Faffing Around

I have discovered I am the object of some quizzical inquiry in my place of work. It turns out the two regular members of my shift, Nick who is a Conch:

And JW who is also a man of long lineage in Key West:

...have been monitoring me and my use of language. This came up the other day as I was dealing with a recalcitrant Trainee who was having difficulty believing I knew what I was talking about. He was staring at the monitor as I was explaining step by step how to enter certain information into the computer. The police dispatcher on our shift is required to note and type every piece of activity called out by the cops on patrol and if the dispatcher doesn't keep up the flood of information can be overwhelming.

 

After the Trainee went on break I was sitting there enjoying the silence of not training for a minute when JW started giggling. 

"We were texting, Nick and me and it turns out faffing is a real word, at least in Urban Dictionary," JW said staring into his phone. Cross-room texting is popular in dispatch when I'm training as I spend a lot of time talking and explaining and using examples to keep the Trainee alert, killing other more leisurely conversation that usually fills the room. That Nick and JW were commenting on my vocabulary came as a bit of a surprise.

(This is a former dispatch Trainee I worked with years ago, now a cop on the road:

)

It turns out I had been indulging my use of language with an old English expression, "For God's sake stop faffing around and enter the call," I'd said in exasperation as the Trainee wondered which way was up. And JW and Nick had caught on and asked themselves if "faffing" really is a word. Apparently it is. BY the way the Trainee got over his nerves, stopped faffing around and got the job done. 

I enjoy the English sense of humor, dry and rather restrained yet biting while understated. Humor is much easier to deploy in a mono-culture because the goal posts are the same. In the US there is always someone ready to be mortally offended by a public display of biting humor. JW and Nick's attention to detail surprised me. 

It turns out my language has been monitored on other occasions too.  In conversation I mentioned someone was a pompous gasbag, and JW later told me he rushed to the dictionary as he heard me say it and later still he was most excited to find the word pompous in a comic he was reading, "...and I knew exactly what they meant!" he told me triumphantly. 

I was educated in a British public school at vast expense by my father who did not like me much (I was not biologically his) and who preferred to shuffle me off to a "good school" where I would be away 8 months of the year. Consequently my inability to capitalize on this investment in later years I think deepened the rift between us. I did not go to university, nor did I network, nor did I seek out meaningful employment: I ran away to California. 

So now, after a life spent faffing about I have finally found the source of meaning for all those years under the thumbs of Benedictine monks at Downside School: I am here to expand the vocabulary of my Conch colleagues. But don't imagine it's a one way street as I learn just as much from them about life as they learn obscure language arts from me. I can thus confidently say a meal without a banana is not a Conch meal in certain peoples' homes. JW is learning operatic arias as I forget myself and let loose as I come stumping up the stairs to work unaware he is at the top waiting to be serenaded. It's all a bit of a  trade off.

Darkness And Light

Years ago I was getting an education from the monks at an English Benedictine Abbey and Dom Daniel was assigned to teach me history. As one does when one is a schoolboy one soon learns to insinuate oneself into the memories of the teacher, the better to distract them from the lesson plan. That I was genuinely interested in history accounted in part for my interest in Dom Daniel's war service during the Second World War. As we walked the Downside Abbey Gardens discussing perhaps the English Civil War and the dissolution of the monasteries, I pressed Dom Daniel on his time with the RAF. His blue eyes twinkled beneath is red tonsure and he laughed out loud. "It would not be good for my humility!" he protested in his soft Irish brogue, a slave to his monastic vows. The lesson plan progressed.

So it was last night I wandered down to Duval Street on my four o'clock lunch break. Spring Break has been hitting us fairly hard and I felt it was time for me to see the chaos up close. After all it is easy to get detached from the business of policing the street when one gets to work from a secure, air conditioned room at the top of the police department. Something after the manner of the late Dom Daniel of Downside I felt it would be good for my humility. It was very good for my humility as it turned out. I can't possibly do what our young police officers do, night after night, with good grace and cheerfulness, dealing with drunks. I am just the dispatcher thank you, safe from the marauding crazies, wandering the streets in search of a drink and a new friend:I wonder sometimes why it is I like living in the Keys so much, especially as I am not in the least bit drawn to the preferred activity downtown. On my nights off I would rather sit at home and give myself an appendectomy than subject myself to the noise and crowds and stale beer smell of Lower Duval so imagine my surprise when I bumped into, literally, an off duty colleague of mine who apparently can't get enough of the bars. By the time I showed up it was after 4am (summer time) so they were closing and crowds were milling on the street.Everyone was very good natured, shouting to be heard over the confusion and laughter. Apparently some fights did break out but I walked the sidewalk unmolested, dodging crowds of raucous young people too busy making their point, whatever it was, to notice me. The cops standing around were also too busy keeping an eye on the seething mass to engage in banter with a bored dispatcher on lunch break.The hot dog stand was doing a roaring trade, as well it should because the dogs are quite tasty and doubtless especially so after a hard night's drinking. I like the hot dog stand partly also because it reminds me of taco stands I've frequented in Mexico, where the populace is out taking an entirely sober paseo, evening walk.

For some people the scruffy sidewalks of Lower Duval are the perfect environment to allow romance to flourish, a notion I find a little hard to second but there it is.Especially as it was freezing cold with a howling north wind and temperatures somewhere south of 60 degrees (15 Celsius). Nothing like a sticky cold sidewalk to get the youthful hormones in an uproar apparently.

It was clear to me I am not an urban animal, as though there were any doubt previously, and I slunk away from the bright lights and noise of this vision of an urban future previously predicted by Dante Alighieri and more recently in the movie Blade Runner. All Lower Duval lacked for my sensibilities was the patter of acid rain. If God doesn't have a sense of humor I shall be doomed to spend the rest of eternity in a place closely resembling Lower Duval at four in the morning...

However I do quite like Mallory Square at that hour of the morning it turns out. Who wouldn't with that deep black sky and wide open expanse of nothing but street lights glowing:

There were a few other people on the far side of the square sort of defying the curfew and enjoying the cold night air but i fiddled with my camera, and sat back to look at the impenetrable sky.This thing is so silly it always cracks me up:I think I must be too insecure because I wouldn't be seen dead with my head in one but I ride down Lazy Way Lane at Key West Bight and I always see smiling people getting their photos taken in a similar model. I expect they had nice upbringings in supportive families and thus aren't afraid to look stupid in public. This particular photographer's model is in back of El Meson De Pepe the best known Cuban restaurant on the island. Its usually pretty crowded so I don't get there very often but I really enjoyed their second location on the other end of the island. It didn't last which was too bad, but at Mallory Square El Meson's outside bar was closed for the night and looked very evocative to my camera.Warm Havana nights, even though its actually a cold Key West morning.

.

This is the part of town where the tower of the Pirate Historeum glows in the night and Tifts Alley and Wall Street are empty, waiting for tomorrow's loads of cruise ship tourists, trolley passengers and souvenir hunters:

And so, to bed after all the excitement, except this was just my lunch break so I walked back to my motorcycle and rode back to work. In fact I did no such thing. The car needs to be driven from time to time and the back end of a cold cold front is the perfect time to air out the Maxima in my opinion. On such a cold night the guest's wheels at the Ocean Key House were tucked carefully away out of the breeze. Had I been riding the Bonneville I might have been jealous.
As it was the heater worked nicely in the car:The Nissan got me home in good order after work too, as it happens. Me? Hardcore Biker? Hardly. Wandering downtown in the early, freakish hours gave me a fresh perspective on why I do like Key West drunks and all. So much going on in one block, so little in another just a short walk away. Lots of room for everybody in such a small place. The magic expanding island. All mine at four in the morning offering at least the illusion of solitude.

Slaughterhouse 7

Me and Sousaphone, 1973

When I was seven years of age my step father sent me to boarding school. It seemed normal enough, though painful, and I took the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as they came; that's what children do. I look back on my decade in English boarding schools and wonder: what were they thinking? The schools grew up in response to the need for colonial administrators in public service around the world, polishing the sun as it refused to set on the British Empire. Their children were herded in institutions of greater or lesser nastiness while their parents suppressed natives and sent home the products of all that far flung administration. Heart of Darkness wasn't in it.

Aerial View, Downside School, Stratton-on-the-Fosse

What these schools are doing in the 21st century I can hardly imagine, in a world where science has convinced me, childless though I am, that a solid close knit family upbringing is the best way to encourage level headed future citizens. Instead these places continue to adapt and create the background for Harry Potter and the benefits of magic. That they serve the scions of the wealthiest just makes their existence even weirder- they're not meant to be prisons they are supposed to release the inner fully rounded man (and woman in these enlightened days). Downside School in southeast England specializes in producing young Christian gentlemen, which it would, as the 600 pupils are attached to the Benedictine Abbey which operates the school.In the summer of 1973 my mother finally succumbed to the cancer that had been eating her brain and I returned to school to find consolation as best I could. My trombone classes were my escape and I would retire to the men's toilet at the school Theater and blat away at the Marine Corps anthem and "Silent Night" in B flat. The music school lacked rehearsal space and we used any and every available room to practice our dismal trade.

L-R Chuff, Simon McCall, Me

And then Kevin Byrne crashed the Music School like a Greenpeace protester at a whaler's convention. He rounded up the first few musicians he encountered and luckily for me he need to pee that morning and found me practicing assiduously in my hidey hole. So I became the second trombonist in a new experiment that was intended to make musicians of us and give us the appreciation of jazz we had so far never been exposed to.

We'd never been exposed to anyone like Chuff either- so called for his love of steam engines. He drank Real Ale, ran toy trains, ran everywhere with a limp ( I may be wrong but I think it was a motorcycle accident that gave him a scar on his shin). He could listen to a piece of music, throw it down on a few pages of handwritten scrawl, transpose it for harmonium and perform it on any musical instrument you'd care to name. He loved music and he loved teaching and he made life worth living for this accidental tuba player. I became a tuba player becuase this boy graduated and left the school, else I probably would never have had the opportunities I did:

As second trombonist I was a fairly obscure sound, in a room full of eager players but when the sainted Bernie left school I was promoted to fill his shoes. Bernie broke his arm (as seen above) and spent his musical season playing the sousaphone left handed, expertly, and I had to fill impossible shoes with my minuscule musical talents. My struggles to learn to support the band playing jazz and religious hymns, not to mention theater work and military music, kept me hard at it, and in a school where nothing much seemed to make sense, music gave me my my place in school and I earned modest renown as the man with the silver coil round his neck.

My role in all that stuff was very modest and just how modest was amply illustrated for me recently when the USPS dropped a package off at my house containing a printed summary of 34 years of musical tradition at Downside School.

It turns out the school is edging Chuff aside after decades of making music and thousands of miles traveled. "Internationally Renowned" is no exaggeration. When I played with the Slaughterhouse 7 we traveled no further afield than Wiltshire, but in the decades since, Chuff's energy has taken the musicians to Malta, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, South Africa, Chicago in 1987:Then there was Fiji and a performance at Sydney's Opera House. And raised millions for charity.

It was always a vague plan to go back to Downside and pay a visit to the Band Room, the place where I can fairly say I got a leg up on the rest of my life, but now it's all gone. Progress has swept away the traditional jazz refuge that Chuff gave us, the breath of clean fresh air is drowned by a stuffy need for test scores and scholarships up the educational ladder, and so Downside goes back to the stultifying world Chuff saved me from so many years ago, in the boys loo at the School Theater. The sounds of the iPod have drowned the squawks of the students' horns and learning ain't what it used to be. And I never did take the time to wander down memory lane. Too late! No matter how hard I try I still manage to miss the bus from time to time in Life's unravelling of Time.Lo! A thought! Now at last, my wife knows exactly how it is that I occasionally manage to surprise her by knowing the words to traditional jazz standards and why New Orleans, pre-Katrina, always appealed so much to me.

Chuff left his mark, and I doubt he has any idea how profound it is.

Vespas

It all started out in the Fall of my 12th birthday with the arrival in my life of a bright orange Vespa 50. It was my mother's surprise birthday gift which she announced to me on our way from the airport, sitting in the back of a cab, 20th century Roman ruins flashing by in the background, the Rome of Fellini, though I knew it not at the time.
It would have taken so little to pose boy and machine in the middle of those hillsides, but I guess it never occurred to me to get off and stop riding for what we call today a photo-op, even had I known what that meant.

I was appalled by the gift of such magnificence, I didn't now what to say, a vehicle of my own put me in the world of the self-propelled. This at a time when in Umbria most of my neighbors were still hoping for their first car as their cared for their oxen, ploughed fields by animal power and went to church on foot. I felt like a yokel attempting to assimilate the gift of an automobile- catapulted far above my station wondering what the consensus would be were my peers to hear of my promotion to motorized driver.

It served me well, taking me all over the Umbrian hillsides of my childhood, for I was no more than a child. I rode that orange machine every vacation I spent in Umbria, and at the end of each I put the Vespa away under cover and there it waited for my next release from boarding school in England. And I have no memory of regrets or longing when I put away the Vespa, put away my shorts and pulled out my pinstriped pants, black tie and black jacket- the accoutrement's of the Young Catholic Gentleman Downside Abbey struggled to make of me.

My sister, one of twins, went out with a young man who rode a Vespa, a sky blue 125cc, and it was there I took my first ride on a scooter, my sister in back sidesaddle, her husband-to-be steering and me, from time to time, 8 years old and standing proudly holding the handlebars in front. 41 years on the Vespa is still there, clean and covered awaiting its owners decision to give in to modern helmet laws and take her for a spin in the 21st century. He has little to say of the halcyon days of his youth, except to point out that the machine he courted my sister on was never very fast. "And now I've got to wear a helmet to go slow," and he shrugs, unsentimental farmer that he is.

When I first saw my sister after 25 years away from her home she took me with pride to see the old machine, freshly painted and ready to go. "We still have it," she said shyly. And I found the foot board on the left hand side where she rested her feet riding sidesaddle, a practice forbidden in my home state of Florida, a place where paradoxically one may ride without a helmet!

Time passed and the fad for off road motorcycles swept the Italian countryside. I sold the orange Vespa and traded its reliable power and its comfort for a manly 50cc Beta, an offroad rocket that pleased me at the time and took me on goat trails inaccessible to my Vespa, but that eventually gave way to a real motorcycle, a road machine, and I took those trail riding skills with me on my journeys.

Vespas always hovered on the periphery of my vision and when I read about Roberto Patrignani's trip overland by Vespa to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 I decided to take a trip by Vespa too. 6 months I spent crossing the US and Mexico in 1981 on a P200E I bought in New York. I rode south, my first brush with Florida and visited Vespa Ft Lauderdale for a service and they repaired an electrical glitch, under warranty and in 24 hours! I wasn't even surprised because Vespa was always known as a world wide operation. And there in the background you can see they were still selling orange Vespas, just as I remembered mine, even though these, the height of modernity sported turn signals and mirrors.

That journey across America was perhaps the most enjoyable trip i ever took on two wheels, a journey marked by encounters, a lack of drama, and more photos than I had ever previously bothered to take, it marked a turning point and a year later I was re-united with the white P200E in California ready to start a new life together.

By 1989 I was older and no wiser. I sold my P200E after years of service and thousands of miles commuting. Vespa in the US had folded operations, the Vespa shop in Los Gatos had long closed and I thought I was holding onto a relic. Anyway I was leaving Santa Cruz and California on my boat and had no room for my elderly, outmoded two wheeler...

...Nowadays I promise my wife I would no more sell my Vespa than I would a kidney. It may be late but I have learned my lesson and my GTS is mine till the bitter end, and perhaps when I am immolated at last, my elderly, outmoded 250cc Vespa will go with me

And with it the memories of its predecessors who left such a mark in my memory that I never have looked at a Vespa since without longing. What an odd obession.