What A Morning

I am not among those who slow down on the bridges to admire the scenery - irritating drivers! - but every day I do get to peek at the waters on either side of US 1 and the Overseas Highway lives up to its name. And when I realized I had remembered my big camera I pulled into a parking area next to Kemp Channel, the one that divides Cudjoe from Summerland, and Rusty and I took an extra walk before the real thing.

 Lately it has been extra still and extra humid but when the breeze picked up and the air lightened the big puffy summer clouds came back and the sun broke through the persistent cloud cover of weeks previously. The effect is glorious, blue skies, flat waters and not so wet that you can walk around without turning into a human sponge.

I thought the cluster of kayaks was some sort of summer camp, most likely from the Sea Scout Base nearby, and I set to pondering what the youngsters might think of a summer spent in this remarkable place. Maybe it just is where they live. I try to remember if I appreciated the physical beauty of places where I grew up and some of them were really nice, but I have no memory of thinking how lucky I was. 

 I think Rusty is a bit like that. His criteria for finding somewhere interesting beats me. He had a really good time for the span of several photographs looking hither and yon. Him with his nose me with a telephoto. 

While he was head down in the smells the other side of the highway was on fire...

 I guess the osprey on the top of that pole has a ringside view of the morning spectacle.

Then we  got on to the serious business of walking and more sniffing.  And photos of course.

A Light Italian Lunch

My nephew described the dead wild boar as the Umbrian equivalent of a Florida crocodile and he has a point. They are a protected species much of the year but when a particular animal goes rogue and wrecks crops special permission is granted for an out of hunting season cull. This one was taken away for processing by my nephew and it will eventually reappear as sausage and salami and prosciutto. They are an earthy lot my Italian relatives. 

My wife is in Italy learning Italy at language school five days a week and practicing her nascent Italian seven days a week  with my sister and nephews.  My wife reports it's all much more fun than she had anticipated and because she likes to cook my nephew's girlfriend Giulia is also sharing cooking tips:

Giulia runs the family bed and breakfast and takes care of laundry cooking breakfast and so forth, as well as giving lessons on cooking with fire apparently. Everytime I watch a movie and food is cooked over a flame I cringe. The way its done is to burn down the fuel until it is embers and then pull out the embers to radiate heat and cook the food, as in the photo above.

Even today this is a pretty rural part of Italy but when I was a child the roads weren't paved, electricity and piped water were innovations and these country skills, killing and cleaning, cooking with fire and so forth were in common usage. Nowadays there are many urban Italians to whom these skills are bizarre and unknown.

Antonio in the cap above was delivering fresh fruits when I was a kid and in those days he used a little three wheeler and when I met him in May he told me this was his third box truck worn out by continuous deliveries to these very rural communities.  His son rides with hm to continue the family business in a part of the world where Amazon, though known is not dominant. Below my wife scored this excellent photo of a food truck with a message in fashionable English that fell slightly wide of the mark:

That it is in English is testament to the fact the Umbria is a destination nowadays like it never was when I was a boy. Americans and Italians "in the know" now boast of second homes in Umbria; Tuscany is too common for them.

Meat cheese and mushrooms are what Umbrians eat in a region without a tidal coastline. Consequently I have no idea what Italian names are for fish, just as I had to learn sailing in California and have no idea about that specialized dialect in Italian. The stuff my wife deals with I am familiar though and ;ast weekend she was at a family celebration, a grandchild's birthday and she was plunged into that part of Italian life not usually lived by visitors. I took this picture in May when the family gathered in my honor, the Uncle from America.

Part of the idea for my wife to spend a month in Italy is to live and learn Italian without me there to interpret. It is natural and normal for everyone to turn to me so without me there she had to rent a car, drive, explore, talk and ask and rely on herself. Which has worked out surprisingly well. Immersion is the way to learn. She also had another chance to enjoy a protracted celebratory lunch for the birthday boy and immerse herself in the family cooking. First lasagna:

Then suppli. In Umbria (and Rome) what Americans call "arance" (oranges) are a variation on the Sicilian style of fried rice ball that has taken root in Italian-America. These rice balls have a meat and tomato sauce flavored rice inside and fried breadcrumbs on the outside. And usually no gooey cheese which is the Sicilian style.

 Fried zucchini, known confusingly to my English family as courgettes.

Sausages and prosciutto killed and cured by my brother-in-law. This is a very robust country family. I was never cut out to be a farmer and that was obvious to me. Though I caused much outrage at the time my decision to flee is generally viewed as the right thing now, 35 years later.

 Beans and salad because even determined meat eaters like Umbrians do graze rabbit food.

 Not sure what this is but I do like Italian custard especially when oozing from flakey pastry. When I was a youngster dessert was almost never served after a  meal. It was always fruit and creamy pastries were reserved for breakfast when in the city.

And for special occasions there is home made "English Soup" which is an Italian variant of the English dessert called trifle, layers of cookies custard and fruit in a huge gooey mess. It is said British sailors introduced trifle to the Italians during the Napoleonic War and I always had it during my childhood, a mixture of custard and chocolate sauce which was irresistible and fondly remembered.. 

 Dogs are part of the scenery and these live better than many in the region where chains and kennels are part of the scenery and which break my heart.

 My brther-in-laws dog got a new American bed (from Amazon via my wife's suitcase) and my wife reports Caramella likes it very much. All good dogs deserve a bed.

 Me? I got the pictures of lunch and placated my memories with a cuban coffee and cheese bread from Sandy's, at the old location on White Street. Food is so evocative.

 Me not missing the family gathering or the food or the winding mountain roads. Rusty is somewhere just outside the frame.

And when not prolowing...

 He has his own bed.

He never did take to an open bed, he likes being scrunched up when not on the couch or on my bed. Very odd

Seeing Key West

I keep thinking there's nothing new for me to see after eleven years chronicling my walks around the  Key West neighborhoods. 

 There is. It might be the angle of sunlight falling on a house or a man sitting on the sidewalk.

 Or the older generation cleaning the gutter by hand:

 I am inclined to forget not all US  cities offer these varied old frontispieces to their city streets:

 And not every city expects to see eager scooter riders cluttering their streets.

 When in doubt, look up.

Another Country

I have never treated my telephone as anything other than the miracle it is. I have listened to people curse the mobile telephone world we live in as though it is somehow an implement without an "off" button. To like one's potable phone is somehow to epitomize  the life of an anti-social, hermit freak, someone who lives without true friends who exists only in the ether on"social media." Yet for me, my iPhone is so much more. It is a camera, a library, a compass, a navigator, a flashlight, a telegraph, a fax, a radio, a television, a publishing house, a weather station, a notebook,a gramophone player, a news stand,an archive,a Dictaphone, an atlas and so much more. I grew up in a world which lived by actual horsepower, that expected people to live in homes with (hopefully) cold running water and communal televisions, a world where oxen plowed fields and walking was the main means of locomotion.

I was a child of privilege fully equipped with hot and cold water, indoor plumbing and servants, but I who grew up speaking three languages no more imagined portable telephones than I could conceive a world where everyone in these villages owned a car.

I first noticed the mobile phone transformation when we traveled, my wife and I, on a three week road trip behind the recently removed Iron Curtain. The countries of Eastern Europe in those days of the mid 90s went straight to cell phones and skipped the whole landline dilemma, which we clung to for a decade longer. Our Western rental car out performed the two stroke Trabants we encountered but the young people in Czechia and Poland walked around with phones glued to their ears. Texting was still just over the horizon. In the picture below you can see an outline of my mother watching the procession from the shadow of the kitchen window in the castle where I grew up. We had a TV and the rest of the village shared a TV for the single channel broadcast in Italy at the time. We children democratically preferred to watch television with the children of the village rather than alone in one of our several living rooms.

Before she left to live a month with my family in Italy my wife took me by the scruff of my neck and forced me to download one more application on my phone. I whined but she was relentless. WhatsApp uses the Internet to make phone calls and unlike the cell signal my wife uses in the lonely mountains of my youth the WiFi at my family's bed and breakfast gives us a perfectly clear signal on which to talk. It is amazing. In my childhood the task of calling my father in England when my mother and sisters and I were on summer vacation in Italy was an all night affair. There were no cinemas within 45 minutes drive on gravel roads, so for entertainment we went to the next village which had a phone and sat for hours in the cobblers shop where Carletto repaired shoes and waited for the various operators to connect lines from our home in England to our village in Umbria. Our world in Italy was limited to a few villages in a narrow radius.

These days there is an app for everything, including travel bookings, such that travel agents are pretty much vanished for ordinary folk. Newspapers struggle  with electrons and writers struggle with free content. Cable TV is overrun by streaming content. Change is everywhere; food delivery is real, electioneering by Facebook is commonplace. Yet to me the simple fact that I can talk to my wife in Italy for free on a  crystal clear internet phone line from the phone in my pocket still seems like a miracle. I could even do a video link if I so chose but we are old and prefer our phone links to be audio only.

"The past is another country; they do things differently there." That quotation from L P Hartley has haunted the second half of my life, every time I think about my bifurcated youth, half in a proper English boarding school, half let loose in the empty countryside of my Italian vacations, I think of how much the world has changed. My wife spent months with her telephone studying Italian on a Duolingo App (of course) and now she is away for three weeks in a classroom setting every weekday, learning to drive without me, to order food without me, to talk to my Italian relatives without me, learning to function without me as her interpreter I am connected once again only by my iPhone.

When I was a child the phone booth in the 1960s was installed in this man's shop (above), Lorenzo was the cobbler and his shop smelled of glue and leather and I sat at that well worn table playing with tacks and lumps of dried glue while my mother handled the phone and tried to get a connection to London. If, after hours of calling back and forth the connection was made my father's voice came down the wires reverberating and distant as though he was on he moon. Even then my little mind was boggled imaging our distant connection putting me monetarily in the living room at home in England, lifting me out of Lorenzo's workshop in Morre, all along the length of a tiny piece of wire. After the call my mother and sisters and sleepy little me staggered out into the night once more immersed in Italy and Italian and dirt roads and faint street lights and outhouses, a century behind our orderly English life. 

Gravel roads and a beast of burden, a human being, in the good old days:

I don't know if phones are stunting our social skills or if Amazon will destroy our middle class insecurities as we know them. But I do know its nice to be able to call half way round the world on a whim and to be able to hear the voice at the other end as though she were here. At least I am getting something slightly useful out of the revolution before it destroys us.

To Kill A Mockingbird

Rusty resting at the monument to Norberg Thompson, the man who created Key West Bight and commercial fishing they say. From the Key West Historic Marker Tour which you can see all around town:

"Norberg Thompson was a man of initiative and enterprise who always seemed to be ahead of the times. By shaping much of the economic infrastructure that gave growth to the town in the first half of the 20th century, he significantly influenced the development of Key West.

In an early business venture, he was involved in the sponge industry, having taken over for his father as the representative of several New York sponge buyers. At its peak, local spongers held a monopoly on the sponge industry- supplying 60% of the sponge demand nationally. Thompson was responsible for a good portion of that success.

Most of Thompson's businesses were located in the Historic Seaport District. His business, Thompson Enterprises engaged in fishing, ice production, cigar box manufacturing, pineapple and guava canning, turtle soup production, sponging, and hardware sales. Over time, business after business would emerge, flourish, decline and be replaced by another. Thompson's various business ventures are a reflection of changes to Key West during the early 20th century.

At the peak of his career, Thompson owned most of the Historic Seaport. His greatest achievement was the thousands of local jobs his businesses supported for nearly 50 years."

Of course when I chose to sit on a  bench and Rusty decided to pause and watch the world go by a local resident took our decision badly. I don't know why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird because they do like to dive bomb passersby for no apparent reason:

From Harper Lee's novel we get that quotation that you can shoot all the blue jays you want if you can hit them but it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. Which is a shame as jays aren't nearly as aggressive. Rusty just ignored the irritant. Maybe he's read the book?

From the history blog Facing Today this observation:

"The longest quotation about the book's title appears in Chapter 10, when Scout explains:

"'Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.

'Your father's right,' she said. 'Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy…but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

So, who is the symbolic mockingbird? Later in the book, Scout explains to Atticus that hurting their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley would be "sort of like shootin' a mockingbird." Mockingbirds are not the only birds in the book. Finch, the last name of Scout, Jem, and Atticus, is a small bird. Like mockingbirds, they are also songbirds."

And so home to be annoyed by the camera, my soulful dog on his choice of furniture: