Coming In From The Cold

I think it is more true than ever that you have to live your life at home, not at work. Rusty greets me at the top of the stairs outside our stilt house, every morning I'm at work. I pull up, park the bike, take off my helmet and he rushed down and leaps into me happier to see me than he can express, though he does let loose a few howls and mewls to show his relief that I am home. 

I value my dog so one night last week when a hotel called us to say they had a dog loose on the property it actually felt like a kindness to send out an officer to try to get the dog and find the owner. All of which happened by about three in the morning. The officer located a phone number on the collar and radioed me asking me to call the owner with the good news.  I shouldn't have bothered. He acted as though I was telling him his mother was dead. Is this a joke? h kept asking as though it was impossible his hound had gone walkabout. Are you really the police? You aren't even a US citizen. You must be a Russian spy. I kid you not. 

I don't sound as though I was born this side of the Atlantic but there is nothing Slavic about my intonation (I am a US citizen as it happens)  and I simply couldn't understand what he was talking about. I was trying to get his dog back where he belonged...and I was an Enemy? In the end the weird man's wife was convinced to go to the hotel and save the family pet, a cheerful Labrador apparently on the lam, a night in jail at the SPCA. The call bothered me though. So my wife sent me a picture of Rusty in his favorite spot, not on his couch, not on MY couch, not on his bed or mine but on this corner of the carpet:

I have heard stories of people feeling empowered to hate immigrants, and indeed a friend heard his trailer trash neighbor screaming at some guy on a scooter to "go back home" to Poland. I think the Pole was being an asshole but sending us immigrants "home" every time we offend is no answer to anything. Yet this behavior is now condoned by the top dog:

I see huge ironies writ large all over the US these days.I remember President Reagan telling the Soviet Union to "tear down that wall" speaking of Berlin and today our President wants to wall us in. I recently heard an appeal from the new President of France calling on the US's best and brightest minds working on new technology and climate change issues to make France their home. In France he said they would have everything they need to do their work.  Meanwhile the US President digs in and says coal is best and climate change is a hoax. The German Chancellor is now being described as the "leader of the Free World" a title she rejects but one that is filled with irony in light of Germany's past.  I feel like we have all slipped down a rabbit hole and landed in a world made upside down.

I am bracing for more anti-immigrant tirades especially as the constitutional guarantees seem to be holding up better than one might expect. But I miss the country I emigrated to, one filled with optimism and belief in itself and fearlessness in a world that needed those qualities as much as it does today. I hope it comes back soon.

Dawn Patrol

How I decompress from nights of taking 911 calls.

I love these spiky cactus plants, even without the bloom. In my ideal world my home would be surrounded by them several ranks deep, which would allow wildlife to approach but would keep humans, zombies, nosy neighbors and predators well away. My idea of a welcome mat.

Rusty was running in circles nose down while I had my head up watching the sun come up. The mornings have had this wintry feel to them lately which is totally bizarre as mid-May is the time of year when heat and humidity make themselves known in the air: summer is here. This year it's not been like that all week.

We stepped out of work one morning to a brisk north wind and Nick the Conch shrugged and said welcome to the new world order where its hot in winter and cold in summer. It has been feeling frigid riding home each morning and I've been forced to wear a jacket. I know 68 degrees doesn't seem cold everywhere but in May in the Keys its an arctic blast. I expect to see melting icicles hanging from the branches of the trees as the first rays of the sun hit them at seven in the morning.

There were a bunch of birds observing our terrestrial progress. I wanted to ask how they felt about cold winter mornings this time of year but they ignored me. 

 I wondered why the woodpecker below looked so plain until I realized I was accidentally in monochrome mode and I was so fixated on his lack of color I failed to notice how puffed up and indistinct he was. Maybe he was feeling the cold too.

I surprised myself photographing this dragonfly far above me in the trees. I could see his jaws moving in the telephoto lense so he was either breakfasting on dried wood -yum- or his teeth were chattering.

It has been rather pleasant feeling cold this late in the spring. Summers around here are long enough stretching well into November so a period of fresh cool weather is quite welcome. It reminds me of Mediterranean summers when I was a child, the low sunlight the col early morning air when I used to get up before the rest of my family and I wandered out into the woods and fields looking for trouble. 

I thought I found it too, a face peering out of a dead tree trunk. The harder I looked the less like a face it appeared to be. No trouble at all actually.

The art of photographing bougainvillea still escapes me  as the blooms end up looking fuzzy and indistinct. I liked the colors though and Rusty was still dodging back and forth, nose to ground tail well up in the air very busy.

 I think he enjoyed himself.

I'm sure he did.

Which is what counts.

On The Water

A few pictures from running about on the flat waters under a blue summer sky in the Lower Keys.

Sunrise Light

The sun was coming up over Key West, through the clouds and trees.

That hour gives a peculiar slant to the light.

Though even the immensely tall traveler's palm can be kept in shadow by a taller home:

A low wall by contrast bright with sunlit color, vibrant:

A pelican keeping guard, grumpily watching me drive away home with my dog:

I snatch it's portrait as we pause at a stop sign. Good bye Key West, for the day.

Gentrification Without Friends

My wife was profoundly saddened this past week by a friend who moved away. He has a portable job and he sold his 450 square foot for a  thousand dollars a foot or more and is now merrily bidding on "proper" homes in central Florida much closer to his family. My wife understands why he left Key West after decades in town, but now she has no one to go to the movies with when I am at work of an evening.

Her first teaching boss in Key West, the woman who took her in and gave her a chance to try a new career away from the law, has retired and gone on a world tour which could take years to complete. At last report Carol was in the Maldives after staining glass in Florence, picking wild flowers in Cyprus and doing I dread to think what on a beach in India. We helped Carol empty her home before she put it up for rent and one cannot be annoyed with a  woman who devoted almost four decades to education in Key West for going walkabout now she is retired.

A fellow teacher left Key West last December to take care of her mother in New York. She texts my wife daily and they talk and my wife reports she is taking full advantage of the cultural opportunities in her new/old city. Good for her my wife says sadly, also thinking about her office assistant who we visited last summer in her new home and new marriage in Illinois. Now she has a job she likes in the schools and is settled into a life away from the tropics. Her Key West adventure is done.

I think every day about what we will do in retirement. Our plan to get a small RV and live in it and rent homes as we go as the mood takes us will pout us too on the road away from Key West and sometimes his plan gives me pangs. Perhaps by 2021 Trump will have abolished Social Security I used to think but now that seems an unlikely way for me to lose the power to decide. With pensions and Federal funds we will be able to live quite well we are told and could even afford to stay in the Keys with financial care. But is that what we want? This town of change. People coming and friends leaving...

I have never liked living anywhere quite so much as annoying irritating vexing Key West. The exasperation factor is always there ready to leap out and remind you that you will be glad to shake the sand from your feet for the last time when you leave. Except you won't. Who wants to be the quitter?

And yet there is more world to see and shrinking time in which to do it as old age creeps forward. And like those who came before and left Key West is changing and adapting to new demands of a different demographic. I lived a good life in California in the 1980s after I decided Key West was too remote.And now after two decades of residence and proper work perhaps it still is for one who needs to roam. Meanwhile those that have left aren't coming back and they are the oxygen that help my wife to breathe. And those friends are slipping  off the greasy pole that is life in contemporary Key West.

Seashell Motel

A story I judged to be somewhat incomplete caught my eye in the newspaper and I am still wondering what it means.  The bare facts as reported in the Citizen indicate the would-be developers of the elderly, inexpensive and somewhat shabby motel and hostel on South Street are having difficulty finding funding for their project.

The Soni family wants to replace the Seashell at 718 South with a  modern eco-lodge as depicted in my rather poor reproduction from the newspaper article. The construction was supposed to have begun a year ago but the developers got an extension on their project and now are asking for another. The reason is only hinted at but it seems they are having trouble raising money to create their new hostelry, which feels like a first in development-mad Key West.

The Soni family earned high  marks as contributors to the community in newspaper interviews with city commissioners. Based I suppose on their conversion of the elderly and ratty El Rancho Motel on Truman Avenue into the modern energy conserving Silver Palms. I snagged this picture of the El Rancho in 2009 as it was being torn down. It was a classic 1950s motel except it was showcased on the main drag into town.

Now it looks like this, or it did when the Silver Palms was brand new in the summer of 2010.  It has actually held up quite well with its energy and water conservation schemes. You'd think it would be a no brainer for the owners of the Seashell to pull off the same feat a second time, but not so.

Is it because the NIMBY wealthy community of Casa Marina doesn't want a  "giant" new hotel in their well-to-do area? Apparently in part  the newspaper says. No funding yet, say the developers. No permits says the Historic Architecture Review Commission, to which the city commissioners respond that owing to a technicality they get to give permission first for this particular Old Town Project. But there are murmurings on the commission, faithfully reproduced in the paper hinting that this new hotel will never happen. Why not? Therein lies the mystery.