Memories And Mental Gymnastics

Triumph Bonneville 900, circa 2008, Key West Florida.

Benelli Tornado 650, Italy's answer to the Bonneville, with my adored dog Sandy, Italy 1979.

Six months ago I started wondering who was reading this blog if anyone, and I got Sitemeter which I use as a modest free tracking service (currently carrying an ad opposing nukes in Iran. I'm waiting for the ad supporting nukes in Iran! Who are these people?) and to my astonishment this site gets an average 230 visits a day, 6,000 a month, which since April adds up to just over 31,000. Despite Jeffrey's insistence this blog is still just my outlet for the many rambling streams of consciousness cluttering up my brain. Taking pictures of daily Keys living tends to relieve the pressure, in some inexplicable way. I am astonished by these numbers that have been creeping up on me. Who on earth are all these people?BMW K1200R on the road to Spoleto, Italy. Rented one very wet and cold June 2008.

Determined motorcycle beginnings, I was a helmetless risk taker even then. UK circa 1960.

I have noticed that Canada went to the polls this week and re-elected Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper's party. They started their parliamentary campaign five weeks ago and it was all be done by Wednesday breakfast time. We in the United States are grinding along into the final three weeks of our year long saga and things are getting unpleasant. I must confess I am hugely amused by the signs I see photographed at Republican rallies (I don't have television) denouncing Obama's socialism. This is the same week our Republican Administration announced a plan to nationalise any banks needing Federal reassurance! You just know Marx Lenin and Engels are sitting up in their dusty coffins clapping loudly! A field day for an Ironist, a dreadful day for the United States as markets continue their inexorable slide and trust remains evanescent.

My grandfather's shooting parties and elaborate picnics. Umbria, Italy circa 1950.
Chris' less elaborate picnic, on a bicycle camping trip from our English Boarding school. 1971.

There is a move afoot in the Keys to change the name of the new airport terminal, from McCoy to something else. A recently completed court case found Monroe County guilty of not properly protecting the workplace of a female assistant to County Commissioner Sonny McCoy. The county has been fined $48,000 after a trial that saw McCoy not deny the charges that he was grossly sexually explicit in his office ("Guess who I had sex with in Paris, last week?" Juvenile boasting it sounded like to me), he just seemed to think the woman liked it. McCoy's daughter wrote long letters to the newspapers attacking the victim and justifying the naming of the terminal for her deceased mother, a very decent woman no doubt about that. However, unhappily for that line of defense Sonny McCoy had a bust of his own head, not his late wife's, commissioned to adorn the almost completed, McCoy Terminal. One fine suggestion in the Citizen's Voice was for him to put it in his living room.

Mellito wondering what mess my overpowered superbike was going to get me into.Italy 1979.His son Giovanni sheltering from a downpour with me, Terni Italy 2008.

The stock markets around the world, were moving back up the long steep hill they tumbled down over the past week. I was afraid to wonder what would happen if the latest bank bail out schemes offered around the world didn't boost confidence. I was not encouraged by the IMF boss, the gravelly voiced Frenchman enunciating the notion that we faced systemic financial meltdown, (what, I wondered as I listened to the radio, does that even mean?). Even though I am not depending on the stock market for money I am convinced it is the bell weather of our economy, as a visible expression of trust and faith in the system. The question sliding round my brain is: where does the government get the money to cover it's multi-trillion obligations? Printing is the only answer I see and that inevitably leads to devaluation of the currency. I fear we shall see more sleight of financial hand in the months ahead and more economic shenanigans to evade this unhappy truth. Might as well face it now: we the little people are going to get screwed one more time. At least one more time to cover for the absence of oversight of the financial wizards who are too smart to be left to their own devices. I hope my vegetables grow splendidly, and edibly, as a hedge against inflation. My castle was my home at Morruzze. Fifty rooms with the oldest from the 12th century.800 square feet dating back to 1987. I'd much rather a canal instead of a wine cellar.

I attended a memorial yesterday for Cheryl Heinlen who died this month at the age of 56, which seems altogether too young to me, as I head towards my 51st birthday. Cheryl had grown more isolated leaving one to wonder if she was driven by her desire to write, alone, or whether she was isolated and depressed. Thus she slipped into a coma alone, discovered in her apartment just in time for her to die at the hospital. To our astonishment a friend of ours through whom we had no connection to Cheryl announced she too was going to Finnegans Wake and there we met. It's hard to tell people how small the world is when you live in Key West. Connections are more like spider webs than railroad tracks. Not least because we ran across Josh and Lisa in the bar by coincidence, so while I went to work, my wife spent the evening with them... I find the ties encouraging in these bleak times, and they permit me to hope for a better, more intimate, post-consumer future. Not I hope fed by memorial services but by the desire to simply be together.My sister Liz, 60, the happy farmer's wife and grandmother. Umbria Italy 2008.57 years ago she is the twin on the left. Neither has ever left home making me the wanderer.

I have no idea what prompted this flood of reminiscence, other perhaps than Cheryls's death. But here it is, make of it what you will. Not exactly Key West but a crooked path here!

Think Globally Dig Locally

When my wife and I were out sailing around Central America, I told her that when we settled back on land there was no way I was going to get back into gardening. For routine garden work I said, we would pay a gardener, I was no longer going to be a slave to a lawnmower. Which worked out well enough for a few years especially as we don't have any lawns, just wood chips and pea rock. Then I decided I needed to put my back where my mind was, so I went out to Home Depot and started spending money:Upon the advice of Lisa and Josh we spent a little less than $250 and came home with planks and plywood to make four vegetable beds, four feet by four feet (1.5 square meters each), soil to fill them and a few pots for some fruit trees. Lisa has been developing her own southernmost garden over the past few years:She showed me how she created her own raised beds using simple pine planks with plywood floors, properly drilled to drain water. I followed her instructions and found a shadier spot for some vegetables that don't need to be in the direct path of the blazing southern sun:With their help the selection process to get all the necessary stuff was easy and painless, and I have started to put together my new beds. The pots were a bit easier as all it took was basically lining the bottom with some rocks for drainage and tossing some potting soil in on top:Lisa gave us a couple of pineapple cuttings, and as unpromising as they looked I just stuck the spiky things into the dirt and off they hopefully go, they seem quite vigorous so far in their pots. We also got a mango, a key lime, an avocado and an orange tree and I spent a pleasant afternoon potting them as well.I am always astonished by the way things grow. It seems to me wildly improbable that things will sprout, never mind flourish, when they are stuck in the ground but sure enough the drive to live pushes them up. This neck of the woods is not very promising as far as gardening goes, thanks to the absence of soil and proximity to salt water, but it is frost free and I think it's time I took advantage of all that sunlight.Lisa calls her beds a Victory Garden which puzzled her mother who had to point out there isn't a war on, but her daughter ever the activist begged to differ. She's fighting to create her own locally grown organic food:This gardening thing is an experiment for me, I find it surprising that I have taken to it after decades of not wanting to deal with growing things. I justify in my mind as a way of seeing how well we can do growing our own food, organic, local and overseen by ourselves. I hope we can fend off the damned iguanas and insect pests and have something to eat in a few months. I expect some failures but I hope that given time and experience I will remember the lessons my father taught me years ago.

It was his only hobby and I grew up in a vast market garden of growing things, we composted, mulched, dug and pruned with a will. This photograph from around 1960 shows my early days of motoring in a part of our kitchen garden in England, when I must have been two or three years old. There are quite a few edibles growing in the background:I am getting back into it on a more modest scale, four beds, a few pots and I hope the patience to expand as soon as i think I understand what I'm doing:

Having friends who can show the way is a big help and Lisa is quite the adventurous gardener, taking advantage of our frost-free climate to grow wildly tropical fruits in her much larger space. Sunday night we went by the have dinner and after dinner we sat out in the balmy eighty degree night and watched the full moon hover between the clouds:As we sat down below in the midst of Lisa and Josh's arboretum:Josh has half a dozen degrees of one sort or another to his name and he is driving the bio-diesel program at Key West High School:He also introduced me to something called Gentleman Jack, a brand of whiskey that was in large part responsible for my inability to produce a coherent essay yesterday. We sat out under the stars marveling at our good fortune, enjoying the absence of seasons, more or less:Lisa is a teacher at a nearby middle school and together the two of them taught for a couple of years in Kuwait. they were momentous years as there was an outbreak of some unpleasantness next door in Iraq, and they have their own stories of ducking and covering:It was a just reward for screwing and drilling and cursing and grovelling looking for errant seed packets the afternoon before.

They also introduced my wife and I to the value of a tropical outdoor fire to poke and stare into as the whiskey level dropped and the conversation slowed, and soon enough it was time for bed. My wife, the designated driver carried me home.

Key West Locomotion

It seems singularly appropriate to consider the wheels of motion in the Keys because my Chevron station got a new delivery of gas yesterday and a gallon (four liters) of regular is down to $2.98. My Bonneville runs on mid-grade which is currently available at $3.20 and I get 45 mpg (17 km/liter). I've put 17,000 miles on it (26,000 kms) on it since I got it a year ago -all on boring straight Florida roads:

The ones I feel sorry for are the youngsters with their rubber burning crotch rockets, stuck in the Sunshine State with its straight roads:Vespas, the deluxe scooters are appearing in greater numbers in Key West, mostly in winter because the do tend to be the preserve of the wealthy, relatively speaking. You can buy a lot of cases of Bud Light for the difference in price between this yellow Vespa LX150 and something like an entirely functional Taiwan Golden Bee:A Yamaha Zuma 50cc will do the job if you are buzzing around town with a package to deliver:And Duval Street gets crowded with people sitting in their cars cruising and checking out the scene. Irritating I call it, entertainment others call this style of not driving:

My wife hates taking her car downtown, she'd rather take her Vespa 150 anytime, and it seems there are a few people that don't think much of cars. Were you to live downtown you might find your car being used as a public trash can, it's one of those "island living" acts of disrespect you need to get used to. Drunk people do the weirdest things and they don't mean anything by it. They confuse their neighbor's cars for trash cans: Or you can be like me and get out of town every now and again, to enjoy the open road, albeit straight and flat:Some days it's good to drive a car, but downpours are usually short lived, as short as they are heavy:Even if parallel parking is beyond your natural abilities you should try to fit into the space properly. Your best efforts may make your rivals for the sought after parking spot crazy, especially as those spots can be in short supply. Waste not, want not and if someone is tempted to stick their moped behind your badly parked car please don't knock it over when you finally lurch out of your spot-and-a-half:Sometimes nature speaks and trees, of which key West has an abundance, make use of your car as an ashtray. In Turkey figs fall on vehicles, in Key West it's just inedible blossoms:Cars and two wheelers cohabit quite well in Key West, even though some new arrivals still bring their hatred of bicycles with them from Up North and shout epithets at locals peddling:

If you do park your scooter or motorcycle at a meter you must pay for the meter, and you can stick as many vehicles as will fit into one metered spot (though a single moped at a meter is entirely legal, don't bother calling me in dispatch!). Any and each vehicle parked in a metered spot will get a ticket when the meter runs out, and you only get ten minutes per quarter- that's a buck and a half per hour versus thirty five dollars for a ticket. Meters run from 8am to MIDNIGHT six days a week and noon till 8pm Sundays. Or of course you can use bicycle parking racks- but you also get a ticket if you park your moped in bicycle parking. That's because the city is well supplied with parking for motorized two wheelers...If all that is too much you could do this to get around, except not on Duval where it is illegal:

On the other hand those of us who are a little further advance din years prefer to do this, an adequate compromise between speed and usefulness:Here too are some rules. It's okay to ride a bike on the sidewalk as long as you yield to pedestrians and have an audible means of approach ("Excuse me!"). Use lights, you will get stopped, and I enter a million traffic stops BNL (Bike No Lights) in my night shift.Do not ride the wrong way on a one way, any tickets you get on a bike are moving violations against your driving record.The sad thing is these tourists (identified by the rental plaques on the front baskets) ride bikes in Key West as a vacation thing, this experience won't awaken in them the notion that cycling is useful transportation. I mean, what do you do if it rains? Melt?It's the same problem pedestrians suffer from, and Key West, particularly Old Town is ideal for walking, even in inclement weather:And in fine weather, dry weather walking is a splendor of sights to be seen:Plaid shorts are entirely respectable in Key West, even away from the golf course. We are fashion rebels when it comes to being seen out in public, in your car, on your bike or best of all on your motorbike.

Elgin Lane

In 1801 the Seventh Earl of Elgin took pieces of marble from the Turk controlled Acropolis in Athens and had them shipped home to England. He did this while he was the British Ambassador to Constantinople because Greece was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Since 1980 Greece has claimed the Elgin Marbles as part of their heritage, but the British Museum is still hanging onto the Parthenon Sculptures, bulldog-like. And that is what I think of when I think of Elgin Lane in Key West, neither of which has anything to do with the other....

The easy way to find Elgin Lane is to cruise north on White Street until you find the brightly colored inconvenience store known as Blossoms:

                            

From Blossoms its a one way ride straight down Elgin Lane to a point that pops out next to Paradise Cafe a couple of blocks away. And in that stretch of narrow one way asphalt lies all the romance and intimacy of a narrow key West lane. Personally I find Elgin Lane to be unusually attractive- I'm not sure why.

I hit it on a bright sunny day, hot but not too hot, sunny but not too sunny I suppose. Shadows were starting to lengthen and I should have been thinking about heading home. I had just been to the Tropic to check out Werner Herzog's latest documentary about life at the South Pole Encounters at the End of the Earth, a snappy title for a movie infused with Herzog's own special brand of lugubrious Teutonic hopelessness at the human condition. Which film I thoroughly enjoyed and whose somber tone was the perfect antidote to the cheerfulness inspired in me by this modest little alley.

It sort of looked like rhubarb to me, but that's impossible...I'm pretty sure.         

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Elgin Lane distinguishes itself from other Key West streets by the impossible good manners of it's sign writers:

 

Well, most of them:

             

The houses on Elgin Lane are the usual mixture and included an upper crust guest house with barely glimpsed swimming hole:    

And the inevitable Conch Cottage with its own form of OSP, off street parking:

And even though I frequently see porches set up for outdoor entertainment its rare someone is out there rocking gently or playing backgammon. Perhaps it's the time of day I pass by:

Some houses are kept full of junk, the gruesome pack rat syndrome. I could never be a pack rat, being as how I was always traveling and leaving all my stuff, perforce, behind. Not like this character who likes to live behind battlements of stuff:

Others fight the good fight, as do I, and struggle to keep the crap factor to a minimum:

You don't even have to do much maintenance if your home is made of Dade pine:

Some people are dab hands with a paint brush and pastels are the shades of choice. There is a tradition in Key West to paint outdoor ceilings a light blue color. The superstitious among us believe light blue for some unaccountable reason keeps spirits away and also has the beneficial effect they say of keeping insects away. Powerful stuff for a simple shade of blue:

I caught one less traditional detail on a house that was all shuttered up- with a zip tie!

Elsewhere ingenuity was evident, the sort of lateral thinking I used to employ when I was far from land on my sailboat, not, as in this case, on a construction site:

I saw another piece of whimsy in a road sign on a stretch of this narrow street:

"No Parking At Any Time" says the faded sign, which seems obvious enough in this kind of area, so it didn't take but two minutes for me to spot someone doing just that!

That's what they mean by "island time." Don't lose your mind when people just stop in the middle of the street- it's the response to the general lack of space. Besides if you're in a hurry there is Eaton Street, a main thoroughfare just a block away:

As if parked cars weren't enough, Elgin Lane is apparently plagued by junior league moon walkers:

And cyclists, ready to run you down. Mind you those are always available in Key West, accidental ecologists on our streets:

Oh and don't let's forget my pet peeve:

We were at a movie the other day, my wife and I, watching a Spanish movie titled Fred and Elsa, a sweet concoction about late blooming love at the Tropic Cinema and one of the characters announced, annoyed, how irritating people are who don't keep their cell phones on. I got a big jab in the ribs, but I am unrepentant. Cell phones take messages with the greatest of ease. I met another character enjoying public telephony:

Actually no, look closely and you'll see he was sucking hard on a brown bottle. He was a pretty cheerful character as he watched me point and shoot and volunteered that his was a long time Key West family that came here from Nassau. I've been to the capital of the Bahamas a few times and it never seems to get more attractive, a run down crowded borough with all the charm of a dilapidated shopping maul tacked onto a rabbit warren of narrow streets. This character turned a tad maudlin remembering Nassau in the 1960's making it out to be paradise lost, as usual; a nice guy gifted with a defective memory. Hell the Duke of Windsor was banished there in World War Two (he had unfortunate Nazi sympathies and they had to ship him somewhere he would do no harm) and he was in despair. I don't think Nassau was much improved by the time our beer toting new found friend saw the light of day. But I digress, once again. Another piece of Key West whimsy, a light pole growing out of a palm tree:

As cold starts to tighten its vise Up North I continue to enjoy Key West's primary colors, green blue and white with occasional splotches of yellow thrown in. I would rather eat worms than have to live in a place with seasons. I think that's my greatest fear if the economic melt down were to displace me, as after a life spent wandering I have finally settled in one place, a place of endless, glorious summer time. And Elgin Lane ain't half bad either:

Not that I think too highly of speed bumps, but I did enjoy cruising the lane. And no, I didn't lose my marbles.