Up close the blossoms look like this:
Here's a nice shady, colorful spot to spend eternity:
Where even the graveyard is colorful .
Gary sent me this essay at my request some time ago and I offer it here by way of introduction to a month's worth of his pictures that I will be publishing here at Key West Diary. I had been thinking about just leaving the page blank for the month of July while my wife and I are in Italy renewing acquaintance with Giovanni my childhood motorcycle riding buddy and my sisters and their families. Giovanni and I got our first mopeds together and we rode them all over Umbria together, graduating to motorcycles and cars as we grew older. We still like to ride together.
So for the next month as Giovanni and I plan our adventures for ourselves and our wives, I will be publishing three pictures a day from gary's archives that he has very kindly loaned me.
I expect I shall make room from time to time to publish the odd picture of our rides together as we make middle aged mischief across Umbria and Tuscany this July.
I'm going away for what amounts to a month, and this will be my last essay until August 1st when I plan to be back- if I'm spared - as the ancients used to say. GarytheTourist has loaned me s some hundred pictures to keep this space busy and pretty till then and I have no doubt my iPad will move me to blog irregularly from Italy as I ride. How to say good bye to my love is the hardest part. She hasn't had it easy in her mixed up life and now at last she does have a permanent home she comes back to every day; except not for the next several weeks.
I know the boys will take good care of her, God knows she lingers with them every time we visit and get up to leave. I hope she doesn't forget me while I'm gone because I know I won't forget her. Can't forget Wayne either who cooks all the dogs chicken and rice every day- no wonder Cheyenne likes to hang out with them.
And Wayne who drives the boat to Marvin Key to let us all enjoy the back country.
And so good bye to all the bystanders who roll through the diary to remind us why we like Key West.
Or stand around making my pictures more worthwhile.
There are sailboats and lots of water, which I won't see much of at all until I get home from the mountains of Central Italy.
There will be tourist attractions where I'm going and I'll be a visitor just like I am sometimes here at home.
It is fashionable to hate the tourists once you land in Key West and make it your home but I see tourists behind every paycheck, in every arts movie I get to see at the Tropic in all the exotic and interesting foods they prepare for us in restaurants that would never normally grace a town of 23,000 Americans.
I am well aware of my mortality and the inevitable passage of time so every time I go away I know I may not come back. I fully intend to but if I don't- no regrets, that's what my wife and I always tell each other, we've had a good time.
I am glad to be able to come home to a place that doesn't much care what one wears, where fashion is as fashion does, not a diktat from someone who thinks they know better and impose their vision on the rest of us. There is much freedom to enjoy at home in the Keys.
The Key West Sculpture Garden was completed in 1997 and I don't think it took too long for this town's inveterate nick-namers to find a funny moniker for the place. Harry Truman, fine president though he was does, does kind of look like a Pez dispenser, in the nicest possible way.
However you won't get any Pez candies out of the dozens of heads on display down by Mallory Square. The centerpiece like the heads, is the work of Miami sculptor James Mastin and it's a fine portrayal of the wreckers who used to make a decent living for themselves salvaging grounded ships. 
The heads themselves, also by Mastin, were chosen for inclusion apparently by a selection committee and of the original 36 (with room for expansion), only one was black, Sandy Cornish, the freed slave who gave his name to largest church in Bahama Village.
You could spend a happy couple of hours wandering the statues and admiring their biographies which are not easy it must be said, to photograph legibly. Ellen Russell Mallory was an interesting inclusion.
She is considered the first "white female settler" in Key West arriving here for her husband's health in 1823. He did poorly and died shortly thereafter. She set herself up as a boarding house operator for seamen and gave her son the best education she could. He became the Secretary of the Navy, for the Confederacy and the square on Key West's waterfront is named for him, Stephen Russell Mallory. 
The garden is free and visitors can peruse all the statues and history they want at their leisure.
It's a pretty spot though not very shady when the sun is overhead.
And for sixty bucks I'm told you can have a brick dedicated to you or someone you care about. All the information is at the garden's rather ungrammatical website here: http://historictours.com/keywest/SculptureGarden/index.htm
Meet reality for many new arrivals, an anonymous apartment in New Town:
Apartments in Old Town tend to be rooms carved out of old homes, awkward and lacking in amenity and expensive to boot. If $1500 a month for a one bedroom here seems like a lot, in anonymous USA, consider what you get.
Indoor laundry, reliable central air, off street parking and easy access to the supermarkets of North Roosevelt Bopulevard...No wonder cops and firefighters line up to snag a place here.
And just because it's a modern apartment complex doesn't mean your $1700 two bedroom or $2000 three bedroom doesn't get some tropical foliage to remind you where you are.
The tourist eye is always on Old town which is where the wealth accumulates. Working three jobs to maintain a window air conditioner, noisy neighbors and the constant possibility of getting your bike stolen starts to weigh on some people. Others would never consider living a full three miles from Duval Street and all the alcohol fueled action.
For others the trailers of Stadium Mobile home park are home, in exotic tropical Key West.
Key West, where I learned on my recent foray on the Conch Tour Train that the traveler's palm yields a half cup of water if you cut off a stalk. A survival tool, in arid climes I suppose. In Key West cash is the best survival tool there is.
