Keith

I hate bicycles as a general rule. I don’t mean from the perspective of a driver dealing with cyclists on the highways and byways, though those encounters can be harrowing enough. No, I deeply dislike standing astride a velocipede and pushing off on one of the pedals. I know torture will follow. 

I dislike the general mechanical ineptitude of bicycles. They creak rattle and clunk, all while you sit on an instrument of torture that if you were forced to sit on it against your will would be recognized as medieval torture. That and having to pedal and sweat. You get no quarter on a bicycle. 

So you have to push down on the pedals to achieve progress. While all this is going on you are considered to be a vehicle with all the rights and obligations pertaining thereto. I stop at stop signs and motorists melt down in confusion when I don’t simply glide on through. I look over my shoulder instead of blindly swerving across lanes of traffic, all while lurching and clunking and swearing gently under my breath.

I know Webb Chiles, a Masonic cycling cultist, despises me for my anti bicycle dogma and half Key West can’t afford a car as they throw their money into the great rental maw that consumes their lives but I would rather walk on crushed glass in bare feet reciting verses from  the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit than ride a bicycle. And yet sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do. I arrived in time for my appointment on Stock Island by velocipede. 

“Well that’s a surprise,” Keith said from astride his Yamaha scooter’s broad thickly padded saddle. “I never would have guessed you would show up on a bicycle.”  I said nothing, principally as my numb gonads were once again consuming most of my attention. Every time I descend from the high Olympus of a rigid bicycle seat I worry that I will never restore normal feeling “down there.” Who would voluntarily crush the family jewels into submission just to save a gallon of gas?  Not I. Layne was at home aboard GANNET2, plugged in and air conditioned, organizing storage and I thought a nice ride would make up for the afternoon’s planned caloric intake. Silly me. 

It was a good afternoon. Keith and I worked together and apart in dispatch for a dozen years and as we have grown older and less brash we find ourselves with more outlooks in common that I should ever have imagined. We talked politics and travel and hardly touched on work, his work, as I am RETIRED. By the way, it would take more than crushing my gonads by bicycle to make up for a plate of Cajun pasta at Hurricane Hole. 

My last three years in dispatch when I retired from supervising to save my sanity and that of those around me, I worked on Keith’s shift where I found a quiet refuge to simply do the work and enjoy the process of taking calls and sending help to those in need, no office politics involved. He helped me gain my equilibrium after years of work related stress. I am grateful. 

It was a pleasant afternoon, one of those moments when I appreciate the value of Key West as tourist destination. I had no need to check my watch to see if I needed to go, to prepare for work, to meet an obligation. It was a matter of sitting around and talking and reminiscing and enjoying retirement. Another thing Keith and I have in common is his firm determination to retire when the time comes. He will probably stay in Key West, his retirement is planned, and I like the way he thinks. Dispatching has given him too a secure future in old age. 

I got home in good order, despite  the damned seat post that kept sinking as I rode forcing me to adopt a bizarre crouching posture as I hunched over to push the pedals and got my chin almost scraped by my knees on each revolution. Quasimodo on the tour de Key West.

Dinner was grilled burgers under the stars, a cooling breeze and palm fronds waving overhead. Our moochdocking landlords had a parent staying for a visit so I found myself chatting about the merits of Key West with someone else, an other enthusiastic visitor… Bernard from Cork in Ireland loves the tropical ambience and I found myself meandering through another long conversation this time fueled by iced water as I struggled to stay focused. Winter time made everything dark at six in the evening so by 8:30 it felt like midnight and I was well past my bedtime. Irish whiskey and Irish conversation will do that apparently. 

The Keys Paradox

Layne spent the afternoon with a circle of friends discussing a book. Layne the nomad participates online usually of course but was pleased to be able to reunite with her friends for an afternoon. I saw her off in the passenger seat of Carol’s car leaving Rusty and I alone, parked and plugged in secure in an absent friend’s front yard. 

Soon enough I got a text. Stuck in traffic, cyclist killed at the triangle. “The Triangle” is the name given to the intersection at the entrance to Key West where US 1 enters  the city and splits into a north or south direction.  I took Rusty for a neighborhood walk already determined to take a day off driving. 

A sunny November morning in Key West with higher levels of humidity than I would like, but pleasant nonetheless. Rusty mooched slowly along sticking to the shade perhaps because he is older and more sensitive to heat or because he has learned to enjoy the cooler air he has found on our travels and no longer funds sunbathing as pleasant as he used to when we lived here. 

I passed a man polishing his big black SUV so I said good morning as you do in Key West. It’s easy to identify the incomers in this town who bring their habits from Up North; they are the ones who avoid eye contact when you pass them in the street. Ray paused in his polishing and started a conversation. 

He slipped easily into politics and I started to back away fearing the modern descent into separate camps but he fell instead into the “pox on both your houses” camp. I just listened. But then the conversation got interesting. He and his wife retired from government jobs in New York and they decided to load their Lincoln with what they needed and no more. They sold their home and travel the country renting as they go. I was astonished, we had something in common. We discussed destinations. St Augustine is looking good to him, a destination I enthusiastically endorsed. Rusty got up and stretched. We set off for hone around the corner. More apparently retired  people riding for the beach: 

It probably didn’t go well for them. The rain started suddenly and came down hard for a while. Rusty doesn’t like the hammering of water drops on the tin roof of GANNET2 so he left his bed and laid down next to me in my driver’s seat swiveled around to act like my Lazy Boy at my desk. 

Layne texted me about the second road traffic accident they were stuck in further up Stock Island. A scooter rider had been killed by a car not a mile from the spot where a cyclist died a few minutes previously. She saw the rider cartwheel and die on the road and she was reminded once again of my own near death drama. I was largely oblivious as the rain soon stopped and I got comfortable with my Kindle. 

I am reading “Berlin Diary” by William Shirer as a primer for election season and spent a happy couple of hours delving into the arcane eyewitness story of the start of a cataclysm without the benefit of hindsight. When published the author had no idea how his story would end.

Locked away in Paula and Ivan’s garden, with inches to spare i had an afternoon to myself and my thoughts. Rusty snoozed among the banana leaves until we were interrupted by the start of the game and much hooten’ n’ hollerin’ from next door as the Astros won the World Series. 

Layne on Sugarloaf Key couldn’t get back as Highway One was closed southbound. Rusty had no idea what was happening and was reluctant to go for a walk lest he missed her return. I, who had always been at the mercy of road blocks in my tightly scheduled work life found myself idling the afternoon away with not a card in the world. 

After all these years I found the formula for thriving in the Keys. Sit tight, do nothing, don’t move and it will all pass. Instead of struggling as the first CBS correspondent in Berlin William Shirer might have benefited from the sane advice.

Key West Again

“It’s like you’ve never been gone.” Wayne and Chuck said that as they put us up in their driveway in Key West. 

I had my birthday dinner with them at Off The Hook on Caroline Street. Pasta and clams (and a whole lot more) for me.

Layne chose tuna. 
And they did the same. 

Of course I had dessert, banana pudding which Layne tasted but Wayne and Chuck are taking their exercise regimen very seriously and observed me non judgmentally overdosing on sugar. I shall celebrate no more 65th birthdays I feel pretty sure. This one I shall remember.  

“It’s like you’ve never been gone,” Kristi and Rachel remarked when I popped into the police station to see how dispatch is doing without me. Not too badly apparently. 

I found a room filled with smiles and good cheer and I had a thoroughly good time extolling the virtues of retirement and listening to their stories about work. I have too much to do to go back but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t greatly cheered by my visit. Dispatch is short staffed as always but they are on a upward trend impossible not to notice, in control, cohesive and smiling. I half wanted to rejoin the team. “Take the phones…” the captain said to me as 911 rung and honestly I am so used to that particular ring tone I was responding to the calls, twitching in my seat. 

I owe my ability to walk to the city health care plan and the support of the department. I owe my freedom in retirement to the pension plan and I am as grateful as I can be to them. It was a good job but I had fun showing a young trainee the road to Patagonia on Google maps. 

Rusty had a grand time trotting round getting pets and passing out on the cold linoleum in the kitchen. 

“Whose dog is that?” “Hey, Rusty!” and he flopped around like a fish out of water waiting to be rubbed. Now I remember how I did 17 years and four months in dispatch. There were some very good times. 

I went to Stock Island and had lunch with Nick. His apartment burned down during Hurricane Ian but he saved his dogs and his car while not losing his optimism. 

We had a Cuban lunch at El Siboney. We spent ten years working nights together in dispatch. We answered 911 together after Hurricane Irma. A clean up crew dropped a log on his car after the storm so I say if Nick didn’t have bad luck he’d have no luck at all. 

I went off the Cuban reservation and had stewed chicken fricasse with mashed potatoes. I usually have yuca but I was not following a script. 

Our neighbors were having a zoom conversation during lunch which I thought was odd. However everyone drives with their phone in their hand. Why not have lunch the sane way? Nick and I had an actual conversation. 

The weather is too warm and sultry to be enjoyed properly in a van. We have to plug in to keep the air conditioning going. In the evening Rusty and I spent some time walking to avoid the sun, like the good old days. 

We had lunch with a friend at Oasis an Uzbek restaurant on White Street. I had a kachapurri which is melted cheese in pastry with a loose egg on top. You don’t see these too often so I dived in.  Our friend lives in the Casa Marina district and his house was recently valued at more than four million dollars, despite no money put into a 600,000 home when he bought it. He was not happy because as he said there is no reason for such an over-valuation. The prices are ruining Key West and as one who doesn’t need the money he sees the negative side of the problem very clearly. 

I don’t know how the chickens survive but they seem to thrive in a world where their wandering is a tourist attraction. See here outside the Harvey Government center on Truman. 

I just shake my head when I see cyclists on the Seven Mile Bridge. I’m not that brave.

We spent some time swimming at the Ramrod Pool, a while in the ground dig deep and square for a development that never happened. Locals use it as a picnic location to swim their dogs. We swim but Rusty doesn’t.  

Take out the hours spent at work. Take out the drinking and fishing. That’s what’s left. Dinner with friends. 

Enjoy the water, if not the process of making a selfie. 

And enjoy being a tourist. Not a resident! 

Time Passes

I was up early, before the dawn made itself felt. Rusty wanted a very short walk, shorter than I would have liked, but the air is thick and muggy in Key West when you have been away enjoying the fresh open spaces across the fruited plain. 

We had Waste Management for company pumping out the many and various porta potties  at all the many construction sites where winter homes are getting their annual face lifts for their few weeks of winter occupancy. 

I sent Webb a note pondering my new status as Keys outsider and he replied with a very warm and kind reply congratulating me on my 65th birthday. I had completely forgotten it was October 31st. 

My sister called me later from Italy to congratulate me on making another birthday but she had forgotten how old I was. Ten years and one week younger than she, is the answer. I also had to update her on my whereabouts as things have got complicated since I took to a roaming old age. I pointed out to her I was back where I started when I used to ride my motorcycle to improbable places and send her a postcard just to annoy her.

Elizabeth (on the left) became the family matriarch after our mother got cancer and died at the absurdly young age of 49 (spoken as a 65 year old) and she has lived in the same house married to the same man for half a century. I have not. 

Giving rides to friends on horses, cultivating fields, becoming a grandmother and managing her unruly twin sister was her life and she gave up on me when I walked away from my responsibilities to our 300 year old family farm. Mind you  I was terrible at it, untrained, unprepared and not at all interested in being an heir. After a decade locked up in an English boarding school with no training on how to be an Italian farmer I wanted to see the world and be someone other than the life that had been planned for me.  It took 25 years of isolation in the New World  for the family to come to terms with the fact I was never going to change and here I am, happy as a clam in a tin box having divested myself of almost everything I own to be free to take off again. This leopard has not changed his spots.

I now find myself traveling not by motorcycle but with the same spirit of curiosity I had when my family expected me to settle down. Now they have no expectations and the fact that I am a 65 year old nomad of no fixed abode causes them no surprise. 

My friends in Key West do the same shoulder shrug. They have had time to get used to the plan. GANNET2 appeared. We took vacations aboard. We packed up our home. We drove away. We left no room for doubt. 

Key West is an orange I have squeezed dry. Unlike most other places I have lived I have no regrets, and feel I left nothing undone. I’ve explored the Sunshine State top to bottom.  I’ve sailed and swim to my hearts content. I remember Key West from before the Internet, when the Citizen and Solares Hill were the publications that glued the community together. I remember the news of the weird column in the paper, grotesque failures of Florida Man in Key West before the internet invented that meme. I remember the Citizens’ Voice when anonymous locals could criticize the great and the good with impunity and hopefully some humor!  All gone. 

That’s the Key West I miss. The cranky, funky, annoying and slightly down at heel town. Cli ate change is making itself felt and a town filled with elderly millionaires struggling to express their inner bohemian isn’t for me.

Some people have asked if we have a satellite SOS machine to send calls for help if we stuck off the grid in South America. I dislike asking for help at the best of times but I was delighted to realize, as I thought about it, I have no one I’d like to send an SOS to…I don’t think most of my acquaintances would find their quality of life improved by a plea for help from somewhere on Bolivia’s Road of Death from an idiot who chose to drive himself into trouble. 

Stock Island at eight in the morning ing is a long line of commuters forced out of the city by impossible house prices begging for admission to serve their betters.  It’s just part of the new reality of life in Key West. The city has no room for the workers needed to make it function. 

November is the month of high, high tides when the sun and moon align and their combined gravitational pull creates what are known as “king tides.” A friend told me the Key Plaza parking lot regularly floods with the tides. And one just adapts. 

I like to joke that only Layne and I went to Key West to get serious jobs and yet here we are completely free to do as we wish thanks to the Florida Keys. It’s a pity the only place I’ve ever considered to be my home is so unlivable for the youngsters to come who might like to do as I did. Or just to live here for a while and make those memories that feed the many years ahead of conformity and duty. Key West shouldn’t be the preserve of the wrinkled and rich.