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...
 

White Street Gallery District

They call it  the White Street Gallery District, a formal name for a strip of stores along the north south road that more or less separates Old Town from the area now known as Mid Town. Sandy's Café has to be one of the best known stores on the strip. No longer open twenty four hours it does fire up at 5am which is early enough for most people. 

Not so long ago there was a divorce between the operator of the café and the owner of the property and they went their separate ways, and ended up a couple of blocks apart. Fernandy's hasn't survived coronavirus so now there is only one red and white Cuban coffee shop on the street.

Another well know name is Fausto's the locally owned grocery store with two outlets, one here on White Street and the other on Fleming.

They describe themselves as a neighborhood social center which I suppose is true. It always surprises me how many businesses have two successful outlets in Key West, a town with a great many people reluctant to travel more than a mile from home.

Elections rear their head everywhere and Lopez has been a  city commissioner for almost as long as I can remember but in fact he was elected in distant 2005 and he is running again. Yup, we know him.

As I recall Mo's was started by a French Canadian couple who sold to a new Haitian owner and the place has kept it's garlicky Gallic appeal ever since. Still going strong.

White on White. It has a certain ring to it. I may have been giddy when I saw the sign. Rusty woke me early and I was half an hour ahead of schedule when I got to town, hence the time in hand to walk White Street with the camera before driving up Virginia to the salt mines.

And as I was getting into the car to go to work I saw two people passing in the night across the street. I felt just a little less alone on the unlighted end of White Street, though  don't think they noticed me at all. 

A gratuitous Rusty picture (which Webb says can never be gratuitous of the perfect dog). He was at home relaxing while I was at work and my wife sent me the snapshot to make me jealous. It worked.

White and Black

Walking White Street and seduced by the shoes and shadows. If you want color pictures return tomorrow to this page. today's untrammeled offering is a play of light and shadow as Rusty and I walked around White Street between Truman and the Pier.

This looked like a bunch of neighborhood kids passing the time of lock down playing in the street as once was common. At least in my youth it was normal to wander around away from home.

I prefer walking to cycling as being on a bicycle puts you in the flow of traffic whereas using your feet gives you time and opportunity to stroll and look especially when Rusty gets interested in something. 

I enjoy the light in the Keys which produces hard shadows and lots of silhouettes. 

One is taught to appreciate soft ambiguous light, the golden hour twice a day as the sun nears the horizon with the blue hour a close second after or before the sun appears and everything gets that cold tint.

I like the harsh sunlight of midday in the keys, especially when combined with a breeze to unfit my glasses as I walk.

These bushy sidewalks along Flagler Avenue near White Street create tunnels of light especially when I turn off the color image. Some photographers like to shoot in color and remove the colors in the computer later. I enjoy the act of photography more than I do fiddling with computer settings so I try to see in black and white and if it looks good I take the picture directly.

During the lockdown I have found myself pushed to think more and more in abstract terms, of shade and shape and indeed colors too as tomorrow will reveal on this page as did yesterday.

I was trying to explain the abstract nature of shadows and objects and a socially distant stranger wandering in his own exercise hour called me an artist which was a bit weird. I am just a wanderer with a camera.

Rusty exhibits how own leash tolerant patience when the mood strikes me to try and spot the sun through. bush. In the back country he wanders around me at will, running forward and falling back but on the streets in the middle of a grocery run he has to pause alongside.

I'm not sure what will change if the leaders move forward with opening up the state. I don't think the Keys will open anytime soon and I know I'm not going to rush back into a normal life until I see what is really going on. I find I have lost confidence in what I used to think of as daily life. I fear that may be the worst coronavirus legacy for those of us who live through this epidemic physically unscathed.

Elizabeth Bishop Rediscovered

I received a surprising notice in my electronic doohickery that Elizabeth Bishop  was being celebrated while I work this weekend. The news I just learned is that at last her home where she lived in Key West before she went to Brazil to conclude an adventurous life has been purchased for restoration by the Literary Seminar.  What she left behind in Key West was a home barely acknowledged as her own. In similar fashion where Tennessee Williams lived is equally unmarked and unknown were you to look for it. Well that state of affairs is changing at least for Elizabeth Bishop. I don't suppose her home will become the talk of the planet the way Hemingway's home in Key West has become such a center of attention. She was after all a woman and decidedly not a swashbuckling drinker and big game hunter and war chaser, rather a poet of sensibility who yet managed to live life very much on her own terms. I rather prefer her style in writing and in life but the good news is an enduring institution which is the Seminar has announced a concerted effort and quite some commitment to making her home the landmark it deserves to be. Great news.

This essay I wrote in 2014, so the decrepitude of the landmark is no new thing, and given land prices in this absurd town, nothing could have made the purchase of an historic home on White Street at all easy. Yet it is done. Excellent. 

624 White Street

The state with the prettiest name,

the state that floats in brackish water,

held together by mangrove roots

that bear while living oysters in clusters,

and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,

dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks

like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.

The opening of Elizabeth Bishop's poem called Florida.

She lived here from 1938 to 1946, on White Street in Key West and published her poems as she gathered up her stuff and took off on a world tour. That tour stopped abruptly when she fell in love and settled in Brazil for 16 years. Those sixteen years were happier, they say, than the difficult years in Key West, a town she liked but that did not bring happiness, oddly enough. I don't think happiness in love was easy to find for a lesbian in those distant and prejudiced days, albeit a wealthy one able to ignore convention and not starve as a writer.

Bishop was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, got a good education and an inheritance so she was spared the tedium of daily work. However she also lacked the discipline of earning a living, but by way of compensation she turned out poems that are gaining in popularity and earning more respect the more time passes since she died.

Not that the famous poet gets much respect in Key West.  Hemingway's home is famous and the image is sold artfully by the family that owns the business. Everyone else is on their own, their marks on the city of Key West as obscure as if they had lived on the dark side of the moon. That this home has a plaque from the friends of the library is a minor miracle, but ironically enough Bishop's former home is an embarrassing wreck.

Who knows and who cares really. Lots of people live in tumbledown homes in Key West, and lots of people who think they want to live here expect the high rents to return a decent living space. That's not very likely in Old Town. But a famous writer's home should be a landmark shouldn't it?

My last writer's home was the opposite, not recognized at all but not left to rot, far from it. Key West Diary: 709 Baker's Lane, Key West. It's not easy to be critical of people living in their homes, owned or rented but there is a sense of sadness when you see this lovely old eyebrow home not just degenerating but taking a memory we owe the world with it. Indeed the homes of writers around the world are revered, the sense of place that imparts the art to the artist. Here? Nah. What a shame.

Elizabeth Bishop's Misunderstood Life World Library Volume, “Brazil” : The New Yorker

White Street

 Ambling around on White Street around 8:30 with the sun low and behind us. Sandy's Cafe now offers smoothies. Maybe it always did but I only ever order coffee to drink from them. Why else go to a Cuban coffee shop?

 This building cracks me. A Commercial paint shop also housing totally hippy food outlets. Both valuable but they just don't look quite right set in the same location. In Key West where space is at a premium and land costs are correspondingly high it makes perfect sense.

No one could remember how to say the original name of this rather interesting restaurant so now they call it The Oasis, which any American can grasp. "Al Maidah" means table spread for a feast in Arabic according to the ever alert Wikipedia.

 Early Christmas detritus outside the county building.

I paused to exchange pleasantries with this guy. I've seen him shuffling around Key West for years refusing help and minding his own business. How long have you been walking Key West I asked. 46 years he said. Does it get boring hanging around I asked. My fear of homelessness is having all time and no money to spend every single day. Boring? he said. Key West is never boring.

The yoga studio sign prompted me to post this one on Instagram while alluding to his patience waiting for a bus.

 Probably better off being a passenger on Truman Avenue in winter:

 Or better yet riding a  skateboard up the sidewalk.

 Rusty prefers to walk.

A rare selfie. I forget why I took it but I can never coordinate a smile with the photograph. Because I am incompetent.

More wheels sharing the road, deep into the shade of the Meadows. A former meadow and now a neighborhood. 

Across Truman I knew of a spot to take a break with a  low wall for me and a patch of grass for Himself. 

Jose Marti, the revolutionary claimed by everybody. The Cuban government praises him for fighting Spanish colonial domination in Cuba meanwhile the right wing exiles in Miami hold him up as an example of the fight against oppression and in Key West he is one of the most famous people to blow through town in the 19th century.  Read all about him: Wikipedia

Companionable silence, always golden.

White Street Night

I have been enjoying the black and white function of my camera lately.

I thought this one was good....I tried to pet Rusty but he walked away across White Street. ha ha.

I always enjoy complex instructions for the delivery of mail. The smaller the community the more convoluted.  Key West has to be a letter carrier's nightmare with all its alleys.

I take these pictures to remind myself how different Old Town is, how old and how unusual.

Rain reflection:

The former Navy base at Peary Court is now open to civilians who can pay more than $2200 a month for a duplex. The fence is there still but the gates are wide open.

Bamboo texture and...

...poor paint peel. 

The city in black and white:

The full moon effect comes from the camera which is capable of lighting up the night by multiple exposures in camera.

And the moon helps too when it comes out from behind the clouds.

I have been enjoying black and white photography for a change.  

Key West remains a bright colorful place.