Lessons From A Genoese

After we decided on an outline of a retirement plan five years ago and moved into a rental house on Cudjoe Key from our home on Ramrod we settled back in to another very quiet suburban life. I worked nights for much of the time coming and going like a vampire, sleeping by day and grinding toward the much desired retirement. After I fell into disfavor with a new boss and was pushed to days by office politics I still found myself leaving home before dawn and in winter coming home well after dark. The punishment of day shift suited me so there I stayed, not least because the architect of my banishment to days didn't want me back on nights.  

This reversal led to me living more daylight time on my street and I have long felt lucky to be in a quiet neighborhood of people who for the most part go to work and keep pretty much to themselves. The most jovial and noisy character is a handy Cuban American who lives to help his neighbors, a trait most in evidence after Hurricane Irma wrecked our neighborhood. The storm came to the Keys right up Spanish Main with 140 mile per hour winds.

Our immediate neighbors have been rather odd people, a New England couple who bought the house as a retirement place and who visited from time to time and spent their visits obsessively cleaning and tiding and bringing order to their lot. My wife the jovial extrovert invited them round to drinks but if looks could kill they would have sizzled her and her invitation! They remarked they don't touch alcohol, to which my irrepressible wife replied well...coffee perhaps? But even she withered under their  stern puritanical stares. Well, that didn't go so well. We stayed frostily apart.

The New England wife has never warmed up but she has been slightly undermined by her husband who reminds me of one of those characters from a sort of Leave It To Beaver cast of characters, the hen pecked husband or some such. He talks to us when we swim in the canal and she doesn't seem to be around. He talked of his own swimming exploits until someone told him crocodiles inhabit the mangroves outside the canal. I find the constant barrage of neighborly negativity in one's life will kill off hopes and dreams faster than any another cause. He stopped swimming while we continue to paddle in the increasingly cold Fall waters. Normally we try to start swimming with the daylight time change in Spring and stop around the winter time change coming up next week after we are gone.

Then weirdly the neighbor came by and asked if we minded them cutting down the coconuts on the trees on the property line. This was very odd because last year they called the landlord to ask him if they could trim them half way to extinction and he called us in a weird game of telephone. This time he came directly and I shrugged and said no problem, we're gone on Monday. And after he digested all that (José up the street knew but this guy was apparently out of the loop) he asked, as they do inevitably, where are you going? I sighed as I don't want to sound evasive but I really have very little idea how to explain an open ended journey. Namibia? Cairo? Belen? Samarkand?

This part of the conversation always sounds a bit weird to my ear. I say we are taking off in the van and they say where to? And I'm damned if I know how to reply. I try to temper my answer to the plausibility of the answer to the listener's ears. The short answer is Mexico for the winter, Alaska next summer and maybe South America after that. Tons of people do that, and you can check the Overland sites on Facebook to see the barrage of chatter on the subject. This guy shocked me more than a bit after he heard my reply and because I didn't want to sound evasive all I said was: Patagonia.

He looked puzzled. Where's that? I've never heard of it. Oh I said trying not to sound like I was talking to the class dunce, the Southern end of South America, realizing, because I am slow on the uptake, that I had just overshot his geographical capacity. Glad I didn't say Tierra del Fuego or something obscure. Ushuaia perhaps? The capital of Antarctic Argentina and (putative) capital of the Argentine Falklands. 

Because he had no idea what I was talking about the conversation drifted off and I was spared more talk. I only talk about my hopes among friends, people like Carol who has an ambition to visit every island she can, and who dragged my wife to Easter Island, followed by sailing on a Gulet in Turkey among other travels. Carol could be a candidate to accompany Layne to Vietnam, a country that doesn't interest me and which I would like to palm off on a friend as travel companion. Carol knows where Patagonia is and can appreciate the desire to see it.

I talk about it on this page because it is what I want to see, and it is in part why I am leaving the Keys. I know that every plan is just that and any number of things can derail them, injury, illness, plague, mechanical failure, loss of nerve, fear and so forth. But this page is the page to dream and hope.

I find it disturbing that geography and history, things that interest me and seem commonplace can be so obscure. I have my own vast cultural black holes, lacking as I do any profound interest in baseball statistics or popular music. I struggled with sports when I was younger and over breakfast with my buddy Bill, in Santa Cruz in the 1980's we read the San Francisco Chronicle and he quizzed me on the sports pages when I wanted to read Herb Caen's three dot columns...Many breakfasts we ate at the Catalyst nightclub (oddly, a breakfast place too) while I tried to sort Meat Packers from Raiders and such.

Despite his coaching I never really got the sports thing under my belt. Webb Chiles, himself an inveterate traveler pointed out I would do better  boning up soccer stats to prepare myself for south of the border than being up on politics and history, and no doubt he is right. However I am what I am, and history and geography have kept my interest alive in the world over the decades. Not knowing that Patagonia even exists would be a sin in my religion.

And yet people get through life quite cheerfully and successfully with no clue about Magellan, von Humboldt, Vancouver or Cook. Half of me wishes I had been born to the great age of European exploration, despite the dangers and discomforts and if you read my description of the van, the very lengthy description, you know discomfort is not really my thing. I'd give up four wheel drive for a plush bed and a portable potty any day. Indeed that's exactly what I did. 

I took to the sidelines on Columbus Day while other people wrestled publicly and drearily with the concept of Indigenous People's Day. I used to think of these holidays as Hallmark holidays but nowadays I move agilely with the times and think of them as Facebook Holidays. Everyone has an opinion and is happy to argue the toss with strangers, and then the whole historical mess is forgotten the next day with the next online drama.

Columbus was an adventurer and thus not given to administration and that makes him a worm. However we ourselves are living in a world where Hispaniola is a mess, and we treat the distress with about the same level of care as Columbus did. Indigenous People's Day? Sure we all want to celebrate that worthy cause but then bring up the notion of reparations and the tax watchers all come out armed to the teeth with indignation. I think I am despite appearances, getting older as I have less and less interest in boarding the nearest passing political bandwagon. 

Then my apparently well educated neighbor tells me the rest of the world is a mystery to him and I wonder why anyone worries about Columbus Day. With all this public anguish in the air I do what my Italian ancestors would have done: I say a Mea Culpa and pass the collections plate to my neighbor.  I am neither religious nor spiritual but I do admire the pursuit of either by my well meaning neighbors:

From Wikipedia:

Unity describes itself as a worldwide organization offering an approach to Christianity which teaches a positive approach to life, seeking to accept the good in all people and events. It began as a healing ministry and healing has continued to be its main emphasis. It teaches that all people can improve the quality of their lives through thought.

Unity describes itself as having no particular creed, set dogma, or required ritual. It maintains that there is good in every approach to God and in every religion that fulfills someone's needs. It holds that one should focus not on past sins but on the potential good in all.

Unity emphasizes spiritual healing, prosperity and the curing of illness by spiritual means, but it does not reject or resist medical treatments. It is accepting of the beliefs of others.

Taking off like this into the void makes me appreciate the intense bravery, perhaps merely lust for wealth of those early explorers. They must have had balls of steel, lacking every modern device to find their way. The fact that Columbus never did locate the continental United States or Mexico and that he always figured he was in India, a land of myth, makes his voyages even more remarkable to me. That they could plunder, rape and murder in the name of God gives one some idea of how warped the human mind can become at the prospect of wealth. 

And here I am fussing about the size of my tires while rejecting satellite phones and carefully packing clean clothes, micro-sized electronics and long life foods that Columbus could never have dreamed of in his philosophy. Maps?  He didn't need no stinking' maps. Not least because there weren't any...

In a physical sense I know where I am going more or less as I love reading modern maps and charts. In the more complicated world of inner journeys it's all up in the air and thus rather exciting. I'm pretty sure I know where Patagonia is, and I have an idea what it may be like, and I wonder how shall I cope with wind and rain and cold and gray and summers like winters, but I may come away a better person for the struggle I hope.

I am not fond of killing for work or sport or even as a concept, but I know I'd make a dismal administrator. I took what I was given to do at work by people I viewed as crazily ambitious set in judgement above me because I knew I didn't want their jobs especially as the work seemed to make them crazy. In no way could I have run the dispatch center filled with angry personalities and drama queens. I kept my head aimed at the damned pension. I have no way of knowing how badly I might have fared trying to run a colony in a New World, but I doubt I'd have had the nerve to jump off from Spain bound for God knows where in the first place. In an age where cheerful Mexico puts the fear of death into most North Americans I find their ability to criticize Columbus rather laughable. Perhaps to be a true exploiter/administrator you need to be self centered and fixated and thus cruel. Most of us aren't any of that.

I know wherein I shall suffer on the road, seeing the abandoned dogs. Thats about my level of tolerance for human cupidity and cruelty. After that it all becomes a blur. My father in law preferred not to travel to avoid seeing children mired in poverty with no futures and not much hope. Harold wasn't stupid. From the perspective of a man on the brink all I can see right now is the bravery of Columbus, not the awfulness. I'll get back to you on that when I get back myself.

Restoring Key West

I took a few photographs wandering up and down and around following my dog who does not always walk in straight lines.  One of the last pictures I took of Duval Street before the lock down was a black and white photo under the colonnade in front of La Concha with  vendors looking for customers under threat of closure, which of course came to pass. And now the wheel has gone round and at least one is back to give a semblance of normal trade on a street that dealing with quite a few closed storefronts.

The thing about business closures in Key West is that they happen all the time. People come and people go and with them go their dreams, their jobs, their businesses. The damned virus has stomped on a greater number than usual I dare say but Key West is the island of dreams and hopes. So businesses come and go. I used to try to keep track of them but now I try not to act surprised when I see a new storefront. Because I am a police and fire dispatcher I like to have a mental picture of the addresses but sometimes I find myself losing track. Luckily we are fully computerized so as long as the power isn't out I have lots of tools to help!

There is always a spark I find in certain people, and I'm not one of them, that sees opportunities for business and Key West seems to fire them up more than usual. The thing is Key West is the kind of vacation town that makes the impossible seem possible. You might find Cancun delightful but setting up a business in a foreign country is only for the hardiest entrepreneur. Key West is Florida, the Sunshine State that welcomes every off beat and mainstream hopeful.

The funny part is once you've been here a while you can find yourself judging a new arrival's chances. If you look back over the years and I've been musing on this page almost daily since June 2007 you'll see I've noted that Key West seems to spit people out if they somehow don't manage to fit in. I can'rt exactly define the parameters but like the judge said in reference to pornography, I can't define it but I know it when I see it. 

I noted in reference to the closure of one business there were comments made  to the effect that the owner never made any effort to fit in and despite the eatery's apparent success no one expected it to stay. I never ate there and i doubt I shall look up any of his businesses in St Augustine next time I'm there. But some people take these things personally as though they had a stake in other people's business acumen or desire.

I have a line for prospective applicants for residence whether via a job or business which is to tell them to give up all ambition. If you're lucky and persistent you can make a go of it but the chances of you rising to the top is unlikely as not only are the best jobs and locations taken, any outsider exhibiting ambitious tendencies may not find the climate the most hospitable.

I knew a guy 15 years ago who applied to be a dispatcher and got in the training program. I really liked him as he was my age and had a similar sense of humor. When he interviewed for the job the boss at the time asked that interview question about where he wanted to be in ten years. "In your job!" he said brightly as he had life experience and had played the game in other business environments. I winced when he told me. Wrong I said, Should have told 'em you want to enjoy being a good dispatcher. Ambition is not a good thing. He looked shocked but in the end dispatching wasn't his thing and he left.

I have no idea how to run a business, nor yet how to run one without ambition, and even less how to run a business in this coronavirus mess but I have no doubt clever hopeful ambitious people will step and give it a try in the wake of the closures. My other piece of advice, worth what it costs to hear, is if you choose to live in Key West be tolerant. Don't thunder around trying to change what you don't like. It irritates your neighbors and things are the way are for reasons that may not immediately be apparent.Key West: the town of unintended unexpected consequences.  

Statues Zombies and Social Chatter

When yesterday morning I walked Rusty downtown and Key West was empty, more so than prior to the usual hurricanes of recent memory, I thought these statues of the late Seward Johnson would be the only inappropriate social gathering I might see. Wrong!

I fear that in the not too distant future our governor will join those who forbid sauntering outside at all, and in Italy and Spain I read you can only walk your dog within a quarter of a mile of your home. Fines are being levied. So when I saw a couple of newspaper readers on the waterfront at Margaritaville Resort I figured they knew enough not to get close and if they hadn't wiped down the benches more fools they.

 But of course not everyone was so aware and a gathering of yoga matted bicycle riders formed at the end of the walkway, next to Admiral's Cut to share endless loud stories and copious quantities of Covid-19 no doubt. I don't think they were Spring Breakers who have happily evaporated back whence they came to infect those closest and dearest to them. 

There were a few people out and about early in the day, mostly other people walking dogs, and a few joggers and cyclists of one sort or another.

It seems like social distancing has become the new normal and a very good thing it is too. When I get home after walking and neither sitting on benches or touching anything the first thing I do is put my clothes in my laundry hamper. Then I take a shower and get clean clothes. It's become a routine.

Some people might call it a ritual but I haven't yet cottoned on to the idea that a routine becomes a ritual unless some higher power has been invoked. Taking a shower is routine in my home. Ablutions before prayers might be a ritual I suppose if I believed in such things.

Oh and while we are looking at a lucky few jogging through an empty Key West I'd like to make one other point of what irritates me most today (aside from the world appearing to end). When did "multiple" become the only way English speakers describe more than one of anything? If you come nearby and start telling me about multiple this or that I do believe I will violate the six foot separation space and share Covid-19 with you. Try saying "many" or "several" or "a few" or find your own thesaurus. I'm sick of distracting myself on YouTube and hearing multiple speakers droning on with multiple rhetorical questions about multiple aspects of photography or vans.

The Bodyzone gym closed the other day. That was okay as my immune deficient wife and I had already agreed to stop going. However when the small local gym near our home on Cudjoe Key also closed desperate measures were called for. My wife got out her rendition tapes and started us on a course of CIA approved interrogation techniques. The label said it was home exercise plans but I can't feel my legs and I'm pretty sure I am ready to tell anyone who will listen whatever they want to hear. My wife ignores my protests and keeps pressing on. Apparently she doesn't think I am properly broken yet. I am allowed to swim in the canal of an afternoon behind the house and that relieves the aches a bit. A gin and tonic later does its part too, as we soldier on in isolation.

Nearly nine o'clock on a Monday morning and Greene Street looks like the epicenter of a pandemic. All it needed was a few zombies to start giving me the creeps. When I got home my wife yelled through the shower door that a virologist on the radio thinks this can go on for more than a year.  I was not terribly polite when I refuted that suggestion. There have to be better ways to die than watching humanity crumble. My friend Webb is not fond of social media so I thought of him, hunkered with his wife Up North under a blanket, a thin one, of snow. He sent me pictures of lovely leafless trees covered in snow.  Back at you sailor man:

Someone headed yesterday morning for Federally approved social isolation west toward The Lakes or maybe Fort Jefferson. There was a decent breeze too, which is better than snow I think.

Clean Up

City Hall is looking spic and span these days despite the chaos in the city. 

 White Street Pier and the Aids Memorial less so. It's going to take a while for the crews to get around to cleaning the beaches and Higgs Beach streets. I hope the tourists are patient. Perhaps they can go and stare at the pristine city hall...

In the neighborhoods where they fit, that is to say New Town, these monsters have been scooping up mounds of leaves and sawed up trees:

One guy monitors the grabbing at ground level and the other one sits in a bucket seat and operates the arm. Pretty slick.

 In old town you couldn't fit one of these trains so clean up there will take longer.

It's a matter of closing streets here and there, setting up detours and plucking the stuff and shoving it into a much smaller truck. It will take longer.

 There's plenty of foliage to remove:

 This lot came bagged from a hotel:

 And yet, deliberately tossing garbage on the sidewalks still ticks me off. I know it's just force of habit but still. Is this necessary?

Dawn Walk

I figured an early morning walk in Key West would be pretty quiet on the Bridle Path before six in the morning. Hardly, there was constant traffic back and forth on South Roosevelt.

I was thinking how Key West is supposed to look when we got into Old Town. Like this picture below but I craftily cut out the air conditioning units in front of the buildings and the garbage cans and empty pizza boxes...

 Life is Good. I had just passed a double amputee sleeping on the sidewalk. I think he was sleeping alongside his wheelchair but I wasn't sure so I refrained from taking his picture. Then I saw this:

 The former Cuban Consulate always looks good on the 500 block of Duval in the early morning sun. I have been seeing rather crappy comments about visiting Cuba before American tourists ruin the experience. Frankly it's just one more reason not to comment on Facebook. I dislike it for several reasons:

Firstly if you want to go off the beaten track in Cuba even after mass tourism arrives you can always find your way far from the chain restaurants and stores that will be bound to show up in major tourist destinations. Secondly visiting Cuba right now smacks a lot more to me like exploitation in a country where women and boys prostitute themselves for foreign currency, and where the tourist has more than usual opportunity therefore to take advantage of a society surviving on very slender means. I have traveled in countries of extreme poverty and I can't say I particularly enjoyed being the richest man in town. I have no plans to go to Cuba until things settle down a bit. And even then I'm not sure how much it will appeal. I saw the Soviet Union before it collapsed and I'm not keen to spend money in another worker's paradise for now.

 On the subject  it would take a year's pay at official rates for a Cuban to go shopping in here. It seems life is either poverty stricken or conspicuous consumption. Very confusing.

Silly isn't it, but I still think of Fast Buck Freddie's especially when I see CVS open all night in the old Kress Building.

 I liked the architecture here on Caroline Street but I loved the huge sign.

 And this sign always provokes puzzlement and well it should. The permit scheme it refers to on Elizabeth Street has long since been replaced, several times, by new efforts. Residential permits at the moment are required to park in spaces marked residential. If you have property or reside in Old Town you get a sticker. Otherwise you have to pay for one. Ignore the sign. 

Key West confusion; long may it last.