This is the time of year when youngsters graduate and teachers (and parents) breath a sigh of relief. Today was the day the students graduated my wife's school whose classrooms are located on the campus of Keys Community College. Carol, my wife's boss, kicked off the ceremonies at the College's Tennessee Williams Theater:
Graduation ceremonies all over the world are the same or similar I guess, and being child free all I can really remember is my own liberation from English boarding school life in 1975 and more recently graduating myself from the College after years of messing around finally getting my studies done. Keys Center Academy is an unusual school for girls who are in high school but not making it on the general campus. This specialized intensive schooling gets the support of the Administration and the School Board. Chair John Dick, on the right below, has been an indefatigable champion of the center, and outgoing member Andy Griffiths on the left has too and will be missed.
Reverend Sarah Fowler, Deacon at the congregations of St Peter's and St Paul's episcopal churches is a well known voice for charities around Key West and offered up her words of support for the new graduates as well at the convocation. 
The school's various outgoings, field trips and goofs around the classrooms were recorded and presented on a slide show because in a school with less than two dozen students everyone is friends with, and dramatic participants with, everyone else.
My wife is not technically a Principal in the District because her school is technically part of Key West High School but she has of course made some friendships with people over the three years the Academy has been operating and she is always going on about the principal at Gerald Adams school, and this year she snagged Frannie Herrin to speak and speak she did, upbeat cheerful and brief (as she promised she would be).
And there they were all angelic in white, and tearful and emotional and grateful for the second chance they got, after heading for failure elsewhere in their short lives.
I watched one mum I know eyes glued to her offspring on stage and later we laughed about the relief of getting it done, a landmark success and a glorious first step in what was a wobbly academic career.
You, she graduated, FCATs and all the other horrors of modern standardized testing behind her...for now.
These girls have been turned around thanks to individualized class work, close attention by teachers and endless patience "...I know I wasn't the easiest student to deal with..." is a common theme at Keys Center graduations.
We live in parlous times for education in America and our leaders scream about paying taxes, and cutting deficits and not creating jobs and on and on and on but here one can see the impact of supporting these marginal students, of making a contract with them that if they apply themselves they will be driven to graduate. 
The most painful part of the contract they sign is to give up their cell phones at the beginning of each school day. And if they don't show up for school these students live with the absolute certainty that their parents will be contacted. 
And if they don't fulfill their contracts they will be kicked out. In an era when discipline and deadlines are scorned by schools and rejected by unsupportive parents Keys Center Academy with rigid rules and requirements is an example other schools, and other parents could learn to imitate. "The teachers care..." is another common theme around here. And the big bugaboo of never giving up is often spoken of by the students.
My wife hates saying goodbye to the successful students but by next September, two weeks into the new school year she'll be all over the next bunch, planning success strategies for them. Luckily the outgoing superintendent and his replacement Jesus Jara have both pledged their support for Keys Center Academy as the district struggles with a nine percent cut in a 90 million dollar budget. 
Cathy sang, everyone got dewy eyed...
...and then we hit the buffet table.
I cheered my wife on and thought about the end of school on Friday and summer vacations, once held to allow kids to help bring in the harvest and now practiced as a tradition and little else. I think she'll sleep soundly for a week before she starts planning next year's classroom tactics.
They seem to have rebuilt the shed on the fuel dock and it looks about right to my untrained eye, as a nice bit of restoration.
The Key West Bight is a pretty place to be at sunset,
and I enjoyed wandering the docks for a little while out of my work night.
"Too small," Omar told me with a grin. 
He is from Cape Coral where he moved after growing up in Miami and he had brought his 75 year old father down for a weekend of fishing to celebrate father's day, albeit a little early. The sun was coming up and he told me they had been there since six the night before, "like me at work," I said.
We talked dogs for a while, about Bo who Omar used to let out first thing in the morning and he would tour the Miami neighborhood before coming home in the evening just before Omar got back from work cleaning pools, and the dog "stank something fierce" from his adventures.
I started to get sleepy and after I gave Omar directions to the Tiki Bar and motel on Ramrod where he had set his heart on spending the next evening drinking Cheyenne and I took off. She was mighty reluctant as the old man still had lots of lovely bait fish to hook.
Omar collected the dead bait from a bucket and sliced them up for his father. "He used to do this for me," he said with a sad little smile,"now I have to do it for him."
Though if you are not a member of the club or an affiliated such organization entry is not permitted. There is a deliciously 1960s air to the club, a low building in beautiful traditional blue and white:
The setting is perfect, ample parking and a view over the endless open waters of the Gulf of Mexico north of Marathon.
I can only imagine how much this place bustles in winter but at the time of year the overflow lot was empty except for my illegally parked vehicle, and of the five cars in the inner lot two had out of state tags. I imagine the proportion is even higher when the snowbirds return.
It seems like a nice little oasis off the beaten track, a couple of blocks off Highway One and the only sound was that of the occasional boat buzzing by and the wind whistling through the flagpole rigging.
The newspaper says one quarter of all Americans are planning no vacation this summer. Count me among the lucky ones with my increasingly precious government job, and my wife with hers and count us all lucky that tourists keep coming to Key West to spend money. The floating bar was packed. 
This basin used to be home to the shrimping fleet, in my own memory, but the waterfront hotels have pushed the old commerce aside and replaced it with the new. Excursions and pirate stories instead of fish and white rubber boots.
The scared and tanned old fishing hounds now trail around Stock Island, cigarettes dangling, loose tank tops dangling from their skinny shoulders and their feet encased in the low white rubber boots that are the official footwear of commercial fishermen in the Keys.
Change is good of course and when more money is to be made it is always better they say, so we rejoice that we have the boats of the gentry to replace the smelly old tubs that caught fish. I have faced the scorn of the pros when I was traveling for pleasure and it's hard to argue that putting to sea when one doesn't have to is an odd occupation. "Like jail with the chance of drowning" as Dr Johnson said, a long time ago. 
So many pretty boats, so little actual sea time. 
One is waited on by sturdy dark eyed Asiatics which is truly exotic, one thinks of Mongolia which I have only ever seen briefly from the window of a train, and Samarkand and the Silk Trade route through Central Asia, which I have a hankering to see. I am really very fond of Kennedy Café. 
The Kennedy Café used to be a Cuban restaurant called Seven Days Deli operated on Kennedy Drive and the decor remains but the food is something quite different. They offer sadly no Uzbek food for breakfast and they offer American food for the other meals of the day though why one would turn down a chance at Central Asia cuisine I cannot possibly imagine.
