Broad Horizons

"I've never seen a beach like this!" Diggy's slack-jawed amazement took me aback a bit. He is a lifelong resident of Key West and in all his 24 years he had never seen the endless sands of Fort Lauderdale? It seemed impossible but it is true.

I drove on along the waterfront and Diggy's eyes widened enough to escape their sockets as he observed the broad, clean sidewalk, the perfect palms and the strapping men and women flexing themselves along the waterfront.

Bathing conditions are better than "OK," they are perfect for visitors who actually have their swimsuits along with them...

"Look at those lifeguard huts," Diggy noticed the air conditioned, perfectly painted towers, housing more strapping youths no doubt, sitting ready to run down the ramp. grab the boogie board stuck in the sand, and then into the modest surf to save a life or two before lunch.

"Smathers Beach should look like this," Diggy breathed, imagining a Key West never before seen, bum free, tidy and organized. That's the thing about Key West: newcomers want funk and character, Conchs prefer order, cleanliness and modernity. Its just another paradox. Riding the mainland with Diggy is a healthy reminder of the value of change.

Playing the tourist is a new role for us but we dive in cheerfully, and we decide to take a stroll on the Pompano Beach municipal pier,which charges a fee for entry, a concept unknown on Key West's White Street Pier, and draws comment from my Conch colleague. Something to the effect that an entry fee keeps the rif-raf out.

Furthermore Pompano Beach takes care of its height impaired anglers, and neither of us has seen this neat trick before:

The point of this tour of the mainland was to deliver my still ailing Vespa to the dealer for a fourth attempt at repair. After that we were free to peruse the offerings of machines sold to be ridden. Diggy has moved past the always useful moped and is now riding a reliable Honda cruiser. He feels 750ccs aren't enough and he is seeking, as all good motorcyclists do, a roadgoing expression of his inner self. He's been thinking about an 1100cc V-Star as sold by the Yamaha shop in Key West. I am looking further afield for my riding satisfaction. We started at the Triumph dealer where I tried to introduce Diggy to a Bonneville Cruiser. I like the standard Bonneville, on sale for about $10,000 (deep sucking intake of breath).Diggy sat on the America and judged it unsatisfactory. We wandered into the back and I looked at the classic Ducatis (too tall in the seat) while Diggy proceeded to shock me by mounting a Monster and falling in love. He leaned into the handlebars, tucked his feet up on the standard pegs and decided this was the bike for him.

You can take a Conch to water and be shocked by how rapidly he will leap in and revel in the new, the unfamiliar, the better. I really think Diggy might end up on a Ducati.

Vespa Blues Part Three

I find it odd that I am inching closer and closer to the all American motorcycling ideal that there is "no substitute for cubic inches." I have long held the belief that less is more, and have frequently chosen the simpler path. Every time I came across Yogi Berra's fork in the road I usually declined to pick it up, on the grounds my backpack was already overflowing with junk.

Even on the streets of Rome a 500cc scooter seems the bare minimum to escape the gravitational tug of the traffic circling Piazza di Torre Argentina.

Times change and I suppose that reluctantly so must I. My decision to commute on an engine between 650 and 900ccs is based on the eighty percent rule. Frankly I like speed, and I like commuting during odd hours when the road is clear, but on those days when Highway One is bunged up with traffic I still enjoy the cut and parry of passing. It seems my habits are bad, and they must be punished. No Vespa for me!

I believe the Vespa is entirely capable of maintaining a brisk pace on the road, of passing as I like, of staying healthy for years to come. But I am tired of being a rebel, or riding too many miles, using my two wheeler as real transportation, of enjoying the limitations of CVT transmission, of feeling no fear on "small" wheels.

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So I am toying with my choices to replace my Vespa GTS which is still being tested by Vespa Ft Lauderdale. The Vespa is paid off, I shall sell it at my leisure, but in the meantime I am unsure which exact path to follow. And in an age where "mid sized" is 1300cc, I still propose to increase my cubic capacity in a smaller measure than most riders. I have always found my greatest pleasure in smaller capacities- 350ccs when I was a youth, the splendid kick starting Yamaha SR500 later and a Yamaha 650 Maxim complete with huge fairing and shaft drive when I rode from Florida to California 16 years ago. I remember the dogs of my life, overweight, tall and principally represented by a Honda Goldwing that made me feel inadequate when facing corners together.

My buddy Giovanni loves his elephantine 1200cc BMW and squeezes it through small Italian towns where mopeds sometimes fear to go, even in Spoleto as the small hill town shrinks to accomodate the Two Worlds festival.

I shall restrain my impulse to oversize it, but I shall seek reliability, and as much simplicity as the 21st century offers. I checked my diary entries and I note my Vespa was inoperable almost six weeks ago.That's a long time to be bereft of my favorite past-time, especially for so insignificant a cause. Its time to enjoy life by riding once again. Thus time on some big Hog that will dwarf my puny efforts at daily riding by quarter liter. I hope to be in the saddle next week if all goes well. Risking a ticket perhaps...

In And Out

It happened not so long ago that a member of the Key West City Commission asked a lobbyist to bring him home a t-shirt from Las Vegas. When questioned about the propriety of the gift the City Commissioner, a man who owns strip joints and hard-drinking bars on Duval Street, defended himself plaintively: "But I like In And Out burgers!"

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Much though I regret it, I have something in common with the city commission's bon vivant in our little town. I like the burgers as well. Very much in fact.We spotted the sign from a distance, shining like the Star over Bethlehem so long ago, this time "In-N-Out" led us across the median strip of a very long, very straight drive across the San Joaquin Valley of central California.

The menu is short at these drive throughs, no chicken tenders or salads or other low cholesterol concoctions:

The staff wear little jockey caps or old fashioned masons-type paper hats and white shirts and they pump freshly peeled potatoes through a slicer and fry them in front of your car. Its all an old time Burger Joint should be, and they are all over the American West, those delicious little meals

I woofed mine down and thoroughly enjoyed fortifying myself for the vegetarian celebrations to come, high in the mountains, distant on the horizon. Our resort destination fried a mean parsnip, its true, but the milk shakes are to die for at an In-N-Out.

For my part, all I brought back from this quick stop in Merced, California, was the memory. I prefer the burgers to the t shirts, and there are generally no questions asked about a simple but satisfying road meal.

Young Lumberjacks Convention

I stood at my window and looked out across the open space that could have been a parade ground, and watched the refugees tramping through the muddy gravel. They were people hell bent on getting away, and taking their possessions with them, no matter how much effort it took to haul the little cart along, filled to overflowing with bags and boxes and packages. They leaned and strained and eyes glued on their feet they tugged like oxen bending to the yoke. They reminded me of pictures I have seen of Polish peasants fleeing the Nazi invaders, caught in black and white prints, fuzzy and faded by time; those pictures marked an epoch. And so did these overloaded guests staying at the Evergreen Lodge, a luxury resort high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

I turned back to the gas heater hissing at my elbow, next to the Sirius satellite radio which sat next to my cup of tea. I was reading In A Sunburned Country, and laughing and waiting for the curtain to go up on the new epoch in my wife's family. Her youngest nephew, the last of the small brood, was getting hitched. And I was a guest. An honored guest, for I am the groom's favorite uncle. It is a family joke as I am his only true uncle, and I find my presence at these events is de rigeur. Even at 6,000 feet in late September.

The bride and the groom are of the new generation, both raised to be aware and to live life greenly. He is a park ranger and she studies to be a nurse; meat passeth not their lips, and every burned hydro carbon is an offence against creation. I hope for once that the new generation will be able to pull off the magic trick of converting high ideals into practical reality; something my generation signally failed to do. I wonder how many generations of almost-but-not-quite-accomplished high ideals our over-engineered world can cope with.

The marriage was a robust affair, as it had to be, thanks in large part to a storm that produced light snowfalls, black thunderclouds and cold heavy rain. We cheered the young couple on, and they are so perfectly paired it seems certain to me that they will have little difficulty holding their vows up to the test of time. I witnessed both sets of parents escort their offspring down the aisle, both sets of parents still married, still setting a singular example to the parents-to-come. That's not a sight one sees too often in a world rendered complex by multiple families and tangled relationships. These two are families that appear to mate for life. It is clear from this picture that two happy people are getting married. A celebrant holds the book, the groom's older brother looks on, as the witness-in-chief. It is a scene that is reflected around the world in all human cultures and a marriage is a public event that, like a funeral, has a purpose that is immediately discernible to any human observer. We all get married, in more or less the same way no matter what our language, history or even religion. I enjoy that multinational subtext at weddings. I have seen Europeans marry, Berbers marry, Hindus marry, Africans marry and Americans marry, and its all pretty much the same. I even understood my Jewish wife's traditions at our own marriage...

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The ample fireplace was also the theme of the weekend, in a place where daytime highs grazed 60 degrees and nighttime lows hovered near freezing; temperatures decidedly not suitable for my Florida-thinned blood. The young people who attended the celebration were not one whit deterred. They reveled in their loud plaids, their hairy shirts and even hairier woolen Andean caps, with long flaps over their ears and puffy down jackets insulating them from Nature's fury. Some few of them slept in tents for want of $175/night to sleep with gas heat and satellite radio. We took pity on the Preacher and his own soon-to-be-wife and encouraged them to sleep in our spare bedroom. Our cabin was as large as our modest Florida home. Everything is ample in California, not just the fireplaces.

I looked on and shivered and not just because of the cold. I became more acutely aware of the passing of time as I watched the robust youth busy themselves with all the social activities that these occasions demand. They strode and organized and huddled and planned and laughed and I was glad I was in the second tier, at the back of the marriage party.

Uncle Chuck was not at this wedding, a first since I married into the family. He was killed by a heart attack a good few years ago. In the old days he stood and smiled and sang when called upon at Jewish gatherings, prayed in Hebrew when needed and toasted all who needed a reminder of why families are families. I missed Uncle Chuck this past weekend, I mourned the absence of a generation older than mine and I cannot but help feeling that I was an inadequate substitute, no matter how old the passing of the generational torch made me feel.

Seeking Perspective

In a few hours I will be herded into a plane and launched westwards at 500 mph to arrive in Oakland 2 hours after I leave Fort Lauderdale... and I am then going to be cheerful and polite to what will seem like the audience for the Sermon on the Mount, but will in fact just be a large bunch of relatives gathered to witness the marriage of two young hopefuls. Time to say goodbye for a few days to all this:I am very happy they have decided to make the commitment, and all that, and I don 't even mind hanging out with assorted relatives. After all I did marry into the family 14 years ago and they have all been nothing but wonderful to me ever since (the prevailing sentiment at the time was that at least my wife hadn't married "Ed" even though I was an unknown quantity compared to her last boyfriend). I do wish they weren't tying the knot at 8,000 feet in a place where temperatures drop to 40 degrees. I haven't seen my breath in years.

Its just that I'm feeling grumpy at the moment and I've got things I want to do to move on and make a fresh start. This weekend is my scheduled weekend off but the days surrounding it are swapped out so I will be repaying my colleagues in the weeks ahead for covering for me, which means my time off will be shredded for several weeks to come. That adds to my sense of a lack of closure.

So, in order to seek a balance I went to the movies yesterday afternoon. I had a hair appointment earlier in the day but in a moment of keys disease the hair dresser had apparently forgotten so she came late and dealt with my mop in short order. Which was very good of her as I needed it, but she wasn't dressed to cut hair and I could only think that she had something more interesting on her plate before her daughter got out of school in a few hours.

The movie was a documentary titled No End in Sight which laid out in stark detail the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq after the US invasion. And the destruction of lives:It was detailed blow by blow account of the lack of planning, the lack of attention paid to details, the lack of discussion, about what to do with an entire country once you own it. "The Pottery Barn rule" as Secretary of State Powell put it at the time. It is clear in the film that the US was hell bent on breaking Iraq with no idea how to take responsibility for dealing with the breakage after the invasion. $1.5 trillion down the drain.

Worse than that was the stark human cost, brought home once again by the implications of the lack of planning. The film pointed out that in World War Two the allies planned for two years how to rebuild Europe. The US planned for 50 days how they were going to govern Iraq, and then threw the plans out the window and went with political whims.

George Slocombe, to his credit, agreed to be interviewed and he came out of it very badly. The senior advisor to the Civilian Provisional Authority, he was a political hack who never visited Iraq and made decisions that the film argues were disastrous, and their consequences affect us today. He looks entirely normal and all I could think of as he spoke was that old phrase "the banality of evil." Perhaps in his case it should be re-phrased as the banality of stupidity but his motivation for wrecking post-invasion Iraq will never be known.

In the grand scheme of things I have it pretty good. On today's daily images on the BBC News page we see men trolling for trash in a canal in Indonesia and street children idling in India.This is where I live and what I have to come home to; I can't let myself forget how lucky I am: A Broken Vespa really doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Time to take stock and get over myself.

For Sale- Vespa GTS-Runs Well

My Vespa is fixed, according to Joe at Vespa Ft Lauderdale but he's keeping it for a few days until I get back from California just to make sure the scooter really is working properly. Then I will be able to sell it and wash my hands of this whole unhappy period of my life.

The problem with the Vespa was apparently a loose fuel injection unit which the computer would have revealed immediately had Vespa Miami done as they promised and taken the scooter all the way to the Ft Lauderdale main store 45 minutes away and tested the scooter. Instead they buggered about and made me return three times to get the job done. Each time I was polite and more frustrated and though they discovered the broken check valve in the evaporative system they failed completely to discover the original cause of the stuttering.

Joe is a piece of work and he it is that forced me to decide to sell the scooter. he told me that the Vespa shouldn't go beyond 70 miles per hour or it would die a premature death, which if true makes a nonsense of the water cooling and the rev limiter and so on- all the precautions Piaggio has built in to the scooter to assure long and useful life. Then he said riding the Vespa flat out sucked "too much fuel" into the engine so that when you roll off the gas the engine is starved for fuel and hesitates. Then he suggested that I was shortening the life of the scooter by daring to ride the scooter at wide open throttle. I know its all rubbish and I also know the Vespa will now run smoothly and reliably but I don't want to go near South Florida's only Vespa dealer again.

Joe may know how to read a computer print out but he epitomizes to me a man who services machines but understands neither riders nor scooters. He also confirms me in my belief that the Modern Vespa is not a machine to be ridden. It is to be admired ( and it is beautiful) and purchased by inexperienced riders who want something cool in their lives. Joe reminded me more than once that I have ridden my 250 further than anyone else he has come across, and at 11,000 miles I don't really feel that that is very far at all.

If my style of riding is too much by Vespa Fort Lauderdale/Miami standards then I need to accept the fact that if anything happens to the scooter after the warranty expires in November I will be on my own, and it will be a world of hurt with these bozos smirking and saying "I told you so."

I went to Pure Triumph down the street with my buddy Diggy who had been turned on by his first sight of the "gangsta" MP3 ( Diggy is 24 and his vernacular is quite an education for this old man) where he fell in love with the Ducati Monster and I confirmed my lustful feelings for the Triumph Bonneville. My wife sounded relieved when I called her and said I was moving on from the Vespa. Diggy looked me as though I was mad when I asked if he wanted to look at Piaggio's three wheeler. We had just finished being verbally abused by Joe and Diggy said: "No Dude. I will be worrying all the time about over revving the thing and then I'll end up starving it for fuel." And we laughed together all the way to the motorcycle shop. I don't think Diggy had ever seen me so angry as I was during my confrontation with Joe, and that revelation brought home to me how upset I have been over this broken Vespa mess.

$5600 obo.