Night Thoughts

My wife has just started her penultimate year as a teacher. She ended her summer vacation by going on a  clean up binge and before I knew it bags of stuff were being lined up, recyclables to one side trash to the other and the middle re-useables. Dark corners of distant closets yielded unexpected treasures, forgotten footwear and old tools reminiscent of an earlier time. One could think of it as a Spring clean but it's just her opening salvo in the march toward retirement and change.

It must be obvious to anyone that as the saying goes: "Man proposes and God disposes," and an uncertain uncaring Fate may have any number of surprises in store. Nevertheless there are those among us who plan while others go all spontaneous. In this case my wife and I plan and the countdown to retirement, still three years away for me, has us thinking ahead to how to cope with a new way of living. Not exactly spontaneous is it?

I wonder how Rusty will cope with change as he likes his routines and I hope that living on the road for extended periods will suit him. I plan to walk him and myself into a coma as often as possible so I hope constant attention will mitigate his anxiety.

In pondering a  future without work but with a monthly income I feel fortunate to have found a job with a proper pension plan and to be of a generation that is till offered social security. The drive to end social security or scale it back seems bizarre to me as it was started for the express purpose of sparing older people starvation in old age. While it is fashionable tot al about lack of money I wonder how much better spent could have been the monies spent on two decades of endless war in Afghanistan, a place where American lives have been lost and money spent to suit a purpose that escapes me. I hope that retirement will allow my wife and I to slip further to the edges of modern society, further from these questions debating morality and purpose and closer to questioning the shape of the cultures around us. 

Key West used to be a place  that was a refuge for people unable to find acceptance elsewhere but the paradox now is that acceptance is widespread across the US for all sorts of groups, not just the gay community and Key West's role in the past  decades as a judgement-free haven has slipped into obsolescence. A drag show isn't a defiant act of an alternative society anymore, its just a variation on a musical hall performance all innuendo and cheerful slapstick designed not to offend. Tourist love the cheap thrill of saying they saw men dressed as women singing on stage. Makes a vacation perfect.

We have debated the merits of staying in place in retirement but the urge to test myself grew stronger and stronger as I lay in the hospital bed wondering why I wasn't dead. Finding myself alive with every prospect of living to a much older age than previously suspected forced me to figure a more intense way forward. My life has been filed with variety and travel but from the inside I know I have never really pushed myself to my limits, I have always pulled back. Now seems the time to try to exaggerate and see how that feels.

I walk around Key West and the Lower Keys with a heightened sense of awareness these days. Whatever else happens in 2022, if plans work out I will no longer be a worker, a grounded member of society fixed in place and expected to show up at a given time to do a given job. I will be a drifter, at home some of the time and on the road the rest, a snowbird, a summer visitor, a part time resident, an outsider. I shall have to resist the temptation of telling some other resident "I used to live here" to ears that don't care to a mind occupied with the daily intrigue of earning a  living in an impossible town. No one wants to hear from an old timer past his prime.

I have so many memories of life in the Keys as this is the place I have lived longest on two continents over six decades. I don't really know how we landed up here and inserted ourselves into a life as conventional as any you might find. But we did. 

I walk past the Bourbon and the 801 bar, the last vestiges of Key West's gay community and like just about every other bar on Duval I've never been inside. I live here yet I don't much like the noise and crowds in bars, I don't care to go fishing, I am stolidly conventional. I am thus a fish out of water. Yet he best I can say of myself is I have never much wanted to change anything as I am not one who pushes to change the very weirdness that drew me to live here. The things I like about living here are much more low key than the obvious. I like the generally casual approach to material things, it doesn't much matter what you drive or what you wear and a trip to the mainland is a reminder how different Key West can be. I am in my comfort zone of casual living.

Sometime in the next few weeks we order our van with the fond hope it will be ready before next year's hurricane season. Then we shall see how viable all our planning may be. 

Sea Oats

Above I photographed the classic view of Smathers Beach, often framed by non native coconut palms. As you may have noticed I don't usually seek out the Keys cliches with my camera. But in this case I wanted to highlight something not often noticed.

From the USDA website:
"Sea oats is a long lived, slow growing, warm season, perennial grass commonly associated with the upper dunes along beach fronts. It grows erect to approximately 6 feet in height at maturity, and has leaves that can grow to 24 inches in length. The leaves are narrow, less than 1 inch in width, and taper towards their ends. The ends of the leaves are often brown and curled in appearance. It produces a large seed head, or panicle, during the summer. The panicles are made up of many flat spikelets containing seed. The panicle turns from green to straw colored in late summer as the plant matures. The stem of the plant has bulges, or nodes, near the soil surface. These will often root down and anchor to the soil surface as wind born sediment accumulates around the plant. Sea oats is also rhizomatous. These rhizomes have a scale-like appearance when young, and can be seen as pale yellow, sharp, stiff, protrusions near the base of the plant."

All of which is probably more than we wanted to know but the point is this raggedy  grass patch is considered critical to maintaining the coastline. Leave the stuff alone, don't tear it up and don't cross the rope barriers to walk on it. Easy enough.

South Roosevelt Boulevard:

The stuff grows in abundance as you can see:

USDA again:

"Sea oats is very drought tolerant. This species produces a massive root system, and will tolerate salt spray and brief inundation with salt water. It prefers full sun, and thrives in areas with blowing sand, such as dunes along the upper beach front. Burial of the plant’s base by blowing sand actually stimulates plant growth and helps the plant spread via rhizomes and tacking down at the stem nodes. It prefers coarse sediments, but will tolerate medium grained sediments. It will not tolerate fine grained sediments, and has a difficult time surviving in lower, wetter portions of the beach area. Though it is capable of surviving brief inundations of salt water, it will not tolerate water logging."

The view from across the street on the scenic Bridle Path:

Things I See

After Broga I felt like a walk to cool down and I found myself, dogless and alone  pausing to look at things of interest to me and me alone. They didn't make motorcycles like that when I was a youth, all pointed and ugly but capable of all round performance I could never have imagined 50 years ago:

This was more my speed, a 100cc Kawasaki Scrambler with 1400 miles on the clock, some rust and flattish tires just ready to be put into service as a cool ride around town. I pined for it, memories of my youth, on Italian two strokes because I lived in Italy and these weren't imported but the principle of vintage riding remains the same. 

Truman Avenue leading me and everyone else out of town. If they felt like it.

And the big old Harley Davidson air box, classic and lovely and vibrating screws loose apparently.

I dislike free range chickens as noisy and messy as they are, but I do admire their style:

All you need to have style on two wheels in Key West: handle bars to air out your armpits, a decent lock to be deployed at all times and the all important cup holder.

I got barked at  but s/he was just bored and there was no great effort like there might have been had Rusty been along.

My powers of deduction tell me there is a pool behind the fence. Not that I know what to do with that information.

The towel by itself would be nothing special but the toothbrush?  It must have been a busy evening.

I am not fond of memes explaining the meaning of life but in this case I found them on cloth and for once I took the time to stop and read their platitudes.

I found exactly what I was looking for, a pace to stop a moment...

...and the view was very pleasant.

You might get the idea not to go down Olivia Street toward Duval. Don't rely on bicycles or tourists in cars to figure out one way streets. Always look both  ways.

Crumbling it may be but it's still home. In a town where costs are astronomical you keep on keeping on even as the house comes down around you. 

The Conch Tour trains are running as full as ever and they are an excellent way to get the lay of the land and hear some history in the 90 minute tour. But they do run slow and are an awful hold up.

Then back to the car and back home to a sleeping dog.

He had his long walk in the morning earlier.

Cemetery Pictures

Walking to and from the B'Nai Zion plot I couldn't help but fall victim to the beauty.

 Decidedly unusual views:

 And there was even poetry underneath.

 A well known Key West family. I first heard of them when a Papy wrote a boating guidebook to the Keys.

 The family that pecks together stays together:

 Flight path

 Back to that corner of the cemetery:

Old Bahia Honda

Rusty needed a walk and I felt like taking some pictures so this was an obvious destination as heavy rain would have muddied the trails in the mangroves. Yuck!

 Summer stillness on the water.

 My Lumix FZ1000 really does seem to do a better job with wildlife and I am only just starting to figure out some of the subtleties.

 Rusty looking busy:

 I am very fond of this dog.

 I hink this vast leggy arachnid is a harmless golden orb silk weaver.

 Sunset looking  good.

 Having a good time:

 What an evening.

Idiots defying the signs and common sense and walking through the fence. No doubt they will sue if they hurt themselves. 

 Just lovely.