Broadcasting the Blues

Soon to be...on the road again:

My wife goes nuts every morning as she crosses a few miles of Highway One, and every day its along those few short miles where the reach of "Morning Edition" is weakest on her car radio. A few days ago she called me at home and told me to turn on the radio and hold the telephone receiver close enough for her to listen. She teaches in the Juvenile jail in Key West and there was a story on NPR about juvenile justice and recidivism in post-Katrina New Orleans and she didn't want to miss a word.

The stretch of road between Cudjoe Key and Bay Point has always driven my wife crazy because its exactly there that the Big Pine Key translator runs out of steam but the Key West translator doesn't kick in. So it was a red letter day when the Citizen ran a story announcing confirmation of a new public radio station to be set up in Key West. WHWY should be up and running on 91.5 next year, as a satellite station operated by WLRN in Miami, which would promise a strong signal all the way from Marathon to Key West with no religious interference along the way. "I'll have to subscribe," my wife said and I know she will.

Unlike my wife I find myself indifferent to the blandishments of radio news. I worked in the medium for many years and it used to be a big black mark against Key West that public radio was inaudible in the southernmost city. I think it must be evidence of my perverse nature that now its coming to town I don't much care. With municipal elections weeks away the city is in one of its periodic ferments about over development, and I suppose the arrival of public radio could be seen as evidence of gentrification of the city (the presence of expensive Vespa scooters on the streets could be another). Ergo: a bad thing.

On the other hand I have to admit that I enjoyed living in California very much during the years when Key West was a cultural wasteland and little more than a Navy base with a fishing village attached. So when I look in the mirror I have to acknowledge that I am just another agent of change, like all the other bloated plutocrats that come down for the refreshing climate and sparkling (fecal infested) waters.

History helps me avoid total self loathing, though. The library has helpful shelves loaded with books on Florida's past and every time I look through them I turn back time and I see the same stories, the same fears, the same doom and gloom about change and loss and gentrification. Change is inevitable and on rare occasions it is good, and even rarer occasions it can be stopped, but in a transient town like Key West where most residents are escaping something or other, creating the collective will to stop determined, powerful interests can be more demanding of determination than local sybarites can muster. So we get what we fail to resist, for good or ill.

The good news is my Vespa is running again and will be available tomorrow. Dante at Vespa Miami told me they changed the check valve in the evaporative system that helps recycle polluting gasoline fumes. Its a royal pain in the rear but for now, its in place on my scooter and working properly. I just can't wait to get back to commuting on two wheels again. I am like a child waiting for Christmas morning.

Nera Marmora, or the Pursuit of Happiness

Gina Palmucci, 1891-1924. She took the stage name of Nera Marmora, and sang like a nightingale according to contemporary accounts. She was my grandmother.
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The news that Luciano Pavarotti died last week made the rounds, reaching out so far as to impact my sister in Italy whose computer literacy is so low she doesn't really trust e-mails to arrive at their destination. Yet she was moved to send me one about that piece of news. She has never heard an opera sung in person or on a recording, she has no knowledge of the world outside her small village where she has lived for most of her sixty years and she only thought of me when Pavarotti died because she knows I have traveled far and wide to hear those roles my grandmother sang. Unlike Nera Marmora, Luciano Pavarotti sacrificed everything to bring his music, and himself to the masses, even unto those like my sister whose idea of music is nowhere near Cavalleria Rusticana,

even though she has practically lived the story herself...

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My siblings and I grew up with the knowledge that we had a singer in our family but we knew next to nothing of her, just a stage name and some tidbits from her life: that she had sung with Enrico Caruso, a man who rivalled Pavarotti's ability to reach a non-operatic audience. Yet Gina Palmucci, my grandmother, who lived and died in the early part of the twentieth century never made a recording or gave an interview and would have vanished were it not for her niece who made available photos and posters and programs that allowed the city of Terni to create a book marking one of its most talented offspring.

Terni, an industrial city in the pastoral Umbrian region doesn't have many famous antecedents, its Roman roots in the city of Interamna are largely forgotten, and the city was bombed flat by the Americans in World War Two thanks to its steel mills and its Beretta arms factory. Apartment blocks and streets built to a grid, American style, mark the modern city nestled in a region famous for its medieval hill towns. My grandmother's brother Pasquale worked all his life as an accounts clerk in the steel mill, and I see the old man I knew inside the happy youth on the left in this picture, standing next to his already famous sister:

The city was moved to put up a monument to my grandmother where she lived in the city's old section which has been gentrified and rehabbed, as is the way worldwide in the twenty-first century.

My mother, who died when I was a teenager, never ever spoke, as far as I can recall, of her mother, and I believe that was in large part because her father blamed her for his beloved wife's death. Nera Marmora retired from the stage to live the decorous life of a wife and mother in 1923, and she died in childbirth a year later.Her husband, my grandfather, never did recover from the blow of her sudden death and the secret family legend is he never learned to love his only child as a result of that misfortune. Now they are all dead and only we, the generation that remembers none of that drama, remain alive.

I am now older than my mother was when she died, and my own life has slipped into middle age alongside the career of the great Pavarotti whose talents were on display from when I can remember. I saw him sing in assorted theaters around the world and I heard the praise heaped upon his voice, the voice of a man who pumped his talent for all it was worth. He divorced his wife and settled down with his secretary, he ate prodigiously and sang as long as he could. I guess he enjoyed life. And now its done and he is no longer a living legend.Though still a household name even in farmhouses like my sister's where neither a book nor a libretto ever crosses the threshold. Thats a hell of an achievement, no matter what the cost we observed at the Maestro's two-family funeral.

My own sister in her e-mail reminded me of one night at La Scala in Milan, when the performance commemorated in the frontispiece of the program the first night decades before, in the same theater. And there she was, my grandmother, listed for all to see and none to know. I should have known better, because in the book I now own there is a reproduction of the front page of the score of a new performance of an opera by Giacomo Puccini, signed by the composer himself to the distinguished artist, suave voice of Mimi.

In considering my grandmother's career one sees she had the seeds of greatness sown within her. She sang with Caruso and went on tour with him in South America in 1917. She was selected by Arturo Toscanini, a conductor who left his mark on the world at large, to sing in the premiere of the re-opening of La Scala after World War One, she was praised for her beauty and her voice wherever she went. And she gave it all up to get married to a country squire of little account and thence to sink into obscurity. He wasn't a bad man at all, and got a piazza named after him. He also got his own monument put up after the war celebrating his bravery helping partisans and allied fliers escape the clutches of the Nazis. A good man he may have been but not famous. My grandmother's choice to marry him was the sort of choice that in a media obsessed world would get one labeled insane.

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She was just insanely unlucky that her choice led to her premature death and the gradual dismemberment over two generations of the family that was to be descended from her. I suppose a stone plaque to mark the passing of a human life is no bad thing, especially when the life lived has been a perpetual struggle with unhappiness. But when all is said and done, how could I not be drawn, with all this pent up history of family sadness behind me, to the only land where the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the rules to live by?

All Hail Vespa Miami

Edwin called this afternoon and the gods must have tweaked my ear because my cellphone was actually on at the time. My Vespa is fixed though Eddie was unable to let me know what had gone wrong. I hardly care. I am so excited to be getting my machine back. I now have to wait until Wednesday to haul the trailer up to Miami to bring my GTS home.

I have been mulling over reliability issues, worrying about all those modern black boxes lurking beneath the curves of my vintage red Vespa, wishing it was the simple old two stroke of a vintage ( which in reality suffers from its own reliability issues...); will the lambda sensor go next? or the electronic ignition? or the CDI sender again? Argh! The warranty runs out in November. Double argh!!

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My wife sat me down and said "keep the Vespa because you love it so much." And I do. The space beneath the house has been empty every time I go downstairs and it isn't there. I haven't driven out to the beach, I haven't wandered any back roads since the scooter went into the shop two weeks ago. I have been, in a word, dejected. But no more. Scooter in the Sticks said trust the scooter, not the mechanic. He's right, dammit, and I shall.

Now all I have to do is not bust a gut waiting for Wednesday.

The Pre-Dawn Ride

The alarm goes off at 4:45 and I roll quickly out of bed before I have time to think about it. The house is cool, thanks to the air conditioner and the fans swirling in each of our four rooms, moving the air steadily round our little house. We have no street lights on our road and outside its completely dark, at least it is two weeks out of the month. This period is the other half of the month and the moon, waning is doing its best to imitate daylight.

My wife packs my lunch the night before, my man purse is packed and ready to go and the newspaper hasn't yet arrived in the driveway so I'm pretty much ready to go. The scooter lurks in the gloom under the house, wedged between our two cars, and I can do the loading by feel so I prefer not to hit the outside lights and spoil the effect.

My wife's 150 has the same accessories as my 250 so the loading plan is the same, lunchbox in the trunk, man purse under the seat, helmet on my head. The engine's louder on the air-cooled 150 than it is on the water-cooled 250 but I don't think that any neighbors across the canal could be woken by it. The neighbors on either side of my home are separated by empty lots, besides which, neither house is occupied, as my erstwhile neighbors spend millions not to actually occupy the structures. Suits me.

My street is one lane wide and three quarters of a mile long, just enough to warm the engine before pulling out onto Highway One. The air is warm enough that the chill from the air conditioning has long since worn off. Heading south on the Overseas Highway the 150 is decidedly more languid than the 250 which generally hits 60mph by the time we're passing the illuminated sign at Boondocks Bar.

Mangrove bushes line the roadway, barely visible in the headlight beam, until they fall away and cement barricades mark the start of the humpback bridge which rises forty feet above Niles Channel. Tourists love to slow down as they reach the hump and look out over the waterways, little do they know the descent into Summerland Key is a passing lane...I do, and I'm ready!

At 5:15am Summerland Key is just a few street lights shining on the sleeping gas station, my wife's dentist lurking in an ugly mud brown building, my video store flashes by, followed in quick succession by the hardware shop ("small enough to know you, bigger than we look") and the Post Office which marks the end of civilization as I know it.

The Highway gets darker for the most part after we breast the bridge onto Cudjoe Key, the odd illumination followed by long stretches of darkness, the Vespa humming steadily in the night. From time to time I can see pairs of headlights coming up from behind and they are obviously ignoring the 45mph limit. I've time in hand so I'm cruising and I pull aside to let them pass, even in the Saddlebunch Keys which are marked by the cluster of lights at Mile Marker 15, Baby's Coffee:They call themselves the Southernmost Coffee Roasting Company, which I suppose they are, even though they are a lot less southernmost than they used to be. There was a time when they were roasting and grinding and selling in downtown Key West, but then they decided that the call of commerce required them to move 15 miles out of town. Somehow they made it work, turning coffee roasting into a cottage industry selling knick knacks and gee gaws and pastries and chocolates and offering free hot coffee after hurricanes. They aren't open at 5:30am so its a matter of buzzing on by.

Its a few more miles of darkness, humps and vales, wide sweeping turns, a steady 65 mph through the darkness, bumping onto bridges, bumping off and watching the lights of Big Coppitt grow closer. The traffic heading north is thicker too, a car every five minutes, usually with high beams glaring, flashes past, vacation over, getting an early start on the Turnpike 3 hours north.

Well, I'm going to work, its true but in twelve hours my direction will be reversed I'll be heading home in the golden rays of the setting sun, with enough time to cast off from my dock and take a quiet swim in the flat, still waters of the Straits of Florida. I read about the changing of the leaves up north, squalls and cooling days and I dread the day I have to haul my boat onto its trailer, as the ocean drops below eighty degrees and we pack in swimming for another frost-free winter. At least its riding weather year round, if only I had something to ride.

Night Into Day

I have just completed my last night shift at work. Without a break I start working Alpha Day Shift tomorrow morning bright and early at 6am. To say I am bummed barely starts to express my feelings. There was an eruption at work and the way to "solve" the problem was by fiat apparently, no discussion no reflection.

Bravo Night Shift said goodbye and took me by surprise. When Tamie Came by the Communications center with a bottle of plonk, a large bottle of plonk and a card I thought it was for her new boyfriend who shares my same first name... but it was actually for me instead. I really was touched and said so over the police radio, which of course I am sure they have come to expect of me after all these years...

I suppose that's the thing about working for a semi-military organization, great pension and health benefits, a tight working environment and orders be orders. The Captain says jump and we all start hopping like jack rabbits. Some of the younger officers say I should go to the Union, but I've seen what happens to people who file grievances and I guess I'm too middle aged to go tilting at windmills! Its a good job and I am going through an undesired patch. But its just a patch.


In the short term I am going from one shift to another with completely different schedules with no break and that will be tough. I am going to be the senior dispatcher though in deference to my desire to avoid promotion I will not be an acting anybody, just "senior." I will be training a new hire and that will be hard work, especially as I will be struggling to stay awake and alert at a time of day I am usually snoring. I will also have to drop two classes I have just signed up for ( full refunds at least!) at the college. That's the worst of it- I just can't attend and I can't get permission to be absent for a couple of hours to attend.


All this upending of my life with four days notice makes me feel I'm the one getting punished and instead I'm helping out by making the re-shuffle go smoothly for the bosses.


The good news is that I will be able to home nights with my wife. The thing is we have created lots of time to be together while i worked nights and there is just so much less stress at night in the office when all our work is focused on street work not administrative. I have a lot of adjusting to do.

Oh, and no word on my Vespa which for all I know is dead and can never be brought back to life. That's how I feel at any rate. Well, its all grungy but at least I'm not being murdered in Darfur, one needs to keep a perspective. Or flooding in Ohio. That sounds grim.

90 Miles

I have a dream, and it is in its way a modest but exciting dream. It involves Fidel Castro, which may sound surprising, but there are lots of people who spin dreams around the elderly Cuban dictator on this side of the Florida Straits. Their dreams tend to be rather more grandiose than mine. They dream of his death and free access to a capitalist Cuba for North Americans, including Cuban exiles.

Its a Cuban paradox this time but the revolutionary leader who spoke passionately about Cuban freedom in the 19th century until his early death in battle, was the man shown here in marble: Jose Marti.

The paradoxical Marti is venerated by both the Communist Government in Havana and by the freedom loving far right wing capitalists in Miami who "Radio Reloj" From Havana always refers to as the "Miami Mafia" in their propaganda headlines on 950AM, perfectly audible in Cayo Hueso, which is the Spanish speaker's name for Key West.

I mean who doesn't love a revolutionary, right? He strikes quite the posture in the pre-dawn, a man with a mission: freedom!
The Cuban exile community in Florida gained steam after the revolutionary attempt in the 187o's, when their exiled socialist leader Jose Marti landed in Key West to lead the fight from this flowered isle that stood side by side with the struggle for a new Cuba, as mentioned in more or less poetic, incomprehensible Spanish at the Jose Marti monument in Key West's Bayview Park:Key West being a Paradoxical Paradise, Bayview Park is a park that has no view of any Bay; its all blocked by 21st century capitalist development, in all its cement glory. Jose Marti shares his corner with dozens of less fortunate "residentially challenged" local residents who huddle and drink and squabble behind his roccoco home in the corner. It has the flavor of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but he is silent on that and they are more like chickens than revolutionaries, as they scrabble in the sun for alcohol and oblivion, not redemption and freedom.

I dream of the same thing writ small: freedom. My dream is of me boarding a high speed ferry with my Vespa, similar to the one currently in servce between Italy and Croatia, just four hours across the Adriatic Sea...

...and landing at Mariel three hours later with a weekend of riding Cuban mountain roads ahead...winding roads, leafy forests, empty extended beaches, cold beer and hot pork. Modest stuff I say but enticing, tropical twisties a short hop from my Florida home.

The winds of change are blowing through the Cuban exile community as the older, stronger memories of the exiles are fading and the younger generation settles into a migrant's view of the "home country," a place to be enjoyed on vacation, to be marveled at as the locus of a life spent away from but always tied to it by history. That locus, or focal point is no longer the center of one's daily life, for the younger generation of Cuban exile/emigrant. Unhappily Castro has to die before relations can be normalized because feelings in US political circles run high, and Cuba's exiles vote early and often. So we are stuck with this iron curtain between us and the delights of the other flowered isle.

And then there is the unfortunate violent history of the "Miami Mafia," a long bloody history of terroistic violence against anyone who supported dialogue with the Bearded One. And those of us Anglos, even immigrant Anglos who are puzzled by the need to focus on Cuba while enjoying the American Dream in gorgeous South Florida, we earn the withering scorn of oppressed middle class suburbanites in Spanish accents who would yes, go and take up arms in the Sierra Maestra, but you know they have careers and dental appointments and payments on home and Mercedes Benz, and the next best thing to the revolutionary struggle is to pretend Cuba doesn't exist. Truly a miracle of Latin American magical realism in the style of the Communist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Strange bedfellows all. The paper reports today that a big voice in the exile community was in Key West yesterday to sing some songs about this political paradox, to sing these songs for the first time ever in public. The new album is called Noventa Millas, and anytime you mention ninety miles in Key West you are talking about the gap, the chasm perhaps between the Keys and Havana. Gloria Estefan sang for free for Key Westers on the waterfront of this multicultural little town. One day she will perhaps do the same in Havana.

I was put in mind of all these thoughts yesterday when a rumor blazed through Key West's Cuban community, and the word was that Castro was dead. Unlike 1959 when he came to power its easy enough to confirm such a rumor today. I for one wouldn't call the Key West Police Department for confirmation, because all the dispatchers will do is Google their favorite news websites. No word there of the Bearded One's passing.

In my uncomplicated world I look forward to varied Vespa rides, that will come with the re-opening of this unnecessarily closed border. Even on my wife's 150cc ET4 if my 250 isn't working!

Two generations is quite long enough, for Cuban exiles to martyr themselves, and limit my weekend rides.