Caroline Street

I really enjoy Caroline Street.

 Homelessness I don't enjoy  though I admire the resilience that finds a way around the armrests designed to prevent resting. Why can't we put such toughness to productive use?

 Harpoon Harry's:

 Until I passed the music store I'd never given much thought to the component parts of a piano:

 Off The Hook, worth a  visit.

 Rusty the rebel:

 A (car) parking garage...

 ...filled with bicycles.

 Keys Energy architecture. The public utility that works.

 The Dirty Pig is not a name that inspires me.  I still miss Finnegan's Wake.

The details of Caroline Street.

Elizabeth Street

These aren't typical commuter scenes of most cities which are forced to absorb streams of motor vehicles every work day. There are streams of cars entering Key West at the bottleneck known as the triangle, but  down here the traffic flow tends to be of a more genteel nature as the day begins. A pedestrian, a  bicycle or even a tricycle ambling through town.

Not many people get to make of their journey to work a walk through Old Town. My wife drives the Seven Mile Bridge daily and it's a struggle for her to remember some people drive slowly to savor the unique experience. That she might be late to school is of no concern when the oblivious driver is on vacation.

A Triumph with a wine bar on the back, below. Sometimes I miss my Bonneville then I watch traffic turning the wrong way on a  one way or passing on double yellow lines or braking for no obvious reason or slowing suddenly for an empty crosswalk or not knowing how to stop at a stop sign or failing to look both ways... you get the idea. I have a second chance at life.

This picture didn't work out the way I wanted but it evokes that early morning mood in me. The cat prowling and nearly obscured by the irritating handlebar, the homeless due (or tourist?) struggling with the suitcase. End of vacation or start of a new aimless day?  I put the picture in my diary to remember even though the picture is too busy and unfocused.

This rather obvious joke was Instagram worthy:

Johnson's Grocery store on Petronia and Emma in Bahama Village.  brilliant convenience store marketing involves selling beer and conch for locals and letting tourists in on the "secret." The cool part about the grocery is the connection it carries forth to the past and the community around it. I like to stop a moment and see what piece of history is being celebrated.

Without Rusty  none of it would be seen as he's always  ahead of me.

The Slow And The Dead

When I worked nights I frequently found myself on city streets at three in the morning unable to sleep on my nights off. Since moving to days walking Old Town at four in the morning doesn't happen very often. However with my wife out of town and Rusty always ready willing and able to walk there was no excuse not to go for  a stroll. I ended up wondering if I should have stayed home.

Before six in the morning in those hours of darkness when hangovers rule Key West I let Rusty run ahead off leash. In a world filled with busy bodies it gives him an opportunity to let off steam and it gives me an opportunity to make whatever pictures I want. That he sits on command and can observe traffic patterns without me fails to impress most modern fear filled Americans.But at this hour I can walk and think without submitting to the ignorance of the masses. And young Rusty can enjoy the fact he is no longer negotiating life and traffic on his own. The sexton's building at the cemetery main gate on Margaret Street:

Why I wondered was a traffic cone on a  grave? An annoying vexing question with a stupifyingly banal answer no doubt.

The cemetery offers much atmosphere even through the railings that surround it. I was standing on Passover Lane and all I could see was images. No ghosts were harmed in the making of these pictures. I believe so little in the supernatural that lost souls never make themselves known to me. 

 Flowers pinned to the fence attracted my attention:

Moving on I find myself compelled to photograph empty silent streets at this hour, by now approaching six o'clock, the witching hour when people come back to life and start driving and making noise. Looking up Windsor Lane toward Solares Hill in the distance:

Ambling toward Truman Avenue I passed a Sprinter camper van with a luggage rack on the back filled with coconuts. People sometimes wonder why we chose a Promaster van over a Mercedes and the answers are clear enough in our heads, not least saving $30,000 in the purchase price and avoiding the expense and complexity of maintaining a modern clean burning diesel engine. I grew up in an era when diesels were solid reliable machines of no great performance and nowadays gasoline engines are the simple dependable alternative to diesel exhaust fuel and catalytic converters that have to be replaced periodically and all that stuff needed to reduce air pollution. I enjoyed the coconuts and stopped pondering another imponderable. 

That was when the walk started to get weird. I was no longer alone when a voice called from the shadows to get my attention. No I said, I carry no money. Oddly enough in England I've heard street people take payments with credit cards nowadays when they are selling newspapers. Mind you the police in Britain now prosecute people for thought crimes so they live in a whole new world brave or fearsome as you may see it. Anyway back to the matter in hand. It sounds like the opening line to a joke: This guy walks up to me ans says...

"Can I use your phone?" So I ask what the problem is and he manages to explain he left his phone in a  Pink Cab - You know Carl? he asked as though I have intimate knowledge of the city cab drivers' lives, though maybe he asked because I knew the number to Five Sixes off the top of my head. I asked the dispatcher who did not sound like a bright spark if he could ask Carl to look in his cab for a phone abandoned by a  distracted fare who was now hopping up and down in front of me worried sick. He seemed a little confused and slow, possibly helped along by too much alcohol, a common condition around here.

I think I got the message through to the dispatcher and I was surprised it took so much explaining to get the cab company to comprehend the problem.  I get these calls all the time at work and I call the cab companies for lost items every work day.  Indeed I was feeling rather grumpy that I was now doing my dispatch work for free in the middle of the street with an impatient dog sitting there looking hard at me. If your phone is so important, and mine is to me, how the hell do you forget it so easily? The last I saw he was crossing the street to waylay a fresh young thing he spotted over my shoulder to ask her to follow up my incompetent call and make assurance doubly sure. I fled, happy to be ignored suddenly.

Not for long as a hooded figure shouted across Windsor Lane at me "Does your dog like cats?" Good Lord I thought to myself, two in one morning, really? At least she made no effort to extract money from me. She was freaking out that Rusty might invade the privacy of the cats she has been feeding for twenty years behind St Mary's. As obsessive and nuts as she was, she had a point. It was after six and clearly long past due time to put the cat eating hound from hell on his leash. As you can see this one bored into me with the piercing stare of a someone with only one thing on her mind: Her cats. I was reminded why I really like dispatching and not having to get any closer than the phone to the array of nutters who still hang on in Key West.

Rusty is scared of chickens and pretends to ignore cats who stare him down so her feline charges were quite safe but there are some people you just don't mess with and she was clearly one of them.  I engaged her in conversation for the hell of it, but it soon became clear we weren't going to figure out the meaning of life, and no it isn't cats. Call me nuts but I wish there were more like her in a town sliding into conformity and dopey adoration of mainstream reality. Key West could use a few more eccentrics. 

Sometimes my tourist disguise is a little too effective. On Saturday a smelly man came up to me with an ingratiating air and grabbed my hand -ugh!- and started talking rapidly and following me. So finally I turned and said I work for the police department.  That was all it took and he melted away. I didn't have time to get to the bit where I point out I'm a civilian phone answerer.  I need to get more mean my colleagues tell me when they laugh at my street encounters.  I don't think we need more meanness in the US just at the moment.

I get the feeling that living on the streets of Key West must be incredibly boring, no matter what anyone tells me. We are told most homeless have mental issues but they can't get help so there they go aimless drifting day and night after day and night. So if feeding cats give you purpose then I guess more power to you and in the matter of dealing with people versus animals I'm on the cat lady's side. They fed Rusty when he was on the streets but with the ultimate goal of getting him into a home which he seems to enjoy and that must be why I prefer dogs to feral cats. Perhaps one day I shall fade away into the dog feeding equivalent of a cat lady. Meeting these people on the streets is making me maudlin which  probably means I'm going to attract another call at work from the mad electron woman who thinks her ex is sending her messages through her TV streaming service by subverting her internet account. Or the other one who thinks her neighbor is preventing her from sleeping by sending musical vibes through the wall separating their apartments by wires inserted into her pillow. Lucky for both of them they have enough money to keep them off the streets, for now. I prefer the endless parking violation calls between feuding neighbors. At least parking problems I can understand. And don't forget the reason why I like the cemetery is that dead people have no problems that prompt them to call 911.

Rusty Four Years On

Four years ago today I drove up to the Homestead Petco around ten o'clock on what was  a Friday morning. This Is The Dog had put Rusty up for adoption twice before to no takers. My wife had heard from a  friend about this unwanted dog and as Cheyenne had laid down and died of her own volition just a week before  I surprised myself by being ready to adopt at once.  Not having to decide to give Cheyenne the needle made it infinitely easier to accept her death as it was on her own terms and at the time and place of her choosing. My last picture of her as she prepared to leave me:

Old age is merciless but she was generous to me to the last.

My plan was to get an unwanted older Labrador, the sort of dog that's hard to place as they are viewed with unwarranted suspicion by people who want "puppies." Cheyenne was once an expensive pedigree puppy dumped when her shitty family decided she was too old. But lucky for Rusty I wasn't looking for an expensive fashionable trophy dog. Lucky for me too as it turned out. As you can see when I first spotted the little runt I wasn't really focused on the people who saved him from the streets:

He was dumped in the Redlands of Homestead  where he led a pack of dogs that were killed off by angry farmers using shotguns and poison. When he was the last dog left he surrendered to the good people of This Is The Dog who had been following his progress for months, To this day he cannot stand fireworks or gunshots though he has learned not to run at the mere sight of a big dog and he pretty soon learned to sleep soundly with both eyes closed. This was a picture they posted of him on Facebook when he was a stray:

He whimpered a bit as I drove him away from the only people who had ever shown him any kindness but we stopped along the way and he sniffed the sidewalks and stretched his legs as he got used to riding in a  car. He wasn't overly impressed by this guy's overtures in Marathon:

I always get confused as to why people abandon their dogs. From early days Rusty did his best to please me and apart from a  couple of times when I lost my confidence and yelled at him we have had pretty smooth sailing most of the time.The times we didn't were down to me not having faith in myself which my friend Webb says I need to get over. Rusty agrees and by now we are like old friends and he understands me faster than I understand myself.

I have lived with some really excellent dogs who have put up with my eccentricities over the years but Rusty has attained a new level of understanding. Right from the start we bonded and when I was in the hospital in 2018 I worried he would forget me.

He never did of course and my wife told me he started whining when she turned onto the street leading to the hospital when she brought him to visit me. But right from the start he kept close like he knew this was it for him.. We tried to fence him in to keep him safely off the street but he put paid to that plan easily. In the end I figured he probably could handle our genteel Cudjoe neighborhood after dodging the angry farmers of the Redlands and surviving.

The start of a beautiful friendship.

We did negotiate the bumps, for instance we learned he much prefers curling up in a tight bed that supports him on all four sides. He reserves the couch and our bed for those rare occasions when he wants to stretch out and the open plan dog bed just wasn't for him. But we have had lots of time to learn the little Prince's quirks and to adapt to them.

Long may he last for we have much traveling to do.

Petronia Street

The city has been pointing out fairly publicly that saving a parking space with a  trash can or cone is illegal. It's also illegal to park on the street and not move your car for 72 hours. This is the time of year everyone is turning everyone in for parking infractions. The other day I took 25 of them in a 12 hour shift and I don't know how many my colleague dispatched. When I'm out walking I known when garbage collection is coming or recently occurred:

The sidewalks are narrow and the trash needs are huge so some discombobulation is to be expected as modern trash cans are positively cavernous. Rusty sidesteps them nimbly but I am not quite so lucky as I lumber after him!

Check out the neat new fencing in the picture above. The house has got a lick of paint and order has been brought to a corner that used to be a mixture of outdoor art studio and actual shade tree mechanic's  shop. You can see in the picture below the artwork on the old rickety fence covered with construction netting. 

   

Change is good they tell us but Mr Chapman lost his home next door during the foreclosure scandals and instead of riding his outrageously decorated tricycle up and down Duval playing loud music from the speakers on the back. The neighborhood has gone to gentrification and Chapman apparently had to move to northern Florida from a formerly secure old age in his Key West.

Nowadays it is enough to celebrate the past in two dimensions on a  mural where a game of dominoes will disturb no one and will serve as a sign of how cool the place is that they moved too, and how pleasant it was for those that were lucky enough to live here before it all disappeared and became cultural history.

"The Best Kept Secret Of The Locals!" the neon green sign screams. Irony, where is thy sting?

Every visitor thinks that the locals are holding back, that there is some secret parlor that serves food and drink strangers can never know about; some sort of elixir of youth and  a plate of ambrosia of the gods... for locals only! 

I think the real secret some few locals know and others don't care to bother with, is the state of mind where you walk and look and see and think.

The colorful Conch Cottage illuminated by the afternoon winter sun is there and stands as the obvious symbol of the End of the Road culture of the island.

But sometimes we have to be dragged down to earth and reminded to see the worst with a sense of humor. 

This is the reality of close quarters living in a small American town. You pay a million bucks for a tiny shack but that doesn't mean you get to park nearby or smell only fresh sea air!

But the beauty is also there if you can take time out from sniffing the roses as it were.

Funny the stuff you see when you are wandering around town with a dog (who doesn't piss at random happily) and a camera.