Flying Dreidels

I was rushing up the stairwell at work, the ends of my motorcycle jacket flying, my hands encumbered variously by my man purse and my lunch box. I was minutes away from being late for work, the first time in a couple of years and blam! Who should I bump into on the stairs but the Great Gawd Almighty City Manager himself. He's smiling cheerfully and its 4 minutes to six in the am. I am not smiling, I'm gasping, and with a brief "goo..mo..ning" I'm gone down the corridor motorcycle boots thumping on the carpet as I skid into the doorway of the 9-1-1 call center. What the bloody hell is he doing in the police station at this hour of the a.m.?

"I'm never usually this late," I wanted to shout over my shoulder, "but I was nearly knocked off my motorcycle by a flying dreidel!" As if he would have believed me. An excuse worthy of Reginald Iolanthe Perrin indeed. The manager was cruising down to the briefing room to meet the troops, who were no doubt equally enthusiastic as I was to meet him for the first time.

The morning had started off well enough, with a brisk alarm ring at four minutes past four, followed by an instant leap out of bed and into my t shirt and shorts cycling gear. A pair of crocs on my feet and the bicycle is downstairs illuminated by the harsh glare of the outside lights. I am properly awake.

The ride was excellent, a half hour whizzing through the mangroves, past the dormant Cuban Deli, under the harsh orange glare of the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority pumping station's street lights, and so back home in a tingling lather. I am an unfit suburban rider far from the world of spandex, tour de France and racing ten speeds. I pedal sedately upright on my three speed automatic. Very refreshing.

My commute started less well after I pointed the Bonneville south on Highway One. Four smooth gear shifts and we were purring along at 60mph on an empty highway (speed limit: 45mph). Up over the 40ft Nile Channel Bridge things got sticky, stuck behind a 50mph truck with a Proud to be American sticker (I'd like one that reads Cheerfully American, or Grateful to be American on my Triumph) and a large flag decal on the tailgate.

We purr through Summerland Key under the streetlights (45mph zone continues) at a respectable if timid 55 and in the glow of the street lights I can just make out the time: 5:25am. I'm on target if not ahead of myself. It's on Cudjoe Key that things become unglued. Were I not wearing heavy gloves (its 74 degrees) and a full face helmet (its 74 degrees I say) I'd rub my eyes in disbelief for the Proud American in the full size pick up in front of me has slowed to 38mph (45 zone continues) and peering round him I see a car with a stalk on the roof and a red light on top of that. Absurd, I think to myself, that can't be right.

Can it? Anything's possible in the Keys. But why so slow? Argh!

Sure enough, we take the wide sweeping corner at Square Grouper and there in front of the car I see two more cars also equipped with red light poles on the roof and a slow work truck towing what appears to be an elaborate outhouse. By now I can barely bring myself to wonder what the hell is going on so slow is the parade. Further up ahead I can see more illuminated masts riding on cars and an RV and some sort of machine between them with what appears to be a billboard on the roof.

Then the penny drops -it's Christmas! This must be some peculiar traveling circus of strange religiosity coming to Key West to offer season's greetings to the southernmost hedonists. I've never found eternal salvation to mix very well with 20th century advertising razzmatazz.

And to make things worse, they are driving slowly and by the light of the lamp over the Sheriff's substation I see its gone 5:30am. Time's a-wasting as the red lights wobble on the carefully proceeding cars.

Finally we crawl past the traffic light at Sugarloaf School and just as I am about to open it up (45mph zone continues) and zip past the Proudly American truck and the illuminated mobile roof ornaments a car crests the bridge ahead and I have to wait. Then, past the bridge, Mile Marker 20 opens up a long sweeping stretch of roadway with a gentle curve to the right, it takes a flick of the wrist I'm hitting 75 (45mph zone continues) putting me past the truck, the three cars and the rolling outhouse. Up ahead the billboard is illuminated and visible beyond the other three cars with lighted poles on their roofs.

The outhouse was weird. It had writing celebrating Hanukkah on it and the walls were painted like faux New England brick work. This is a Jewish caravan? Curiouser and curiouser muttered the motorcyclist into his helmet. Especially as New England brickwork, I'm pretty sure never was seen in pre-Christian Palestine. But what's a little historical inaccuracy between believers?

The cars up ahead met their fate when finally we were all free of the 45 mph constraints and entered the highway beyond Sugarloaf Lodge. Here the limit rises to 55mph and I jerked the Bonneville out and beyond the illuminated poles tucking in behind the billboard to avoid oncoming cars.

It was a dreidel, illuminated from within and twirling gently from one side to the other in the slipstream of the car beneath. It looked delicate like rice paper and fragile enough to flip backwards, cutting its bonds to the automobile and toppling onto the Bonneville behind. I throttled back.

After a decade of pootling through the Saddlebunch Keys we finally trooped through Big Coppitt where a few startled dog walkers paused to check out the mobile-museum-cum-illuminated-RV trailed by a flying dreidel and a motorcycle outrider. I was aware the time was 5:45am and I was at Mile Marker 10 with eight long miles to go and a current speed set at a divinely inspired 37mph. Soon though we crossed the bridge to Rockland Key (Mile Marker 9) and the Highway turns gloriously to four lanes (55mph zone) and a straight shot to Key West and the police station.

The final insult as we dropped off the causeway onto the four lane was when the dreidel meister and his cohorts, instead of slipping politely into the right lane took up station in the overtaking lane. Argh!

I like to think the Jewish God is a forgiving sort (my wife assures me He is) because I was ripping His devoted followers all sorts of unmentionable orifices as I dropped two gears and gunned the Bonneville to an embarrassingly high speed in order to pull past before they spread like locusts across all available lanes at a stately 37 mph. I'm pretty sure my rapid fire swearing combined with the slipstream of my angry passing wobbled that dreidel worse than it had wobbled all the way from wherever it originally came.

And that is how I nearly mowed down the City Manager on my to work. Not quite late, but entirely out of breath cursing a group of sweet defenseless Hanukkah lovers out to spread the light of good cheer across the land.

I am a brute and I am sorry. I could have just left the house five minutes earlier and avoided putting my immortal soul and the spirit of the season at risk. I am humbled.

A Midnight Clear

Once upon a time on an island long, long, ago a crisp clear night fell across the land and the residents trembled. For they had no heat; there was no heat upon the scraps of land and over the water neither was there heat. And the residents trembled for they saw temperatures had dropped to an all time recorded low of 41 degrees, and across the islands there was bugger-all heat. That was the coldest low ever recorded and the residents noted it, and it was not good. Absolutely no good at all.The Christmas Season in the Florida Keys is different. Obviously there isn't any snow on the ground and never will be, but there's more to it than that. Christmas comes not with attitude, like there comes across the rest of the land as normally level headed people become ravening shoppers, but these islands enjoy a leavening of humor. The three homes on Sugarloaf Key ho ho ho'ing always make me smile as I ride past Mile Marker 16 on my way home in the dark of evening.

I don't much care for Christmas and I never have. When I was a child Christmas was a time of extra family tension and when I left home all that got left behind as well. Then when I got married I told my wife I had an aversion to Christmas and she replied by pointing that she was a Jew, so that solved that. And then we moved to the Keys nearly a decade ago.

The first few years one lives in the Keys it is a constant source of amazement to see people dressing warmly for winter- long pants, boots, fall fashions are everywhere, and then slowly one acclimates and a sudden plunge to 72 degrees finds oneself also covered in long sleeves and long pants, Just like the Conchs. Luckily the temperature plunges don't last and one can tentatively resume short sleeves and short pants when out and about. And those warm winter nights between cold fronts are perfect for wandering the neighborhoods looking for: It surprises me but I like Christmas in the Keys, not least because there is, against the odds, a community down here and holidays are holidays and if your's is Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, its all the same thing. Key West is the first place I've lived where tolerance and diversity make halfway decent bedfellows, so if someone else's Christmas tree is my wife's Hanukkah bush that's okay too. Of course this is America so the consumer frenzy that is modern Christmas is in full swing, catalogues worn thin by thumbing, UPS desperately looking for fill-in help, all the usual high stress rubbish. For some of us its a great time to have a second childhood, and make it a really good one this time around. Happy Holidays to the mainland under snow ice and drizzle, but I've got to go ride my Bonneville.

The Big Smoke

Miami 2007 is not London 1850 (which used to be known thanks to its coal generated smog as "The Big Smoke" to country bumpkins), but after a few blissful weeks without having to go up to the big city, today was the day. The wife had to visit the surgeon for a pre-operative check up as she is scheduled (thanks to the succesful check-up!) to get her wrist sliced and diced and repaired in ten days. She had the same surgery last year on her other wrist as her arthritis is causing bone spurs to threaten the tendons that control her hands.

Its a form of Hanukkah gift to herself at this time of year, combining some sick leave along with pre-Christmas school closure so she gets three weeks off to recover. It also means that for the six weeks she's in a cast she won't miss swimming as the waters are too cold for us for the rest of winter. She knows the awful pain she will be in starting December 17th which makes her a bit jittery. I drove to and from, as per usual and I tried to find some joy.

The traffic up was reasonably light and speedy on Highway One and the Maxima was in fine fettle though I didn't need to do much passing as even the slow pokes managed to hold 60mph in the 55mph sections of the Overseas Highway. The bummer was that our regular pit stop in Marathon, 30 minutes from home was shut down, and permanently by the look of things. Its a Pepto-Bismol pink hut by the south side of the Highway serving cheap and cheerful Cuban food, slowly its true, but hot and delicious cheese toast in a huge wedge. perhaps the wedges were too big or the curvy Cuban babe who operated the espresso machine got whisked off her feet by one of the burly construction workers that lurked around the place every time I stopped there. nevertheless we had to hold out to Denny's Latin Diner in Islamorada for con leche and cheese toast.

There's another weird thing, Starbucks, which has had an outlet on Duval street for about three years, now has a store in Islamorada, right next to Denny's Latin Cafe, the only decent coffee shop in 80 miles, and Starbucks has to stick another location right next door to try to drive them out of business. I like Starbucks drinks but their predatory construction practices suck.

It was our last stop before the mainland madness, 90 mph on the turnpike, crowded traffic lights and lots of hurry-up-and-wait at Baptist Hospital at the University of Miami. So we sat at Denny's table, listened to loud salsa music over the speakers and indulged in the 78 degree sunny morning.

The hospital, buried near the tip of the lush Coral Gables Golf course was where the pre-op check was done, but the surgeon operates out of a gruesome clinic in North Miami, a stark cold place with angry staff and cruddy facilities, so we had to cross the entire city on the turnpike to get there. Not without reason are Miami drivers rated among the most aggressive in the nation- all those Cuban, Colombian and Venezuelan exiles drive like they are back home. But in a powerful car the stream of urgent traffic gets you there in a hurry!

Coral Gables by contrast is one of those leafy cities, a suburb within the boundaries of the larger metropolitan area, Atherton in Northern California might be comparable or Lake Forest north of Chicago where one of my wife's aunts lives, all trees, large urban homes, in Coral Gables on Spanish named Avenues (Granada, Pilarcito etc...) with huge ficus trees, sweeping driveways and pink tiled roofs, the sort that spew tiles like chaff in a hurricane.

Finally we got to go shopping after all the doctoring and my wife had time only for a short tour of the huge South Miami Target with its vast multi-storey parking lot such as doesn't exist in the Keys. Target is the store she most misses in the lonely fastness of Key West, and of course Costco, where we went later, for those essential huge boxes of bananas and 144 count tubs of sponges and barrels of liquid aminos and I don't know what.

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Once again I felt like a country bumpkin, admiring the huge rows of clean orderly shelves in Target, the vast acres of al fresco parking at Costco:

We came home, a quick three hour drive, to the sounds of the NPR Presidential Debate from Iowa on the Sirius satellite radio with a bundle of white roses we bought from a street vendor, too late to light the evening candle for the first night of Hanukkah. The light burns bright inside, now that we are home amidst the stillness of life in the Lower Keys.