Friends In Key West

I don’t think of myself as a social being but I think I end up looking that way. I was at the Tropic the other night for a talk about Ft Jefferson and the Dry Tortugas and very good it was too. 

Standing outside waiting for the others of my party to escape the crowd I was accosted. 

A couple from New Jersey, long time visitors to Key West spend far too much time on this page sbd wanted to say hello. I hope I didn’t disgrace myself but then another couple stopped by…I managed  not to faint because they were all very gentle with me. I am really sorry I didn’t drag them a block up the street to meet Rusty. But Paula was there finally to manage my life and she took the reins and led us off to dinner. I was full of admiration for the blog readers who accosted me with charm and overcame my social ineptitude. 

Mind you, I can smile for the camera. Unlike Paula’s Dad who in person is really funny but he looks at a camera like Winston Churchill with indigestion. 

On the subject my wife says she is shy but I wouldn’t know it from the way she makes and maintains long distance relationships. I get exhausted by all the socializing she creates so what follows is a short and most probably incomplete list of what it takes to learn to be a visitor and guest in the town where people live their own full lives.

Doug lives downtown and has for as long as I can remember. He loves his Huskies and you’ll seem him cycling downtown on a tricycle with furry partner. We appreciate our dogs.

I have admired Doug's tenacity in a city that chews people up and spits them out. He and his wife have made Key West their home in a way few people seem to manage. 

They take joy in Key West, in friendships forged and new friends who have a habit of dropping into town. Doug’s retirement doesn’t look much like mine but we share a contentment and an appreciation for this town. 

Chuck and Wayne of course. Remarkable success story of learning to live in the Keys and Kry West. 

Rachel and Kristi holding down the fort without me. Rachel has twenty years in dispatch and started three years before me. Kristi has more than a dozen in the room. Their partners are both city employees which steady work gives relationships a chance. They both own their homes so they have stability. Success stories. 

Carol hired Layne as a teacher taking a chance on the lawyer who wanted a new less stressful career. Carol threw amazing parties in her sprawling tree house in New Town supported by rental  apartments she carved out of the house to make it economically viable. She’s retired to her long desired Old Town tiny house part of a cooperative of small units in a landscaped lot out of the flood zone. Happiness in a small package. 

Nick lives with three rescue dogs and extended family across the island. One of the reasons I didn’t go completely nuts sitting up all night answering 911 for more than a decade. And below Keith from New Jersey with a wicked sense of humor and the smarts to get his own place in New Town. He used to own his own business but realized working for city is the best retirement plan in Key West. A few more years…

My dentist of all people. Claude gets it, the van thing. He travels every chance he can and posts pictures on Instagram at his account msflossdaily  I think it’s Africa pretty soon. 

Jonathan last seen in Maine. Sailor and circumnavigator married to one of my wife’s best friends. We sat on the deck listening to the rain and drank red wine and I thought of the other sailor who inspired my travels Webb Chiles the writer. 

I met Robert sailing the Bahamas in the 1980s. He’s retired to Cudjoe Key with Dolly. He came to Key West in 1976 and watched the bicentennial fireworks from the deck of his boat. A life spent on and under the water as a fisherman and later an employee at the marine sanctuary he initially opposed. He’s all about conserving the oceans. 

Me, the shadow drifting through their lives. 

Nicole, a healthy reminder of some of the challenges faced by Keys residents. Tough people. 

Duval Street

Barring some other catastrophic obstruction I’m hoping Rusty and I will be leaving Key West soon. Hurricane Nicole will I trust,  be soaking the just and unjust alike in the indecisive state of Georgia. The plan is to return here after Thanksgiving but in the meantime I have to meander to New Orleans to pick Layne up when she flies back from California.

My instructions are brief and simple and I seem to have forgotten the critical point. I think I have to be at the airport the 22nd but I fear I was doing something important like picking daisies when she got to that point in her pick up instructions. Never mind, it’ll all work out. 

I’m told it’s rather cold and damp on the central California Coast as one might expect in November but it’s not at all here. One can feel rather smug in the Keys at the moment, cool breezes, puffy white clouds, and a little sunshine to mellow things out. The rest of Florida has been wallowing in pouring rain and some gnarly winds. 

It has been rather pleasant. We got a walk or two in downtown did young Rusty and I, checking the state of Duval Street. Much of a muchness most of it with a few storefront changes. Fran Decker has an art exhibit in the local artist spot in the shop window at CVS. When the owner of Fast Buck Freddie’s put CVS in the old Kriss building at 500 Duval he specified a space for local art and of course Tony Falcone got his way. 

I find the obsession with winter stereotypes for Christmas slightly odd, but I’m not a retailer by nature, so I am forced  to suppose Santa Claus as improbable as he may be in the tropics, helps sales. 

It’s low season right now as cold weather Up North hasn’t yet kicked in to push snowbirds south, but the trickle of people on Duval look the same as ever. 

In the past I would occasionally come down and walk Duval before my overnight shift at the police station. Now I’m just another tourist and I like that.  

In a way it’s a fresh new view of the city. 

We were passing the Oldest House when I found myself behind this child dressed for the part and learning to be a Key West visitor. Start them young  I thought as Dad worked the phone. 

Rusty is his own dog and I love that about him.  He got tired of being the center of attention so he walked to the end of his leash and sat by himself refusing to pose with them.  

I’ve only been gone a year but it feels like much longer so I was stupidly impressed by Willie T’s still pulling them in enough to fill the bar. 

We used to get lots of calls asking for help to move the street people along who had a habit of panhandling the customers while listening to the music.  The homeless tend to be seasonal too in Key West and I didn’t see huge numbers as I walked around. I don’t think gentrification makes the place more appealing for them either.  

A former colleague was telling me about applying for “low income” housing for which he didn’t qualify as dispatchers earn too much, his rate is nearly $30 an hour. His girlfriend does qualify but she can’t afford the unit as they want $2500 a month for the “affordable” unit. He could have lived with her illegally (!) but he found something else as he is well connected. The economics of living in Key West make less sense than ever. 

The result is that the commute hours these days are extraordinary into and out of the city as workers come from

marginally more affordable islands up the highway. Construction at the triangle doesn’t help. 

If you have your foot in the door you can hang on. Roger sells knick knacks on Duval and watches the world go buy. After a working life didn’t traveling he is a very happy man sitting here chatting to passers by. I wonder why I am wired differently. But I am. 

Hurricane Nicole

You could say I am miffed to find myself discussing a hurricane threat on this page but when I say “miffed” I mean something far stronger and less delicate. I dare say I am annoyed that not only did Hurricane Nicole put in an appearance but the storm is heading dead due west to collide with my plans.

Layne was going to leave Thursday from Miami to fly to San Francisco to gather in Santa Cruz for a friend’s 70th birthday. However that plan got scotched by Nicole’s untimely appearance and she left yesterday flying from Key West to Charlotte and then off to the wild west. Leaving me looking at a map of the entire rain soaked state of Florida the next couple of days. So I’m hunkering until this wretched thing passes. I have books to read and a dog to walk. I am set and best of all I don’t have to be locked down at work. 

The first thing I thought as I looked at the wide sweep of storm weather covering almost all Florida was how ready are they in Southwest Florida to get rained upon? I think Hurricane Ian was plenty for them to deal with at the moment. This was Monday’s track when we started changing our plans:

The Keys, Flamingo of fond memory and Pensacola are spared a spanking. Paula and Ivan are okay with me staying put a few more days to wait for the weather to pass so that seems sensible. My plans for solitude in north Florida woods are delayed it seems, not cancelled. 

Originally we were going to see friends in Miami and stay the night with Layne flying out on Thursday morning. So much for that. We just have to stay adaptable and feel lucky that we aren’t in the direct path. These days even a category one storm feels excessive to my delicate nerves. The trouble is storms don’t act predictably and we have nowadays sudden unexpected increases in strength and changes of direction at the last minute. I don’t feel much like it but here I am watching a hurricane develop once again. 

Some rain and wind is the forecast in the Keys as we wait and see what Nicole does and what Rusty and I will do in response. This is way better than putting up storm shutters and making my bed in the police station. 

I keep telling Rusty we can’t close our eyes to the possibilities of foul weather messing with our plans but he keeps ignoring me. Maybe I should do as he does, closes his eyes and smiles. 

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.