Old Singles

The Barber Museum's collections includes more than 1200 bikes and one sometimes wonders how they manage to show even the eight hundred at a time they claim.


I am fascinated by the number of small single cylinder bikes they have in the collection, typically Italian of the kind I used to see people using to commute when I was a child.


There were lots of brands like this Bianchi, painted red wit flat handlebars and a long black seat.


They weren't enthusiasts rides, rather they were the convenient and affordable way to get around. Below the Moto Guzzi 250 single Airone from before World War Two which was part of the genesis of Italian bikes though the Moto Guzzi had a sporting reputation too.


That deep luscious red was the universal color. I look at the old bikes with fascination, their simplicity of manufacture with everything visible and their complexity of use with advance/retard operated manually and weird shifting patterns and hand shifters and so on. Their riders must have been real heroes!


This German Horex 250 caught my eye for it's rugged simplicity and practicality. I noticed the full final drive chain cover which I'd love on my Bonneville.


The engine is clean and simple to look at. The beef was it wasn't terribly exciting this nice copy of a leaky funky and fast British single. The Horex has the attributes that appeal to me!


This Ducati 450 Scrambler (below) was aimed the US market and was praised as an exciting ride. However it vibrated lime hell, sucked down gas like there was no tomorrow and was a bitch to start and keep in tune. But it is revered today, unlike the Horex...


And nowadays Ducati builds twins a d makes money doing it, but beasts like this practical Paso 750 were not much regarded.


It's little wonder Ducati today makes performance machines with little regard to practicality. It's the message the buyers have given them.


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Dawn On My Street

The morning my wife's Vespa lost it's drive belt on the ride home I was left with a four mile walk to the house, though luckily the Lower Keys shuttle bus got me part way home fast enough to catch the break of day on my street. A minor misfortune turned into an opportunity to amble and see the sights that normally flash by at 25 miles per hour hardly seen.
All pictures on this blog enlarge with one click or tap.









































The pictures I hope speak for themselves.



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Remembering September Eleventh

The Names - Billy Collins

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name --
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner --
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Suggested to me by an anonymous reader who likes Collins' poetry as much as do I.



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Mario Sanchez

The bald facts of Mario Sanchez's life are much like anyone else's who had the good fortune to be born in Key West, live a full life and die there. In this case 7th October 1908 till 28th April 2005. 96 years well spent.

Luckily for all concerned Sanchez devoted a large portion of his life to his art, which like all good art in my opinion started as a way to please himself and such was his pleasure it made a name for itself.

The Art and History Museum has an exhibit devoted to Sanchez and his particular way of recording his daily life in Key West. No pixels and web pages for Mario Sanchez. He worked with wood and chiseled out a record of town life through the 20th century. There is even a video of the young(er) artist discussing his work.

The intaglio art of Sanchez was recognized in 1996 by Folk Art magazine which is, according to the Gallery on Greene, quite the bee's knees. Check their website.

Also in the museum they have recreated his unique outdoor studio. The writer Hemingway's penchant for writing while standing is widely reporters by the guides at his former home. Back problems suck! But Sanchez's studio was in itself a perfect representation of that which we enjoy about the Florida Keys.

In a state devoted to all possible denial of the outdoors and the natural, the land of enclosed malls and "swamp" drainage we in the Keys have the chance to enjoy sea breezes and the smell of salt water and the silence of empty back streets. In a peninsula that encourages development over reflection, Sanchez's work and the manner in which it was produced is a reminder, in wood and color that a contemplative way of life is possible in Florida's southernmost islands.

Whimsy and animals, magic and then unexpected are part of Keys life, ably represented in Sanchez's work.

Part of the joy of the work is the ability of the observer to recognize parts of Key West. Like everything else in this constantly evolving town, memory is hip. The further back you can remember the more "street cred" you acquire. I find this need to prove oneself rather tedious but my earliest memories of Key West only go back to 1981, and not much do I remember of that first visit (by Vespa as it happens).

There's lots of Sanchez to see at the museum and it's website.

I leave you with an image of "la flaca" enjoying coconut ice cream. Such was her appetite she ended up "la gorda." Sanchez's observations were not trite or saccharine. They hint at the daily struggle of living in close quarters on a small island. Everyone knows your business. And some people appreciate it.

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No Trespassing. Keep Out!

For whatever reason Cheyenne doesn't much like walking the Loop Road on Sugarloaf Key. Perhaps she will develop a taste once again for it this winter if temperatures cool as they are supposed to. Perhaps in her doggy consciousness there is something repulsive about this pleasant public park built around a wide asphalt trail to nowhere. Perhaps it's just too shadeless and hot in summer for her. My dog's feelings notwithstanding I like the place and wish we could penetrate a little deeper than the massive gate and fortifications at the entrance.

Monroe County has, over the past couple of years devoted considerable energy to putting up cement barriers blocking backwoods trails to vehicles. These bright yellow barricades have popped up all over the Lower Keys in an effort to prevent mostly bored youth from seeking pleasure spraying mud and doing doughnuts out of sight of their elders and betters.

It was the sight of all these Loop Road barricades that got me thinking about the local passion for "No Trespassing" signs that sprout like mushrooms anywhere some snowbird imagines people having fun in their prolonged absences Up North.

I keep seeing these posted! signs everywhere I ride in the Keys and I wonder at the stress caused by being an absentee landlord. Beware of the dog?

The gate below is rather fetching if garish. I prefer a more low key approach, speaking as one who has no gates in his life. These barricades have to symbolize the alienation that is the subject of constant discussion in self help therapeutic sessions.

We should unhand the television they tell us and talk to our neighbors. Hard to do when Brinks is guarding the perimeter, however ineffectually.

The adirondack chair is a word touch. I imagine the guarded homeowner sitting in it, corn cob pipe puffing smokily with a big double barreled shotgun across his lap. Most likely the reality is mo one sits there. And the next hurricane to hit head on will blow the ornament into the middle of the next island.

"Keep Out!" "Posted!" "Beware!" the friendly neighbors screech, as though were I ill intentioned the signs might prove effective.

The odd thing is violent crime is decreasing and in the Keys violent crime between strangers is extraordinarily rare. Theft happens and there have been spates of bored teenagers stealing coin purses and fishing rods, and Miami crooks stealing outboard motors for parts, but on the whole on of the joys of living in the Keys is the small town lack of serious crime.

You wouldn't know it to see the home fortifications that line the streets.

I blame television for the suspicious and fearful attitude taken by most first worlders. At first blush if you have not considered such a proposition I know it seems weird but think about what television portrays as the real world.

Local "news" is a mixture of faddish "tips" typically how to barbecue meat for a holiday or how to lose weight after the communal feast and a series of ghoulish stories about some pointless act of domestic violence somewhere in the county.

The acts of violence that I see at work dispatching police usually seem to involve people who know each other and have a falling out usually field by mind altering substances like alcohol. Nothing has made me so inclined to temperance as a lifetime spent answering 9-1-1 calls. Alcohol fucks people up, royally.

Mix alcohol, sex, irritation or frustration and lack of money into a living space and the results are predictable. For the rest of us gasping at the TV screen it can seem the entire world around us is hellbent on taking us down with them. I grew up in boarding schools with no access to television and y vacations were chopped into two different countries so I never did get to follow programs or learn to enjoy staring the boob tube. As an adult I don't miss the nonsense that passes for local news. My fear level is I believe more commensurate with actual reality.

Check the sign above, full public identification right next to a Berlin Wall Style barricade. Below, welcome to America and Keep Out.

To me these barricades and enclosures and protective signs are a measure of how far we have fallen from country I chose to emigrate to, a place of self confidence and standing tall. A place where strangers represent an opportunity for hospitality not a threat.

I know the mainstream theory is that you can never be too careful that it's a dangerous world "out there" and traveling unarmed is an invitation to death by violence. I also know that trying to explaining an alternative reality to the cowering masses is a waste of time. I ponder the barricades and observe the detritus tossed to the curb outside the protected area. Trash in the grass cannot be seen from inside the stockade. Pity though as it's quite pretty outside.

It's a quiet neighborhood on a hot September afternoon everyone buttoned up inside their perimeter fences.

I remember President Reagan urging a bunch of communist foreigners to "tear down that wall," but he forgot to make the same suggestion at home. Berlin Walls everywhere.

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