Mangrove Art

I read an article in the New Yorker magazine, ostensibly it was the ruminations of an art critic coming to terms with his terminal cancer diagnosis. The article however ended up not being that at all and I found myself immersed in a blow by blow account of an excruciating childhood and upbringing which led to a life of drugs drink and smoking. He did say he attributed his diagnosis to the effects of smoking but considering his advanced age  of 77 he is okay with that. Webb Chiles is 78 and fit and active as ever so one could speculate the art critic is cutting himself short with his life of indulgence. 

It has been 13 months since my own brush with death and this time a year ago I was struggling to hobble for 15 minutes pushing a  walker around the apartment complex pool at Seaside condos in Key West. Snowbirds returning to the Body Zone gym remember me coming to class and sitting through exercises in my walker and they are stunned by my ability to walk squat and lift. I find it hardly surprising as I have been haunting the place in my efforts to get back to normal but my recovery is rare and not usual I'm told. I have no idea, I just know I wanted nothing more to do with the wheelchair and with that haunting thought I exercise like a fiend. I am a convert to taking classes five days a week, spinning, lifting weights and exercising my abdomen in a furious series of sweat inducing classes.

I am surprised that my accident and recovery remains as vivid as ever and one can only assume that is owing to the severity of the crash and its aftermath. I spent a great deal of time flat on my back and pretty much immobile with time to think, of which I do a great deal anyway. And now after a year of recovering the use of my limbs I can say that things are on track. I walk normally, though I still have some numbness in my legs there is no pain to speak of. I can bend squat and climb stairs like nothing ever happened so I am recovered. But in my head recovery continues.

I find myself absenting myself in my head a lot of the time. The after effects of a major trauma are fairly universal and quite well known but when they happen to you they pull you up short. I really don't worry about a  lot of stuff anymore; nowadays life is much more focused on he essentials. I still get upset from time to time about stupid stuff but I find it much easier to let go and forget it. I think a lot of this comes with age to even the slow witted among us like myself, but I feel the Catastrophe gave me a leg up and speeded up the process. For people who learn this lesson early on in life or are taught it by their mentors, my hat is off to them but even at my ripe old age of sixty, it's not too late to learn a useful lesson.

The thing that caught me out when I got back to regular life was that I had changed and no one around me had changed while I was out of circulation! That was a bit of a blow. So as a consequence I had to tamp it all down and turn inward. A friend of mine asked me why I am planning to take off when I retire in 2022, and my short public answer was that I need to challenge myself. That is true and I know that a seriously long difficult journey will put me through another inner transformation so when my wife and I get back, date uncertain, we will have changed again and I hope once again for the better. However I do know Key West is my home, it is the place where I have felt most at home and I am angling to come back after the Journey is done. I'd like to be a retired snowbird.

I've done my time here as a worker and Key West has been good to me, so the prospect of a small slow trawler in a city dock for the winters of my retirement sounds perfect. Summers driving the van to see friends while hurricanes blow also sounds pretty good too. I'd like to take advantage of being in town without obligations, without being attached to a job, without having to show up. I'd like that I think. My wife doesn't sound averse to that either. I have two more Fantasy Fests to survive at the Police Department, two more New Year's Eves and then I hope I shall be free. I feel privileged to be able to permit myself the hope of a period of retirement.

When I was a youngster retiring seemed the most natural thing in the world to the post World War Two generation of Europeans. Somehow we have now moved to a mindset where work has to be of  uncertain duration in one workplace, and full benefits are rare and the whole cradle to grave arc of employment is forgotten. We are told young people want neither security nor longevity. Frankly I don't believe it because the Millennials I work with enjoy the prospect of  their unusually munificent pension and health care as much as any of the previous generations might have done. Somehow we have managed to throw away the promise of social security (in the broad sense) and aging with dignity that was the promise made to the immediate post war generation. I never expected to grow old and find myself adrift in a throw  away work culture that seems alien to me. That happened to the generations preceding me when they watched us Baby Boomers get into the workplace but we were the wild ones, the rebels, the generation that made the rules so I had the perspective of the incoming majority. Not any more, where Baby Boomers are the old timers on the way out (!) and the beliefs I grew up with and lived with are slipping away.  Uncertainty and economic inequality are the watchwords now and I don't much like it. The youngsters like to mislabel me a Socialist but I think of myself as preferring simply a more humane form of capitalism, not  Socialist state ownership of industry.  They can label me what they want but in the end I am lucky to have social security and Medicare and a proper city pension and I always encourage the youngsters to go after the same and damn the labels. We aren't all cut out to be millionaire industrialists and I know I'm not.

But as I look forward to the New Year I am armed with a plan, I hope for the best and now I know that my wife and I can cope with the worst, we can survive and I hope flourish, even if retirement slips out of our grasp. When you have survived the worst everything else is less. Happy 2020 everyone.

Thanks For The Memories

I do this thing weekends when I work where I take my lunch break inordinately early, change into a  t-shirt and shorts and run out of the police station as though my hair is on fire. Saturdays the circus starts around 8:20 and Sundays around 9:50 as I drive a couple of miles up the Boulevard to get to the gym in time for the start of the bicycle spinning classes with John at Bodyzone. 

This exercise program during work caused so much upset on the other shift that I have cut back my overtime hours to avoid annoying the dispatchers who despite needing help, complained when I first signed out for ninety minutes to complete the classes and then I came back and signed back in forfeiting my paid lunch break and the overtime for an hour and a half...No one had done this before and they didn't like it. Then I tried fitting the exercise program into a  60 minute lunch break and that went over badly enough they disrupted my start time by deliberately leaving their desks to make me late for class as only one dispatcher can get up at a time lest we miss a 911 call obviously. I don't need the overtime that badly so I just go in after class if I go in at all.

So whey does my obsession with exercise cause so much angst? A colleague on my regular shift prompted me to spend some time thinking about this when he asked me about the intensity of my class schedule. I'm not sure he understood but I told him I am anxious not to get back in a wheelchair and that is the long and the short of it. I exercise to remain upright. I don't exercise to influence or annoy others nor to prove I am better than them or to rub their noses in their armchair bound work stations. I used to do Broga as a way to compensate for my job sitting down but I never had to do it during work as I was on night shift and no one knew what I did by day. Now I work days and my quirks are visible and apparently irritating to some for which I am sorry. But unrepentant.

Honestly I have never enjoyed going to the gym, unlike my wife who makes of exercise an obsession. And nowadays even though I go four or five days a week and I do find some pleasure in the people I exercise with, the reality is that my appearance in the gym is mandated by my desire to keep walking. Puzzled at first my day shift coworker gets it after I explained it to him. 

It might seem obvious that being in a wheelchair sucks but I remember when I lived in California and the language had to be changed. Being in a wheelchair was no longer "being confined" it was now merely an alternative means of locomotion, almost a choice if you weren't going to be too fussy. I can tell you having to be in a wheelchair is no barrel of laughs, at least it wasn't for me. I foudn it confining.

The wheelchair itself is crude and uncomfortable as delivered at the hospital and I spent some time looking for better, i.e: vastly more expensive alternatives should it become a permanent part of my life. Modern technology offers interesting electric motors and i was glad to see if I forked over a few thousand I could get a chair with the wheels slanted inwards to make them easier to roll. Vertical wheels are extremely hard to roll when you have to bend your arms over them to grab the   push rim. More often I would just grab the unsanitary tire and push that to get better and more effective purchase.

The social aspects of being in a  wheelchair aren't much better either. Watching your wife labor to get the contraption out of the trunk  and force it open for you as you totter beside the car holding onto the rain gutter on the roof with the tips of your straining fingers isn't much fun. At first after I came out of the hospital I couldn't stand so I had to train my long suffering wife how to position the chair exactly at the right angle with the BRAKES ON before I could slide myself into from the car seat or the edge of the bed or wherever I was. Learning to transfer to a wheelchair is the first step to semi-autonomy when you can't walk. When I could do that without a  board and with fear of falling I felt like I had made improvements worth noting in my life.

The other social aspect of rolling around in a chair is a severe lack of independence. NEVER touch a chair unless asked to by the occupant, it's absolutely the worst thing you can do, worse than being rude and staring which happens a lot when you perambulate at waist height. I hated being stared at but having someone hold the handles was the worst. I wished I'd had this solution when I read about it online. Perfect!.

I was lucky as i was wearing a helmet which saved my life and I had been active doing Broga, the only form of exercise I tolerated before I got run down. Broga saved my spine so I had every chance of learning to walk again after my leg muscles came back. At the time I wondered why my legs wouldn't move but atrophy sets in after just a  few days in bed. Then I wondered how I was ever going to walk again as I just couldn't get my legs to obey and that felt very very weird. My legs were numb too as the nerves grew back and as I struggled to practice stair climbing, on cement stairs with strong metal hand rails ( I sought them out around Key West) I couldn't feel my feet so I had no idea if they were on the step. I got in the habit of kicking my feet forward after I lifted them to make sure they were properly on the next step. I must have looked very odd. Luckily I still had a lot of upper body strength from Broga.

Even today with some residual numbness in my thighs walking is a conscious act. I never get up and walk without thinking about putting one foot in front of the other. But dammit I am walking! That's a good thing. I can even climb up and down stairs if i forget something and have to go up again. I don't care much about handrails. I carry boxes on stairs and I dodge Rusty whose approach to stair climbing is to treat it as a dangerous act to be completed as fast as possible and damn any pedestrians in the way. Even cripples.

 I remember pissing off some anonymous critic in Miami when I was rolling through the UM facility on my way to an outpatient check up and all these irritating ambulatory people were crowding the elevators like they feared getting left behind or something. All I had to do was roll past to the surgeon's ground floor office but I couldn't get through and no one seemed to see me down there. So I yelled "Make way for the cripple!" and people scattered from the path of the fat old maniac in the chair. From the rear of the crowd a voice called "You aren't a cripple, you're handicapped!" I cackled. because whatever I was no one offered to swap places.

I don't ride anymore. Traffic is dismal and distracted rivers are everywhere and I fear another wreck would wear out my wife and induce compassion fatigue at work where the authorities have been amazingly kind and generous to me. It would be a churlish thing to get knocked down again and expect them all to come through for me with sick leave donations and money to help my recovery, not to mention Cigna forking over for months of recovery treatments. So now I spend as much time as I can with my dog and camera, and make plans with my wife for a worthwhile future and a retirement filled with challenges. I lived through an unlivable hurricane in 2017 and a an accident in 2018 that should have killed me dead instead of only managing a near death. Retirement sitting in a chair seems a response loaded with ingratitude after surviving that lot . 

Looking forward to 2020 I hope we can all figure out how to live together and wouldn't it be nice if we learned to make America even more great by dint of believing in ourselves and our capacity to build and create and take care of what needs to be taken care of instead of always seeking the lowest common denominator in everything. If you do have your own immobility to cope with just bear in mind my recovery wasn't a miracle: it was earned every day at the gym and it goes on being earned no excuses. Do the same whatever your challenge is in life. And don't be afraid to ask for help.

Duval Winter

It is very good for me to see people enjoying the iconic sights of Duval.  A healthy reminder as we close the year that I am lucky to live here.

A tiny bar. How often do you get to see that? You will if you stroll the 100 block of Duval. You might stop your rented bicycle and snap a picture. A fine souvenir. 

A blur of summer dresses in December... window shopping like it was July. Thats the big attraction.

One serious shortcoming is the lack of seating and that is attributable to the homeless population that used to monopolize benches. Naturally they don't mind squatting on the slightly unsanitary sidewalks while the rest of us have to seek a rest where we can. I'm not sure how can the step are but they feel more like seats so we adapt!

Riding into the sunset. Take a Conch Train Tour which is ninety minutes of history and geography and will set you up to enjoy what you might prefer about this town be it drinking or history or art. Then take a bike and ride into the sunset. Or do as I da and walk the dawn away.

More of the same I trust in the new year.

A Kettle Of Vultures

I had a lunch break and I was bored. I had an hour and no idea where to go or what to do...I could walk the waterfront somewhere, at the Bight, or Mallory Square or even Simonton Beach. All of which would take time reach as I'd be navigating downtown traffic in winter. That is always a consideration when you have sixty minutes in hand. 

When I was recovering from my time in the hospital and I needed an elevator as I couldn't climb the 17 stairs into my stilt home on Cudjoe, I lived in an apartment kindly supplied by the police department Love Fund last year. I used to bring Rusty for walks at Little Hamaca as I could let him roam a bit while I struggled to keep control of my legs and my walker. Consequently we got to see a lot of this place all at once. So I had no high hopes of seeing something new but I thought a quiet walk on legs that work more or less properly now might yield a picture or two for my pleasure. 

And I did indeed come across a couple of Birds on Sticks as they are derisively known to some photographers. I saw the familiar winter residents with their wings spread swirling and  circling and I followed them as they spun lower and lower until I came in sight of a whole flock of turkey vultures pondering their next move. A kettle of vultures technically is a group of them spiraling in flight. These are really a committee of vultures which is how they are described as they gather and rest together. I prefer a "kettle" as the all purpose collective noun....

It turns out they like to perch in groups on inadequate mangrove twigs as a result one in each group keeps losing their balance setting off a chain reaction of flapping wings and irritated glances. They had no time to spot me watching them.

Little Hamaca seems much larger than it is so you are actually never far from civilization even when you feel like you are in the middle of the woods. Which made me wonder what masses of carrion they found to feed the entire tribe of twig squatters but they seemed at ease and needing nothing. Therefore I am now exposed as  a know-nothing in the category of turkey vulture observer.

While I know these birds as a sign of winter like so many migrants in the Keys the Audubon Society as all the information you could want about them. A couple of facts I gleaned: they are found all over the US and Mexico and they have the rare attribute among birds of having a sense of smell. They also don't make nests but lay up to three eggs in a space they carve out but don't furnish. There we are... everything you needed to know, and more:

Both parents feed their young by regurgitation. Sounds lovely.

And the trees in Little Hamaca make for an excellent hang out for these birds apparently:

So my decision to wander at random with my camera paid off as it usually does. I was delighted to watch them for a while and take a few photographs. Vultures like sharks and alligators are culturally designated as revolting creatures but to watch them live and not impose cultural values on them makes them quite fascinating.

Huge black Christmas tree ornaments.

Always struggling to keep their balance on the inadequate branches they found. 

And I think I found me a mocking bird on the airport perimeter fence. I got in the car and fled back to work before the little bugger dive bombed me like they do. Vultures leave you alone until you stop showing signs of life. 

Sunsets And Birds

Pictures without words as none are necessary today, except for the first which is actually a sunrise: