A Cuban Lunch

I had not eaten a Cuban sandwich in a long time. I debated the exact amount of time with my wife and we couldn't decide if it had been one year or three and decided it was most likely two. Let's face it: a sandwich filled with meat cheese mayonnaise and lots of salt is not a health conscious choice so abstinence is not all bad. But once you have that flavor on your mind it's hard to dismiss it. 

It happened that I was on foot on White Street and looking for lunch. I thought about the new sandwich shop at the other end of the street, Ingrid's Kitchen offering Czech food to rave reviews. However I had to be at this end of the street in not much time. I tried the Polish Market next to the gas station but Covid has shut their kitchen temporarily according to the babushka at the counter. So at that point I fell back, not unwillingly on the old stand by and they did not disappoint.  

Sandy's had had a falling out with the employees who moved everything but the store up the street and opened a rival coffeeshop in a flurry of lawsuits and accusations over naming rights. Fernandy's came and went and the original Sandy's is still here and still delicious. A large café con leche and a heap of meat and cheese and calories and I was set to head across the street and deal with the title transfer on my scooter.

I like Sandy's and when I worked night shift at the police station three blocks away a strong Cuban coffee in the middle of the night was just the ticket sometimes. At the moment I work days and they are no longer a twenty four hour operation but every time I drive by that's what I think about, coffee and darkness.

The Harvey Government Center where I was bound was harboring the usual collection of dubious characters:

These guys failed to make the deadline for my chicken essay earlier this week so here they are parading around the grounds of the old school building at Truman and White. It's where we pay taxes, renew registration if we miss the mailing deadline and buy assorted permits. It's organized, the staff are very helpful and everyone wears a damned mask without arguing about it. I am so tired of mask protestors; if I'd wanted to deal with kindergarteners I'd have had my own.

Stuffed with food and one hundred dollar bills I waved good bye to the Suzuki Burgman 200 and while I was at it I also waved good bye to Sandy's for a while. You just can't eat there every day you know. I mean you could but there would be consequences...
 

Sandy's Not Sandy's

Cuban coffee just got complicated in Key West on White Street. So I stopped by when I saw the old Sandy's Cafe was open once again.

The Facebook page didn't lie apparently and Sandy's did move up the street one block south from the famous laundry location. The place has the same red and white awning and is now open for business.

So imagine the surprise when the old location, buttoned up for a day or two suddenly sprouted activity and coffee and everything. What....?  So when I came by and asked how come the confusion the guy at the counter said no confusion the Mexicans are down the street and this place is all Cuban, 5 am to 11 pm.  Okay then.

Indeed the fact that Key West's most well known cuban coffee location was run by Mexicans was always a source of amusement to me. I wasn't particularly fond of their few Mexican dishes and I stuck with basic Cuban sandwiches. Now those Mexican plates are gone on the new temporary menu:

I suppose I shall have to wander down to the "other Sandy's" or perhaps the original Sandy's or even the Mexican Sandy's and see how that place measures up with it's seating and everything. In fact while I was waiting a  woman came by to pick up her "to go order" and wasn't she confused when they didn't have it and they directed her down the street to the other Sandy's...I don' think this situation is tenable especially as the other lot has a second store on Fleming Street plus a brand new Food Truck driving around.

My cheese bread was quite good with lots of molten cheese and properly pressed bread (not crisped) while the coffee was not bitter like it used to be so my spontaneous lunch was better than I expected.  On that brief experiment the old old Sandy's gets a thumbs up.

Somewhere in this mess there is a messed up business contract or agreement or something but I can't  see how Key West can go on for very long without all these Sandy's ending up in front of the law which will have to decide who is called what. Until then I aim to enjoy the absurdity of the confusion.

Sunday

I have slipped from my overtime schedule into my regular work week schedule which means the New Year weekend is a blur of sleeping, walking Rusty and taking calls at work for emergencies real and sometimes imagined, thanks to the power of alcohol. Riding to work this week has been a crap shoot but so far I have avoided collisions with  distracted drivers though several memorable  near misses marked my ride to work Friday. Yesterday I pulled over on Highway One to create some separation from the other cars streaming to Key West for New Year's Eve. I just wanted to be alone.

 Clouds  were piling over the horizon driven by cool North winds and I was grateful for the cover of the windshield on the Vespa even though too many dead insects had smeared themselves on it, unwitting suicides. I don't set much stock in the change of the year. Orthodox Jews consider this to be the year 5775, Hindus think this is February 3102 and Muslims argue its  1438  and a few months...so calling tomorrow 2018 amounts to just one more human conceit. Still we need some sort of counting method I suppose to prevent collective insanity... In order to celebrate the end of the year, or just because I felt like it I stopped at Sandy's on White Street.

The place has changed a bit with English speakers in evidence. Recently I posted a picture of the new shop downtown on Fleming Street and there is a Sandy's food truck on the road as well. Change is good they keep telling us. So I had my usual, a con leche and cheese bread to fortify myself for 12 hours dispatching overnight. The hot milky coffee tasted good in the chill breeze blowing down White Street. Their new store on Fleming:

I got a chuckle out of the paper last week. It seems  a local construction company has plans to put 208 "affordable" housing units on Rockland Key near Mile Marker 9, close to the proposed Walmart. There are concerns about traffic and all the usual stuff but no one has dared say no to the Toppino family. They are the descendants of the cement company that won Flagler's contract to build his rail bridges more than a  hundred years ago.  Meanwhile the former owner of Sunset Key and the Westin Hotel, a relative newcomer, has been getting all kinds of grief for a similar, dare one say identical proposal for Summerland Key. He has been whittled down from 200 to 125 units at last count and maybe less before they finish messing with him. A stark reminder of the power structure in the Keys.

I posted a picture on Instagram last week of a Conch Cottage for sale, 2 bedrooms one bath 723 square feet with no garden to speak of, some off street parking and dingy little rooms- all for $1.2 million. When I took the picture I guessed half a million as an example of excessive pricing, maybe three quarters of a million if it were nice or had a pool or something. One point two million, which apparently no one has paid in a year of asking, seemed like a lot even to jaded old me.

The pity of it is that people who make interesting neighbors are driven from this town by these prices. I am not attracted to the types of people who see Key West as a drinking town where they can let loose the inhibitions they have to rein in at their home bases Up North. I don't see myself as a Bohemian in anyway at all but if I have to be around people I prefer to be around self absorbed and perhaps self destructive artists than nouveau riche prospectors mining Key West's  frost-free real estate. And in 2018 I see the prospects continuing to shift in that unhappy direction. 

For 2018 I hope the wilderness in Little Hamaca will survive a little more benign neglect, I hope hurricane season is mild and November elections offer positive results for a gentler future. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

Salsa At Sandy's Cafe

I think when my colleagues voted to send me down Virginia Street to get coffee and snacks from Sandy's Cafe, the all night Cuban Coffee shop on White Street, they weren't expecting me to get the better part of the deal. But I did. Take photos and make sure they don't eat all the croquetas-Nick texted on receipt of this picture:

The  great thing about Key West is that even at three in the morning it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to be an asshole or pick a fight on the streets. In my experience even drunks will at worst be annoying, though the requirement is for you to keep your cool and keep smiling. Key West is a very safe easy going town on the streets. In the pages of the paper tempers flare, and neighbors don' get along great a lot of the time, but walking the streets is usually a pleasure. They aren't strippers, my uncharitable fellow dispatchers texted between 911 calls.

So being the only white guy in what suddenly became a crowd was no big deal. The pity of it was I suppose that I had a police shirt on and yet the big cotton badge gave me a shield to hide behind too.

The women who my (jealous) colleagues rather uncharitably ascribed by text, to the oldest profession might have had  a busy night as they ordered plates of full-on Mexican food. Paradoxically Sandy's Cuban Cafe is run by Mexicans.What is she wearing under that mesh dress? That's for me to know.

The car stereo was turned up and salsa classes began on the sidewalk. Bring more croquetas was all I heard from the peanut gallery.

Apparently they figured they would do better among themselves and there was talk of a threesome but I think it was not intended as anything more than a quick all-woman shuffle while waiting for dinner/breakfast. 

I was in no mood to reveal my Spanish so I kept out of the banter and took the text comments from the office as I kept my colleagues trapped in dispatch up to date. Michael, tell her she's a chonga. It means "beautiful goddess" in Spanish. Thanks Chelsea, I wasn't born yesterday.

 Oops! Not the only white guy any more. Reinforcements.

 Look but don't touch, and she put on a nice show for her audience.

 Time to go. Thank you I said, for livening up a quiet night.

She looked startled. Claro que si, hablo espanol. I could see her thinking back wondering what she'd said. I was busy putting the coffees in the car and clearly I couldn't reveal. That would be impolite.

A Matter Of Time

"It's unusual," my wife said. "I don't recognize any faces here."
"Not surprising," I said. "I figure I'm the youngest person in the audience. By a long shot."
"It's not that I expect to know someone," she went on as we waited for the lights to go down. "But I almost always recognize a few faces in the audience."

We have been living la vida loca lately with too much to do and not enough time. A common story, so we decided to treat the problem in an uncommon way. We decided to to not only make time to do stuff, but that we would actually follow through - that's the uncommon part. At least so far...

Of course a few business details had to be wrapped up at the house before we got away to drive to the Big City, so time was pushing us into a corner...Cheyenne doesn't leave the house much these days, she sleeps and eats and staggers around on very unsteady legs, a really old dog suddenly who fills me with sadness and nostalgia (not that I ever let her know). We wished her a cheery good night and launched ourselves into the cool of night, not too coll, but quite dark and debated dinner. Our initial plan of seafood at Alonzo's yielded to the reality of time so I suggested Sandy's for a fried fish sandwich which we shared so not only was it quick but it was also cheap. We sat at the counter, the view rather prosaically that of White Street after dark and drank coffee and shared fries. It was companionable in a student-era kind of way. A group of real youngsters stopped by and started talking about how authentic the food was and I was reminded that this is winter and visitors are always looking for the "authentic Key West." They looked like surfers who lost their way to Laguna Niguel. I privately wished them luck in their search for truth.

Downtown we parked and I fed the meter five bucks for two hours which seems like a deal compared to the cost of a parking ticket and I didn't feel like rushing across town from a backdoor free parking spot so I paid to park and we strolled. It was a lovely night, not at all cold, velvety dark and perfect for two people to amble. The windows were wide open at the Bull though we had no time of course to pause for a beer. We had a play to watch.

They offer alcohol at the Red Barn but we had to stay awake and drive home besides we were full of Sandy's cafe con leche (so authentic!). The play was a Neil Simon farce and I found a synopsis on my phone...so modern...which I studied as we squished into our seats in the middle of the row in a  sold out house. Wikipedia to the rescue!

We had determined we wanted to do something other than work just three days prior which left me a bit short on actual knowledge about what we had come to see...The set was a Ukrainian village gorgeously rendered by Rick Worth in this picture from the Red Barn website:

I was struck by the fact that the older actors on stage, Key West stalwarts had the smaller roles most of them but they were so proficient in this and worked so well as a team as the village idiots they outshone the raw young talent of the love struck leads. But hey we laughed and I enjoyed the overtones of a world gone mad with stupidity...until I noticed the age of the crowd.

"We just love it here," I overhead someone saying, that sort of comment that sounds somehow patronizing coming from people who live here but a few months of the year. You only get the good and the bad, the ugly and the sublime through the grit of living here all the time. I wish people who think they "love it here" would give themselves the full true measure of commitment. I have heard it said that the reason that residents of San Francisco hate it when visitors call the City (as its known to locals) "Frisco" is because they fell that the nickname, never deployed by residents, expresses excessive unwarranted intimacy with a city too beloved by outsiders. It's an odd sentiment, bewildering perhaps, but I find it applies to my feelings about Key West.

I looked around at the sea of old people and I'm sure the theater is glad to see paying bottoms in seats but I had flashbacks to my past living in God's Waiting Room (St Petersburg) when it was a  much less dynamic city than it tires to be today. I got the feeling that Key West is becoming what St Pete used to be. It unsettled me to feel like that, and I expressed the thought to my wife as we ambled across the courtyard back to Duval Street, after the play.

I think the earth shifted slightly in 2008 and the economic crisis knocked places like Key West out of reach of people who thought they could afford the occasional high cost fling, people who come to town, drink for a week and go home and adjust their second mortgage on their home they thought of as a piggy bank. Nowadays only the elderly wealthy can afford winters in Key West it seems and Duval was relatively quiet as we walked back to the car on a perfect January night. Food for thought. Meanwhile we had other food thoughts on our minds.

We stopped for dessert to go from Kennedy Cafe, the Uzbek restaurant recently remodeled and looking lovely. We had dessert wine at home to go with the Napoleon and the circular baklava and Cheyenne was waiting for us, now more than ever cherished for the simple fact of still being there to greet us, waking suddenly from sleep, surprised and quite possibly pleased to be awoken.

Time passes things change, we come and we go and permanence is made transitory. I hope young people rediscover Key West, and find it an affordable base from which to be creative and thoughtful and high spirited, and a good deal less like the retirement center it feels like it is slipping into.

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Streaks of Light

Many years ago a woman I lived with in Florida remarked to me that in winter the texture of the light changes in South Florida. And she was right and I have not forgotten. It does. 

 I suppose the bald fact of the matter is obvious, as the sun falls lower and lower in its arc across the sky the angle at which the sun's rays strike also changes and the sun is no longer directly overhead. The Tropic of Capricorn is only sixty miles south of here so in June the sun is almost directly overhead which makes for a hot drenched sensation to the light. By now the sun is sensibly much closer to the southern horizon and mornings are arriving earlier and with angled light at a time when I can still be awake if Cheyenne needs a walk.

Above the temple of the spirit, the Minor Basilica of St Mary Star of the Sea and below the other kind of temple, Old Town Fitness. The sun shines equally on both. I love the texture of the non native coconut palms and the shiny quality they get from the sun. They wave all day around my house and though they are a pain with huge numbers of fronds falling off all the time, and dropping coconuts, which do taste good,  I know exactly why tyey are seen everywhere in the Keys. They look lovely.

Bright white winter sunshine makes the most banal apartment complex  glow.  There is a freshness in the early morning air that elsewhere might hint at autumn, but around here with no signs of  yellowing leaves or frost or anything, it looks more like a developing spring day.

Cheyenne is learning to appreciate the coolness of the winter mornings and she seems to be more inclined to be awake when I get home from a night at work. The fact that I arrive home around 6:30 in full daylight also helps her wake up, I think.

I rarely walk with money in my pocket. I carry plastic bags and my iPhone, but if I carried money I'd end up with a huge cup of con leche and a cholesterol sandwich from Sandy's...Cuban coffee and eggy bacon Cuban bread are irresistible to me.

Tell me this cottage with the royal palms, with the shadows, with Virginia Street disappearing into the distance... this is Key West as we want to imagine it will be in a hundred years even if the ocean rises three feet in the interim. 

All this head-in-air looking at shadows and sun beams was provoked by the ride into town at seven in the morning and those big empty thunderheads in the sky.

Vespa Commute

One thing about being forced to ride slowly is that I leave home earlier than usual, just so I don't have to push my scooter out of it's breaking in comfort zone...That in turn leads me to pull over from time to time when cars catch up to me in the faster sections. So here I am being polite all pulled over on the ample shoulder of Highway One and there springs to view a photograph. This is Saddlebunch Bridge  Number One, at Mile Marker 17:

 Luckily the views tend to justify the pictures, especially with a few alterations to the exposure levels. I am quite surprised how well I keep up with traffic in the 45 mph sections of the highway. Usually I pass the slow pokes even by just a few miles an hour, but now rolling along in line with them the little Vespa with all its limitations imposed by the running in period does a decent job of keeping up. 

Stopping for pictures also gives the engine a breather, here on the section of the highway around Mile Marker 10, Rockland Key where the road becomes four lanes and even the most timid can find it ion their hearts to pass the Hobbitt on his moped.

I am really enjoying the ease of use of the Vespa, which weighs in around 230 pounds and feels as light as a bicycle when rolling off the stand.

Riding through town where the top speed limit is 35 and usually is less than that, the P200 already has enough oomph to keep up with traffic. The biggest liability is the front drum brake which is, to put it politely, rather wooden, ie: it doesn't work worth a damn. The hardest thing for me is to remember that rather sobering fact and keep my distance. The rear brake, operated by a foot pedal will lock up the rear wheel by contrast. 1970s  brakes! A disc brake conversion for the front is available but the parts alone cost $800, though it is something I think about every time I squeeze the front brake lever.

For my first twelve hour shift after my vacation I decided Cuban coffee was in order so I stopped by Sandy's Cafe after my ride through downtown, practicing shifting in traffic. I ordered a colada, described thusly in Wikipedia;

Colada, is 4-6 shots of Cuban style espresso served in a Styrofoam cup along with small, plastic demitasses. It is a takeaway form, meant to be shared. This is customary of workplace breaks in Cuban communities.

My colleagues wanted no coffee when I got to work so I ended up drinking one whole cup of espresso, all to myself. 

I handled it like a man, I hope.