Fame In Key West

I got an unsolicited e-mail a couple of days ago asking about something I posted on this page and could they use it? Sure I said, I always do. They even offered to give me credit which I feel is as much as I could expect. I was quite surprised to learn the Studios at Key West wanted to quote something I wrote about the Key West artist Suzie dePoo. All I could find were some recollections I posted from attributed sources. The cool thing is my wife and I are invited to the opening of the exhibit they plan so good for my blog! Score one for my diary! I'm looking forward to it.

I  did write a couple of paragraphs mentioning how little this city in its eternal weirdness fails to mark locations important in the life of quite a few celebrated artists of one sort or another. Hemingway is a massive and obvious exception but a friend did point out to me years ago that Tennessee Williams a gay man and Elizabeth Bishop a lesbian get short shrift and old Robert Frost gets hardly any mileage though you used to be able to rent his writing studio as a place to stay and may yet be able to sleep there for all I know. 

When a well known actress owned a downtown restaurant, Kelly's Bar and Grill was pointed out as belonging to one Kelly McGillis by drivers of the Conch Train as they went by. Perhaps they note William's home on Duncan Street but I don't think they drive by the private house and it's not marked in any way. Fame is a peculiar attribute and certain people come by it more easily than others.

I used to read the news on the radio in Santa Cruz California, and public radio listeners occasionally recognized me on the street.  But when I appeared on a news panel on the main news television station one night, I discovered the power of that medium and I never went near it again as the recognition factor was way too high. Even now I get a momentary jolt when I am recognized. As happened early one morning when out walking the little brown bundle of joy at Truman Waterfront.

I was not too surprised to see a cyclist stop and double back as my current condition pushing a walker tends to bring out the helpfulness of strangers and I was filling Rusty's water jug at the very convenient fountain in the park. I was completely surprised when the blonde woman addressed me by name. Bugger I thought but I put a brave face on it when I have to admit I can't remember where we met so I asked. And she admitted we never had, so I wasn't the tool, I had at first thought I was. That was a start. 

I also had the wit, unusual in me, to take pictures and notes. I am getting good at this, I thought to myself. Sherry with the hat retired to Old Town Key West eight years ago and apparently dragged a husband down too and they both really like it. They came from upstate New York which I quite liked when I was there one summer but apparently this time of year it is sub-optimal as the weather tends to be a bit brisk. I know I'd hate it. Kathy lives in Virginia and was visiting her friend and had never heard of this web page so was a bit flummoxed by the whole about face and talking to a stranger with a gait impediment. They were very nice and didn't mug me which might not have been all that easy as Rusty had got bored and was sitting and eyeing me from across the parking lot. One false move and he would have shredded them. Good boy.

This June this blog will have been posting one a day almost without a break since 2007. Though I say so myself the photography has got a good deal better and I am always ready to attribute that in good part to the fantastic improvement in digital photography over the past decade. I have also made a conscious effort to pay attention to my pictures and that has aid off. I really like digital photography in its current form.

Cell phones are getting really quite good though I do love my Lumix FZ300 bridge camera. It looks like a single lense reflex but it is a fixed lense electronic camera that bridges the divide between a professional quality SLR and the close range instrument found in your phone. Consequently I have a huge telephoto lense  and millions of filter and manual adjustments if I want to use them and sometimes I do. All it consumes is a rechargeable battery and I carry a spare. I take pictures, download them instantly to my phone by direct WiFi and do a little light editing on the phone to crisp them up as necessary and they ready for Instagram of this page. Fantastic.

It has got a bit complicated handling Rusty on a leash in town, pushing my walker and grabbing a quick picture here and there. When I could walk properly and keep up with Rusty I had more time to contemplate my shots but it is a credit to the camera that it snags pictures instantly to help me out. Composition with a tripod and profound thought is not really possible in my weird  walking style. 

The Key West Photography Festival is coming up and this year I did actually brace myself and submitted three pictures. I doubt they will be accepted or noticed as I have no idea how to rename the pictures ion the format they desperately needed. I tried to figure it out and failed and with the deadline looming I sent them in. A few hours later they extended the deadline! Much gnashing of teeth.

They have times for local photographers to give talks but I'm not sure I want to do that. I had thought of talking about my experiences trying to be  a photographer flat on my back in the hospital but my putative title As I Lay Dying leads me to think in a death-phobic society that my own amusement at my severe medical predicament might not go over real well. I have a dispatcher's sense of humor when it comes to talking about my death mask selfie in the roadway and photographs of the doctors operating on my leg... Better draw a veil over that and let local photographers chunter on about sunsets and palms and primary colors. It's what Key West is to most people. We know of course there's much more to it than that.

And some few weirdos have been reading my take on that for fully ten years. Crazy. But the pictures are a whole lot better aren't they nowadays?

You can imagine them laughing uproariously at thirty minutes of pictures like these can't you?

La Trattoria Oceanside

Once again we find ourselves at  a local business in Key West that has one original outlet downtown and then decided to build a second business across town because...Key West is too big? A four mile long island doesn't qualify as big no matter how you measure it, Yet there are dozens of restaurants and stores that double up because some people don't want to drive "all that way."

In point of fact when we arranged dinner with Robert and Dolly one stipulation from them, residents from up the highway, was we choose a place "east of White Street." Downtown traffic in winter can be a bit intense and Duval Street becomes a circus with happy pedestrians stepping off sidewalks apparently at random. Not everyone likes to drive the wild streets of Old Town. 

My wife and I had driven downtown, deep into the heart of Old Town to the Gardens Hotel, wedged between Simonton Street and Duval and found parking right across the street. The hotel has not proved to be particularly accessible on previous visits so this time I showed up and decided to walk in on my cane, suitably impressing my wife as I negotiated a few steps and found a not-too-deep armchair unfortunately out of sight of the piano. The place was indeed packed for Michael Robinson's weekly performance.

It's possible to manage the mean streets of down town but there is some sense in offering people a choice of locations as I confess to being an exception to the rule - I like driving around. My wife once had a teacher's aide who quit the job after a few weeks as she couldn't handle the commute from Duval Street to Stock Island, a distance of five, not always traffic-free, miles. 

I ordered Penne Venezia, an odd mixture of mushrooms dried tomatoes basil and crab meat in a cream sauce. It was an odd combination of flavors, sort of surf and turf  that worked really well in a  rich cream sauce. I ate half and  gave up boxing the remainder. The two women ordered snapper fried in a coconut crust and it was perfect. The fish was moist inside crispy outside and no trace of any frying agent. The rice was creamy, almost a risotto and we looked at each other in surprise.

I think we both have long seen La Trattoria on Duval Street, a rather dusty storefront appealing to visitors where we had a not very memorable meal many years ago and with the choices we have in Key West the restaurant never came up again. This time I actually suggested it after driving home to our temporary apartment just round the corner. Driving by at night the place looked very inviting, romantically lit and overlooking the ocean (across four lanes of traffic). Worth another go I thought to myself. My wife when arranging to meet Robert and Dolly offered it up as an option they accepted so we ended up going.

It was a great meal. Service was a bit slow at the beginning but by the end of the meal everything was up to speed. We staggered out with boxes of food as portions were quite large and next day's lunch was looking delicious too. My wife nixxed dessert which was a drag, not that she was wrong as I was stuffed but I'm thinking the opening bruschetta was delicious, the main course was great so how could pudding be awful? It couldn't of course but we'll never know. I went home and had an orange.

I'm glad we went and we shall go back. It's nice to have a slightly better eatery we can I hope count on to offer good food in a calm atmosphere.  Not every meal out has to be a food truck I suppose.  

Smathers Beach

I could take pictures like this most evenings when the sun is cooperating, around 5:30 when I am driving to work from the apartment where I am currently living at Salt Ponds. I avoid North Roosevelt as much as I can and it's easy when all it takes is a right turn out of the complex and there is a mile of unobstructed water views. Park and shoot (with the telephoto on the big camera)!

These I took from the Bridle Path, that stretch of grass sand and palms that runs alongside South Roosevelt Boulevard and got it's name form the horses they used to exercise there. 

I have to confess these are cheap shots as I can take them from the driver's  seat without having to commit one more act of daily struggle, getting out, assembling the walker and plodding around at the end of a long day of stumping around.  So I sit in the car like a tool and shoot duck in a barrel. 

The effect is pleasing and the camera does the work. Lucky me.

It's actually so embarrassingly easy to get these pictures I remembered I'd taken some a couple of weeks ago:

I'd need to leave the house a good bit earlier to stump across South Roosevelt and stand at the seawall. Perhaps I need to do that to complete the collection of alternative sunset pictures. 

Bien Sandwiches

Once a week my wife the adult educator works at the adult education office in Key West and these days as I live in Key West I am able to have lunch with her without much effort. I reduced my effort even further by walking across Eaton Street to pick up a couple of sandwiches. One would have been sufficient for both of us.

Bien came to Key West seven years ago and I wrote a review of the place in October 2011 however Google was switching blogger format around then and misplaced all my pictures. I have a huge picture gap from those years. Annoying but a first world problem. Anyway Paseo became Bien in 2015 when my picture stream had been restored:

A Seattle-based family that owned two sandwich shops in Washington State then opened a third in Key West, on the grounds presumably they could go no further. Then came the dispute not specified that broke up the little chain of shops called Paseo in Seattle and neighboring Fremont while in  distant Key West they renamed themselves Bien. In a town bulging with sandwich shops Bien has made a space for itself with particular sandwiches and rice bowls. 

Seating is limited with a bench inside and a couple of tables outside and their sandwiches are not the sort that can be eaten very easily on the move. They bulge with ingredients ready to spill down your shirt and leave stains everywhere. Delicious.

 While the seating is limited it is quite pleasant on a cool winter day illuminated by bright sunshine.

 The outside area is cooled  with fans useful in summer when the hardiest of patrons will be sweating. 

Or like me you can bundle your loot into a bag and haul it to someplace offering flat surfaces and lots of napkins. I bought too much food of course, I always do, a fish and a steak sandwich so we could try a sort of surf and turf lunch.

We both agreed the steak was perfect but the fish by comparison seemed to have less flavor. Odd, considering how rich these sandwiches look but next time, and there will be a next time we'll share one steak sandwich. Oozing with melted mozzarella:

I suggested to my wife that the food was so rich one every rare once in a while would be fine and she looked at me as though I had blasphemed. I didn't mean there was anything wrong with the food, far from it but it is in the words of the poet bulging with ooey gooey grease. It's a lot to tackle.

 They are famous for their slices of onion and you can see why:

Worth a visit and I'm not sure why I have left it so long since last time. I don't think my liver could handle one of these every week but every few months a pause to wrestle with long thick slices of sweet grilled onion could be on the cards. Should be on the cards.

It's a good spot to people watch too if you decide to sit and eat right here. Oh and there's a fine bakery across the street if the massive sandwich left room for pastry. I can't believe I said that. "...room for pastry..." Probably not.

Old Bahia Honda

In my continuing effort to hit all our old favorite haunts, the ones I can reach by rolling walker I made a point to haul Rusty to the Old Bahia Honda Bridge. 

Which it turns out is about 45 minutes from my current home in Key West. It takes a certain commitment to drive this far for Rusty, especially as Layne has brought him here on her way to work. 

 It was a good morning for it, as the clouds were dramatic and I had hopes for a sunrise. I got lucky enough.

The bridge is continuing to crumble and It's a shame. Inevitable but it would make a superb bike path right into the state park at the other end. 

There is a filter setting I'm coming to terms with on my big camera called "Old Days" and I like the effect:

 So I played with it for a bit.

 There was dew on the grass; it must be winter.

 The new bridge isn't picturesque but it does the job.

 Rusty trotted out and back but I could only get so far on the gravel. We called it a day.

And stopped at a launch ramp on the way back. It's another of those free access to the water ramps scattered up and down the Keys. 

In the distance I could barely make out the No Name Key bridge as the sun had disappeared and rain was closing in again.

 It was beautiful. I love these spots.

 Rusty was having fun in his own way.

It was a good morning and worth the drive.