Christmas Lights

There is no doubt I have my doubts about Christmas. It's a holiday I don't get. If you look at it with the completely rational mindset of a child who grew up in an unhappy family and who remembers the holiday as a set battle between angry parents it's little wonder I have never much got into the spirit of the occasion. They look at me with disdain and call me Scrooge when I express my doubts about Christmas.

I like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, robust straightforward calls for celebration but Christmas is a weird holiday that makes no sense. Don't get me started on the Easter bunny and chickens to celebrate the Resurrection of the Savior  because that mess is beyond the pale, but yule logs and pine trees at Christmas confuse me almost as much. I can't seem to get my focus correct on this very out of kilter holiday:

I like the burst of decorative effects and I am a sucker for goodwill to all men (and women) but I cannot for the life of me understand the ancillary requirements of the holiday. Why pine trees? Christ was born in a manger in Palestine, a desert land with date palms and olive trees. Ice and snow are the decorative accents people strive for at this time of year, though why you might desire electric icicles to adorn your home I cannot fathom. I can't get them in focus considering I like to live frost free, I prefer it in fact.

Father Christmas- that's a complete enigma, a saint they say named for a King of Bohemia. Why? Because he took gifts through the snow to one hungry family one year. Or something like that. 

I raised my puzzlement to my colleagues who took me to task from one end of the dispatch center to the other. It's not a rational holiday they said, sit back and eat chocolate they insisted, enjoy the decorations they ordered.  Which put me in my place. Still that little voice querying the details is still there whispering and wondering. Why is Christmas in winter. Why did they have to adopt the solstice as the time to celebrate and be cold and dark? Christmas in Key West is as close as I have ever got to enjoying Christmas in summer and it is quite enjoyable. Lots of lights and decorations even though we still get almost twelve hours of sunlight a day at this wintery time of year.

It helps when a cold front blows through and you feel the chill in the air and the Nordic themed decorations shine out in the night. So why, if  Christmas took place in the Middle East originally, has been transmogrified into a  festival of pine needles and yule logs and candlelight? I don't think usurping pagan holidays is much of an excuse. I am of the opinion we should move Christmas to June 1st so as not to clash with July 4th (July1st in Canada) and we could celebrate in proper warm desert style. 

It's like the Easter bunny and chickens and eggs at Easter, to someone with my literal mind I get all muddled up wondering who is messing with what. I have no desire to get dressed in Viking skins to celebrate the Solstice so I am left to wonder why Christmas trees? But there they are and very festive they are too whatever they actually symbolize. Lights keeping the solstice at bay? Adapting that concept to away in the manger was some stroke of marketing genius by someone buried in the distant past. I have to give in to the logic of it.

I do have one thing I really dislike profoundly about Christmas and that is the annual Christmas carol massacre. My wife kicks me in the shins every time I mention it but I hate the mangling of the German hymns upon which so many carols are based. It's not just turning on the radio either (or listening on line as we do) but its shopping or even simply buying gas. Through a fog of artificial electronic re-writing you can hear the original melody written hundreds of years ago to celebrate the original simple concept of a Savior, all reduced to a pile of inarticulate wails and bumps. Nothing I can do about it except retreat to the source and listen to the music as written in its purest form and leave the elevator noise to those that don't care. Which is everybody else. 

The other thing I can do is wander the public spaces in shirt sleeves in December and rejoice in all that Key West still has to offer in proper Christmas fashion: help to the needy on a scale most small towns can't imagine, space for the industrious, and a home still to the few remaining eccentrics without prejudice or unkindness. That seems like a lot of good in the face of a lot of my grumpiness.

Lights, colors and  the hope of a better year to come which in itself seems rather a burden for a few over decorated palm trunks after a year like 2020.

My kind of Christmas tree, lit up by the sun and waving in the wind. I sat on my deck in shorts and bare feet and thought how lucky I am not to have frostbite. I can't get all Nordic and go skiing or ice skating or reindeer riding but neither do I want to, ever.

Eaton Street

I have to remind myself from time to time that there is so much to see in this small strip of land and I have to remain aware that I can wander around Key West and the Lower Keys without noticing everything. Some of the things I do see quite frequently as Rusty is a dog who prefers regular habits and similar routes, are worth looking at more than once. A case in point: The Tropic Cinema.

The whole concept of a film society showing movies grew out of modest beginnings and now thanks to a thirty year lease and some monied folk the theater has become a fixture. Except this year it hasn't because...just like everything else going to the movies has become fraught with peril. They have been showing one film at a time to an audience of no more than 25  well spaced patrons but I am holding out for this treat until later, until after the pandemic.

I can stroll by at some ungodly hour, awoken by my eager dog, attracted by empty streets and peace and quiet to enjoy the architecture, the light and shadows of the sleeping city.

Yellow and white; not the title of a weighty French novel, just a light display I saw on Eaton Street:

The bank on the corner of Eaton Street at Whitehead, across from the post office has changed names quite a bit over the years.  I think once it was TIB - The Island Bank I think and then they sold banks and changed hands and names but the building remains. Is it First Horizon Bank now? Something like that.

I saw the trash truck backing into the sally port at the Old Jail on Fleming Street. If you look around on the Internet you will find stories about hauntings and ghosts at the Old Jail. Enjoy with a  pinch of salt.

I'd take predicting the future with a hefty grain of salt but as usual I find myself outside the mainstream. It appears to be a pretty smart business plan to offer to tell people what is going to happen. Smart enough to be able to afford a place of business in a grossly overpriced market. Hats off to them.

I saw this mem online and it is rather more reflective of my feelings about predicting the unpredictable:

This is not the time to be practical  and consider the impossibilities of the paranormal. Things are so weird I suppose fortune telling could be proved accurate at some wildly improbable juncture.

The Frozen North

A colleague of mine was quite taken by the title of "Beaver Moon" apparently given to the full moon in November when once upon a time beaver hunting was a popular event. The way the world moves it has taken on a  whole new and not necessarily appealing connotation. Rusty on the other hand looked mighty regal as we watched the sun come up over Mallory Square with the beaver moon fixing to set over Sunset Key.

The mention of beaver hunting put me in mind of trappers and wilderness and the call of the wild in northern places where people continue to be active even when snow is on the ground and water turns solid. Not my kind of environment. If it were my environment spending two decades earning a  pension in Key West would be rather stupid, now wouldn't it? Why live in the tropics if you crave snow on the ground I say. So when my sister in law said she wanted to give us down jackets for Christmas I started over thinking as usual. A generous gesture no doubt but it did rather bring out into the open a  future that most likely will involve cold weather and the chance of frostbite and polar bears and stuff like that. 

My sister in law lives near Asheville where my wife and I have before now visited her family for Christmas, which in the northern hemisphere is that time of year when it gets cold. To my mind the best thing about living in Australia for all its robust masculinity must be that they have Christmas in mid summer. Absolutely brilliant. I meanwhile celebrate forced travel in mid winter and Asheville in December can be positively arctic. Oh they tell us, it's not usually this cold as we seek cover from horizontal sleet and streets like ice rinks. But it always is. One memorable Asheville Christmas we struggled into the house from the car parked outside and even Emma the Labrador was put off by the 12 degree night and howling wind. We stepped inside shivering. The family looked at us in puzzlement. Why were we not wearing our winter clothes they asked, as though visiting Asheville in December in short sleeves jeans and thin sweaters was the behavior expected of unaccompanied imbeciles. All we could say in our defense was this is as warm as our clothing gets.  Looks of disbelief all round: the morons from key West are back.

So when I am faced with the prospect of actually owning a proper down puffy winter jacket like they wear on ski slopes and similar abominations I find myself asking what have I let myself in for? My wife has been exploring out of the way nooks and crannies in the van to hold our not-immediately-in-use clothing which I hope will include storing the puffy down jackets most of the time. On the other hand I do have to come to grips with the fact that the pursuit of knowledge and experience means there will be days, several I dare say, of being cold and wearing socks even when I don't feel like it.

When we decided to get married my wife thought the person to tell was her older sister as their parents were both dead by then and it turned out the Asheville-lover was earning money to put her boys through university by working as a general practitioner in Fargo North Dakota. Her mild mannered and slightly vague husband had got a sound job teaching in neighboring Morehead Minnesota and they did their ten years penance living and working astride the Red River a stone's catapult from Canada, also known as The Frozen North. As nervous as I was I put up no resistance when my beloved suggested we go and break the news at Christmas that year. 

I had no idea what to expect when the airplane landed in Minnesota and even though I was then living in frigid wet coastal California my tropical heart was overwhelmed by the icicles in the air and snow banks taller than the car. It was a peculiar visit not least because the news came as no surprise and everyone worked hard to make the weirdo feel at home. Which was an uphill row to hoe considering I watched in amazement as they took the hair dryer outside for a walk on a very long extension cord the next morning and used it to defrost the car door lock. This was not normal and I wanted no part of it. I took the dog for a walk in an effort to experience the familiar in a new setting. That was a bad idea.

I ended up wading through waist deep snow walking on water that was supposed to be the Red River dividing the two states. All I saw as I struggled with a leashed husky having a great day was a field of snow between two rows of twig like saplings. A sylvan place in summer no doubt but in December (the accursed month!) it felt like the North Pole. Then we took off for a wedding in Bismarck where friends of the family were to be joined in matrimony. The drive across North Dakota was a vision of what my hell will look like in the fullness of time, as the heat and fire promised by Medieval visionaries sounds balmy compared to the plains of the Dakotas under wind driven snow. I was sure the four wheel drive Toyota van was going to stop and I was going to die like Robert Falcon Scott eleven miles from safety. 

My fiancé and I were not, thank God, part of the wedding party and we stayed behind at the hotel while they went off to do the honors. The hotel was something out of Alice in Wonderland with the central courtyard roofed over like a giant skylight above the swimming pool. The pool was surrounded - I kid you not - by AstroTurf and beach umbrellas and Dakotans behaving as though they were at the ocean's edge in July. I could not believe what I was seeing and I wandered to the windows and looked out at an arctic landscape of white lumps and deep black wet tracks cutting  through the winter Christmas card landscape. Santa Claus on a sled couldn't have surprised me after the pool party going on at the hotel beachfront downstairs.  The weird illusion of summer carried on the next morning when we stopped for gas on our way out of Bismarck. The sun was shining and the sky was blue but the temperature was minus 20 in American degrees. I volunteered to pump gas as I saw people in their shirt sleeves enjoying the sunshine. Can't be that bad I thought. My leather jacket froze to my shoulders like armor and my jeans felt like ice tubes on my legs. I couldn't breathe the air was so cold. I got back in the Toyota Siena and after I thawed out later the allure of bison in a field alongside the highway could not get me out of the car on the drive back to Morehead. I looked at them through glass and felt bad for their frozen predicament.

Our first serious cold front of the winter has lowered temperatures to 62 degrees, a subject of much mirth by real men who have sailed alone around Cape Horn with no source of onboard heat. Webb notes that temperatures in South Carolina are twenty degrees lower and he is twice as old as me and his cheerful tone dismisses me as a crank and a cold weather coward. He is correct on both counts. My idea of a winter sport is standing on Duval Street watching other people run around town in their winter underwear. This is my kind of December.

I spent my last day off enjoying a brisk sunny afternoon on the deck with a book and a cup of tea slightly chilled in the breeze but enjoying the break from summer's humidity that had persisted far too long. The end of hurricane season was celebrated in muted pandemic fashion on the last day of November and that should close one of the weirdest and most active seasons anyone can remember. I wouldn't be surprised if warm waters in the Western Caribbean don't produce a December surprise as that has happened before but I hope I can safely say I have but one more hurricane season to live through before I retire. I have spent enough time over the years sitting in the police station waiting to be wiped out, thanks.

And there's the thing of it, with no obligations and nowhere to be my wife and I are planning to follow the seasons for a while.  She is nervous about facing Alaska's notorious insect population and I am hoping for a summer heatwave in the Arctic in 2022 but we are both going to make every effort to harden up and expect temperatures to fluctuate rather more than they do in the Keys. If we don't our adventures will be crippled by cold which would be absurd. I'd like to drink a  toast one day in Patagonia to Webb Chiles, first American to sail alone around Cape Horn. I plan to do it actually in Tierra del Fuego, but in the comfort of a heated, windproof van securely anchored on terra firma.

I am a creature of nostalgia and I know I will miss bright sunny winter days and this past week is what I will look forward to returning to after the van travels are done. Things are changing here and I wonder how Key West will look in the course of the next decade. Already we have closed circuit cameras on Duval (above) and the mayor is now pushing history as a tourist draw, which would mark a change in the city's income stream compared to the last fifty years. Fewer artists and eccentrics I fear and more conformity and disapproval.

Key West will change and I too must change. I am going to embrace puffy down jackets and in a couple of weeks we are going to take off for a week and explore cool temperatures and van life for a few days in North Florida. We shall rejoice in socks,  we will learn how to heat the van, we will make full use of blankets and we will watch Rusty scoff at our trepidation and enjoy his fur coat the way it was meant to be used: in the cold. Oh brave new world, I embrace you.

Greene Street

Pardon Greene was one of four Americans who bought the island of Cayo Hueso from the Spaniard Juan Salas in 1822 for two thousand dollars. That was quite the deal as Salas got the island as a land grant from the Spanish governor of Florida for "services rendered" and he did nothing with the scrubby rock which had apparently been a native grave yard they say, hence the Spanish name "isle of bones" translated accidentally into Key West. 

I'm not sure how this place was found to be a  graveyard as the islands were uninhabited and almost all of them stayed that way until the 20th century intruded in the form of Flagler's Railroad which supplied isolated settlements and created secure communications. Anyway Juan Salas sold his island to five other men called John - Simonton, Whitehead and Fleeming (sic) who also got streets named for them. John Warner and John Mountain also bought shares but sold theirs to Pardon Greene who got his street named for him too. Warner and Mountain lost out on the street memorials though I would have loved to have a Mountain Street in Key West.

Salas was no dummy and got another John involved when  he made a conditional sale to John Strong who sold his share on to John Geddes. It sounds like a joke with Juan (John) Salas selling the island to a whole string of Johns but it is a true story. Eventually Geddes had his claim vacated by the courts and Salas gave him 500 acres of mainland Florida by way of compensation for his efforts to actually occupy the uninhabited island with carpenters and builders.

The upshot is that Greene Street is correctly spelled as Pardon was the only non-John among the first crowd of owners of this piece of paradise. Fleeming Street was altered over time and has become Fleming Street, more pleasing to the Anglo ear. I doubt there is much of note in all this to most visitors to Key West who may have a preferred bar or restaurant on Greene Street. I got a not great picture of Captain Tony's as I walked by in the winter sun.

Heading toward Sloppy Joe's one is reminded that Sloppy Joe Russell owned the Captain Tony's location when he started his immortal association with Ernest Hemingway and took himself and his bar and his locals to the new Duval Street location after he fell out with his Greene Street landlord. I think the dispute was over thirty seven dollars if I recall correctly.

Sloppy Joe's looks closed in the pandemic times we are living through but it is actually open with the one door on Duval Street for entry and the doors on Greene Street used as exits. 

The Bull across the street was open with the now usual restrictions:

General Horseplay on Caroline Street is a weirdly named bar replacing the familiar Lost Weekend. I recall with no fondness the ghastly name of "Big 'Uns" which I hated dispatching officers to in the bad old days of crowds on Duval Street before the great recession. General Horseplay seems plain weird to me but I am not a barfly. General Horseplay?

The other great myth in Key West involves the presence of wild chickens. The story goes that they came from Cuba with refugees which makes no sense to me. I can't imagine getting on a boat to brave the rough waters separating Cuba from Florida and taking your fighting rooster as a must have immigrant accessory. Besides if they only brought fighting roosters who supplied the female chickens? I suspect that in the years of Key West's decline when the Navy pulled back from Key West in the 1960s, chickens got loose and no one cared.  Looking at the Depression era art from the 1930s  you won't see chickens depicted loose on the streets, but what do I know? Myths count for more than facts.

It is a tourist town. They love chickens. 

Sloppy Joe's in action, masks off when sitting down. Not me, I walked on by masked and distanced from mask free people sitting down in a  room.  

Island Dogs on Greene Street has put tables on the sidewalk to create outdoor seating. 

Afternoon sun on Greene Street looking toward the harbor from Old City Hall:

Florida Keys

I had to go back to my preferred spot to walk Rusty wandering  the waterfront at the Old Bahia Honda Bridge. A few pictures from our wandering on a not completely cool winter morning. Nothing new to see, just some winter sunshine and clouds.

The road home passing cars parked while their owners go bridge fishing on Big Pine Key.