because she's never lived in Italy and doesn't know how comforting the phrase "Have a nice day" is, especially when it comes from a stranger. 
It happened one day a few years ago that I was working in the shipping department at Fast Buck Freddie's and I'd just come in from the alley in the back of the store when one of my co-workers came up all in a lather and said; "Did you see Jimmy back there?" "Jimmy who?" said I, "Jimmy Buffett,of course, someone said he's out back." "No," said I, "but there was some bald dude back there." Which it turned out was the person I had exchanged pleasantries with while I was taking a break from humping stuff into the store. That's as much as I know about the mythical Jimmy Buffett, a singer who inspires a following, some people describe as 
Jimmy Buffett's public story is all American and it's tied tightly into Key West, where he washed up years ago with a guitar and a desire to sing and those modest beginnings turned into a worldwide following and fortune and all the trappings. Everyone wants a piece of him and now that the 
I am really vague about all this, but I believe it's called the meeting of the minds or some such and the acronym 
Buffett no longer lives in Key West but he has a music studio on the waterfront and he owns part of the building where Fast Buck's is located, so my meeting him in the back wasn't exactly an outrageous coincidence. That's the building wherein his restaurant is located:
Margaritaville is where Buffett fans show up year round. Frankly if all cults were like the 
The "nuns" who descended on 
"We're drinking to save your soul !" they cackled at him as they shoved bystanders aside to get their pictures taken. I could well believe it, the bit about his soul; it was barely one o'clock and they were tanked. These cultists are all about being cheerful and they exuded happiness as they stood around in the 500 block of 
Early in the day there were the unmistakable signs of a Buffet gathering on the streets of Key West:
And then 
And they wheeled out the food stands and the barbecue and the beer and the party began. 
And a final thought as winter closes in, from the bus of the band that played to the crowd:
Which would be, of course, Key West.
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