Perhaps it's time and even though my generation grew up in the shadow of the great conflict the youngsters coming up behind us didn't. Nowadays it's a tourist attraction, the USS Arizona.
They made a lot of noise, probably for the last time, about D-Day this year. It just seemed a shame to let Pearl Harbor Day drift by without even a mention in the newspaper.
I am not by nature much of a sentimentalist, and saccharine displays of cloying sentiment irritate me. The other awkward side to my personality is that I can't stop asking myself difficult questions. I mean if Jesus really was born in a manager in an Arab village to an Aramaic speaking family doesn't that make him an Arab? If this is an accurate representation of his homies why are we locked in holy war with Islam? (The kid in front is actually a 21st century All American high school kid with a temporary though doubtless expensive ailment. He should have been hobbling with a wooden stick to be authentic):
Well, despite all the questions that buzz round my brain like insistent and annoying bluebottles we need to move on and hoof it over to Truman and White for the start of the Christmas parade. Yay!
Whoa! Wise man? Al Quaeda? Shepherd? Oil Man? No, just another parade participant... 
On the subject of disguises go figure why this kid is sitting at her outdoor patio set dressed in a pointy hat...Oh yes, Santa Claus the Nordic heathen depiction of winter has been transmogrified into the Christian depiction of Saint Nicholas, bearer of gifts (Thanks to Macy's Department Store for that commercialization of the annual Yule Log burning multicultural winter gift buying frenzy).
I'm not very good at small talk so here are a few images I snapped from the side of the road in poor light without the benefit of my tripod, pictures that have value to me because they show ordinary people in Key West, fully clothed, raising families and celebrating living in a neighborly small town. Jimmy Stewart failed to make an appearance, which was probably just as well as he's been dead a while, but the spirit of that corn pone movie is alive and well in Key West. 
You can't have a parade without motorcycles in my opinion. In that, I am apparently not alone:
Representing snow is part of the Christmas shtick and very happy I am that snow is represented by bits of white material of various kinds:
The other essential component of a proper parade is a fire engine or two. And check out the kid, children are important if you are going to have a proper community holiday parade:
Music is good too, endless variations on the glorious Christmas Hymns that came out of the Christian tradition in Germany and that have been mangled and rendered almost unrecognizable as muzak and movie sound tracks. Sigh. They were having fun though:
Angels or angles? Christmas is a good time to double check your spell checker.
A young Methodist. I am not a big fan of the my-god-is-better-than-your-god school of nonsense but we should doff our elf caps a moment to the memory of John Wesley who contributed not a little to the notion of social justice as a Christian cause.
During the nudity of Fantasy fest there is the habit of launching beads at passersby. During the Holiday parade they toss candy and the kids grovel like chickens pecking in the dust to grab what they can. We had a well trained group of youngsters next to us who shouted cheerful slogans directed at each particular group of passers by ("Nice Car Mister!" they shouted in unison at the dour driver of a Mazda Miata. They were rewarded with an absent minded shower of candy from the driver who could not bring himself, however, to crack a smile). It was an excellent spot to sit, and we enjoyed a few surplus tootsie rolls and Hershey chocolate bites, the overflow of the excellent young ragamuffin barkers on our block.
Nice car, mister, indeed. This lot were smiling as well as tossing our sugar to appreciative youngsters.
"Ooh!" my wife squawked, "Get that one!" I did my best though everything was against me: no light, too much movement and sugar jitters:
In years past I enjoyed the juxtaposition of cultures in the parade, the boy scouts, mormonically anti-gay walking behind the trannies of the 800 block of Duval, adult themes tastefully done next to ebullient children's religiosity. This year I think there may have been some reaction, perhaps unconscious, to the excesses of a Fantasy Fest fueled by depression economics and an adult desire to vanquish reality for a week. Lots of people complained about the excesses of Fantasy fest. The holiday parade was a succession of church floats and sedate business advertisements. These men dressed as gender ambiguous angels (angles?) were from the Metropolitan Church ( the gay lot as far as I know):
In it's editorial in cheerful support of the small town "values" of Key West the editorial board pointed out the scenery in the city which provides a suitably Victorian backdrop for the Dickensian holiday parade: 
Some parents in Key West like to complain that there is nothing for their kids to do in town, other parents get off their duff and take their kids to the playing fields for some healthful sporting activities. The city built a hockey rink (Southernmost Hockey League- ice free) and it is enormously popular. Witness:
I am not very child oriented but I do like dogs. I saw this critter riding in a heavily decorated bicycle wagon and my heart went pitter patter. It got worse.
The SPCA parades with a bunch of dogs with little "Adopt Me" jackets and guess what? An actual yellow Labrador bitch marched down the street on our side of the road. Lots of people say they have labs or "lab mixes" but this was an actual female yellow lab and I knew I had to have her. My wife is resisting so there is some friction in the home. My wife says the economy is bad, vet bills can be horrendous, we are planning a three week vacation in Italy next year, etc etc... I say the economy sucks so lots of people are abandoning their dogs. Big dogs are hard to find homes for and that lab needs a home. We are at an impasse and I don't think it's going to go well for my side of the debate. My wife usually wins. Failing a Labrador, here's a picture of an angel (angle). I only realized afterward her legs are unsuitably illuminated but this is a concession to the pervs in the audience. You know who you are:
The city commission just approved a concession for a second trolley tour company in the city and residents are in a ferment about how many tours can the city sustain. That will be a thought for another day. This is a Conch Train in holiday trim:
This picture is a reminder that frost is banned in Key West and we have to make do with make believe snowmen. What snow men have to do with Christmas I couldn't rightly say, but who am I to argue with inexplicable traditions?
A tip of the hat to our friends and colleagues in Public Works who are routinely maligned for failing to do a variety of responsible tasks that they actually do very efficiently. Here is a Government Truck cleaning the street instants after the last float passed by:
And here is the proper sentiment of the season from all the families and ordinary working people who live in Key West and put up with the noise and chaos that two million visitors a year bring with them.
Spare them a thought the next time you are debating how much to tip. Key West is one of the most expensive cities in Florida and sixty percent of the city's economy is sustained by visitors they say. Merry Christmas indeed; we can only hope.
Ah yes, the bearer of exotic vacations be they ever so short, on some deserted island. This was the ferry we took to the Dry Tortugas for Thanksgiving, an experience that lives on with pleasure in my memory. 
A quick glance at this yacht gives the impression the people are rather eccentrically taking their ease in the dinghy on the sun deck. I also was forced to wonder if any of them had ever actually been to St Vincent and the Grenadines, under whose flag of convenience they registered their boat. A tax ploy of course...
Hoi polloi docked under the boring old flag of inconvenience for tax payers of more modest means. 
Not Gone Fishing, but lots to talk about anyway. Everyone should go shirtless in December.
If I were a pigeon I'd find a more comfortable perch but judging by the amount of guano this looks like a popular avian roost, angled as it is, under the eaves of the Turtle Museum (make a mental note to go check it out).
She later got in a dinghy and went out to some boat anchored somewhere.
A charter captain has to work the phone to make sure tomorrow isn't a bust.
And so after this brief panorama back to my landlocked home.
The cost is expected to total something like 200 million dollars but Monroe County is moving forward with the creation of a sewer system all along the Keys. The island I live on, Ramrod Key is undergoing the first stage of this invasive surgery. Observed by the local wildlife, God rot the iguanas and their nasty penchant for eating my vegetable plots.
The county has spent the last two decades valiantly procrastinating this job. The city of Key West tore up it's streets in a giant dust storm a decade ago and wrapped up it's sewage system and superb treatment facility before the county even figured out it was time to get serious. Now that time has come and the State of Florida was threatening all kinds of sturm und drang if the job wasn't done by 2010 but they've relented and extended the deadline to 2015 without fail! It was pretty obvious that getting the Keys sewered by 2010 was a pipe dream, so to speak. Now they are giving it all they've got. And, check this out, there is a bike path going to be built on top of the sewer line! Cool! 
While I am a big fan of bicycle paths and look forward to not having to share the shoulder with dopes driving cars and handling phones at the same time, the person that designed this bike path needs to be taken some place quiet and educated and then shot. In this next picture you will see the new bike path joining the old Flagler bridge across Niles Channel. Which would be excellent if the old bridge wasn't cut in two to allow tall boats to pass under the new (tall) road bridge. The bike path is effectively a path to nowhere.... 
This is the old Flagler Bridge which makes a fine fishing pier... but you can't get to Summerland Key this way and if you are on a bike this is where the new bike path essentially ends. Lame, no?
It's not the end of the world for someone like me who is ready willing and able to hit some pea rock or grass between the new path and the shoulder on the road bridge but this beautiful path that crosses a mile and a half of island needs to be connected to make proper sense.
Instead the engineer who designed this is sending a message that travel by bicycle, as anything more than a recreational tool, is not to be encouraged. It rather reminds me of the brilliant minds that used to allow bicycles to be loaded onto bike racks on the Lower Keys shuttle buses between Marathon and Key West. That program was so successful (obviously!) they shut it down. Instead of finding ways to encourage alternative transportation they just said: Screw it! No more bikes on buses... Who are these people who can't think or be creative!
Granted the shoulder on Highway One bridges aren't that wide but they are entirely usable by bicycles:
Th work is proceeding apace and there are casualties, in the flora. This tree is still alive even as it provides inadequate shade for the back hoe.
This next one wasn't so lucky, yet the workers still propped it up with pieces of wood. I hope there is a better landscape plan for the final product, but just getting a bike path in these financially strapped times seems lie a deal to me:
The whole business of putting sewers the length of the Florida Keys is not without controversy as you might imagine. The cost of individual home hook ups has yet to be assessed, and the numbers vary between a low of around $7,000 and up to $20,000 if all governmental subsidies are withdrawn. The idea is to add the cost of the sewer assessments to utility bills for the individual parcels and spread the repayment plan over a period of time, probably twenty years. Which, rationally speaking, seems entirely do-able to someone like me.
However, as surprising as this may be, not everyone views the installation of modern sewers as a good thing; it turns out not very many people at all are like me, to everyone's chagrin I'm sure. Indeed there are many people who grumble loudly at the cost and the bother and argue that things should be left exactly as they are. And if you want to know how things in the toilet line work right now, read on. If not just look at the pictures.
The way it works right now is that each home has it's own cesspit, and these are supposed to filter all the waste produced by 50,000 permanent residents and millions of visitors. Because these islands are made out of limestone rock they do a terrible job of filtering all that waste, and the result is horrendous pollution, or possibly not. The really odd thing about the sewer debate is the total lack of numbers. It is beyond doubt that the coral reef is deteriorating, whether it's because of human waste in the water or because of agricultural run off from the Everglades or some other thing (climate change?) no one really knows. Nitrates in the water running into Florida Bay do seem to be established as responsible for algae blooms off the Upper Keys but there is no doubt the reef is deteriorating and you'd think shit in the water would be a common sense reason to try to make that one change at least. But we are not a people renowned for our common sense, are we? So the merits of sewers lumbers on in the popular imagination as a subject for debate.
Meanwhile the sewers themselves are getting planted at long last, and every time I ride past the road works i wonder why this project wasn't started twenty years ago. We have to do it now when the country is broke!
Happily the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority is in charge of the work and they seem to be doing a fine job. The first round of sewer installation was carried out by a contract given to a very dubious organization called Key West Resort Utilities that not only did an abysmal job of hooking up the new system (back flows of shit into homes were reported all over the place) they were also investigated for cheating their customers and charging family expenses to the business. After that fiasco, despite friendships between commissioners and the Resort Utility executives the county was obligated to go the public route and awarded the contract to the boring, reliable, capable Aqueduct Authority. Good for Ramrod Key residents, crap (literally) for Stock Island.
This is just the main line they are installing so we will soon see side streets torn up and all that kind of annoyance, but I find it hard to be critical of a plan that will get human waste out of the ocean. I guess that makes me a radical huh?
The new bike path is showing signs of how nice it will be once it's done, check out this kerb:
The work is stretching off into the distance. Up next, I suppose the Torch Keys then Big Pine, then the world!
And this is the other end of the bike path, at the Shell station (slowly being transformed from a Chevron, much to my delight) :
I am impatient, I want it to be finished but I am glad it's getting done at long last.