Seen along Petronia Street

For some people, every day is April Fool's.

Buds on the beach

"Hello, John? Mr. Garber would like to talk with you."

"We're going stir-crazy in Miami," Sidney said, "so we're coming down."

I told him how sorry Robert would be to miss him, since he's in Tennessee for taxes and bridge and insurance appraisals and . . . .

"I'll miss him too," Sidney said. "We'll see you tomorrow."

The big Lexus pulled up late the next afternoon. We walked through the house, and Sidney was tired so we adjourned to Mangoes for drinks. A few hours later there, after several more drinks and dinner, they checked into the Hyatt at the seaport. Friday we met at the beach for lunch, at Salute, delicious as ever.

They dropped me at Truman and Simonton, turned right and headed back to the mainland.

If I make it to 88, I want to have have that much fun.

Parting gifts

The last time Ref was in his backyard, sitting in a chair in his robe, sick to death, he was directing Arnold and Nate through the welter in his storage shed. He pointed out the concrete pineapple.

He'd gotten it in Miami, he told Arnold, because he knew Robert and I liked pineapples as a symbol of hospitality. He warned Arnold against dropping it, nicking it or putting it among the hundred other things to cull. Ref wanted it to be a housewarming surprise for us.

So the day before Arnold left, he brought it over.

Right now it's at home on the porch -- and at more weight than I can carry, it's probably pretty safe there for a bit. (For all its lawlessness, Key West is pretty low in petty crime: I stupidly left a bag of drill bits in plain sight on the porch overnight, and nobody nicked it.)

But eventually, I think the pineapple from Ref and Arnold is going to have a fine home at the most private part of the house, at the far edge of the pool. As with everything else around the place, we'll think of both of them at every glimpse.

Finishing touches

Arnold spent Wednesday and Thursday finishing up some things he wanted to handle himself -- locks on the gate doors, ball catches on the closets. And then packed his tools.

"They're calling me up North," he said, and he's leaving Friday.

I told him I couldn't say goodbye, so we didn't. I also told him I could never thank him enough. And then I went inside to dry my eyes.

Upward and onward

Dave's working on the landing here Wednesday afternoon. Deco's been shaving the treads and risers below him to fit ever so tightly and beautifully -- and we're all loving the way it looks untrimmed.

We already have cove molding in hand to cover the screws that will secure the backs and sides of the treads.

Nobody wants to use that trim. We love the clean lines. So: Do we go only with liquid nails -- which are engineered to be just as strong as nails or screws after all?

I'm inclined to see how that works for a month or two. We can always add screws and trim; it's awfully hard to subtract 'em.

■ ■ ■

Oh, you wondered about my little time with the judge.

HARC appeals are the last on his agenda (he deals with Code Enforcement first -- zoning violations, bad permits -- and I'm not going to be at the back of the crowd at a certain Duval Street restaurant during a concert soon; I'm just saying); so I sat for 90 minutes or so waiting my turn.

I'd watched him lose his temper a bit, so I wasn't optimistic when I wished him a good afternoon and asked for a continuance. He asked me why. I told him that my problem seemed not to be with HARC, but with its guidelines, and said in my most confident and optimistic tone that I planned to change them. I smiled.

He adopted a bit of the manner you might use with a benevolent madman, and told me gently it would be an uphill battle, but one worth fighting if I had the energy.

He gave me 60 days to show whether the energy was moving anyone on the Commission. At that point I can abandon the appeal, argue my case or seek another continuance. Worse things happen.

The wheel squeaks

Decko and Dave were busy flooring closets in the den Tuesday. Roy was back painting shoe moldings -- little strips of wood to be placed along the regular moldings between the floor and the walls, to hide the joints. I was busy sweating:

Wednesday's my date for an appeal before the city's special magistrate, and I'm going to ask him to defer his decision while the legislative process works to change the HARC guideline that requires us to tear out seven of our windows.

Three possibilities:

-- He'll defer his judgment.

-- He'll rule against the windows for the record.

-- He'll be so dazzled by the original argument I submitted to HARC that he will rule that the windows can stay.

No. 3 is about as likely as him sprouting wings and flying from the courtroom in Old City Hall -- but it's Key West, and stranger things have happened.

Right out the door to the pool

Dave and Declan had planned to work the weekend.

Still, after being there for me on Saturday during the appliance delivery they told me they were planning to go to the Big Pine flea market on Sunday.

Then they took the day off again Monday.

I was there early Monday for the garden guys, to put deposits down on plantings and the irrigation system, and was of course a bit put off that the floors were getting zero attention.

Then, walking back to the apartment, I ran into Skip and Zach from Duval House. Both asked about the progress on our place, and each commented on how delighted I looked when I talked about it.

It occurred to me: It's not about what didn't go right today. It's about what's gone so right so far.

Turning air to gold

Robert left for Tennessee Saturday morning -- taxes, a bridge tournament, his usual stuff.

Tonight I took a long walk down to Higgs Beach and back. It was in the 80s when I left, with big breezes.

Lovely sunset.

If the fridge, fits . . .

Pedro ("Call me Peter") called early Saturday on the road from Miami to tell me he was a half-hour away with my appliances.

I warned him about our narrow street, considering the size of his truck, and gave him an alternate cross-street, and he took the directions . . . .

90 minutes later, he was coming straight up the street, the hell with the cross. "I can get this almost anywhere in the Keys, even in Old Town," he said.

I think he had to grease a few cars to get by, but by heaven he and Esteban pulled up right in front of the house.

Off came the washer and dryer, the dishwasher, the microwave, the oven for the undercounter mount in the island -- and then the fridge.

He took a skeptical look at the opening, measured it (which we'd measured a dozen times ourselves, but not with the floor in place), shook a finger at me, grinned, and said, "You're a very smart man, or a very lucky one."

He and Enrique wrestled it up the front steps and into place. It was a matter of maybe an inch, wedged into the angle under the steps to the second floor.

"I bet you're going to have a big party once this place is finished," he said. "Don't forget your delivery guys."

Daytime fireworks

It's a challenge finding flowers I haven't taken pictures of already.

. . . But not the other day at Duval Square, where these pink bursts were rising from something that looked like a very unprepossessing agave.

Boys' night in

Small island.

Dennis (at left) was one of our great helps at Island City Tile.

Steve and John (at the head of the table) used to run the Equator guest house here -- but before that, were from Chattanooga -- and are big buds with Dennis and Tom (right).

So when we called Steve and John to ask them out to dinner Wednesday, they said they'd already planned to have Dennis and Tom over . . . .

It was delicious.

Chicken for lunch

We were having lunch at Willie T's on Duval Street today when the chicken crossed the road to join us.

This was not Blue Heaven, on Thomas, where yardbirds scratch in the soil under the table bases. This was Duval, and this magnificent rooster came up to us to see what he could cadge.

Robert threw out a sweet-potato fry, and he made short work of it.

I looked at him, thought of every iridescent coq-feather bit of couture I'd ever seen, assessed the difference, and ordered a ham panini though I'd been planning on smoked chicken.

Handsome devil.

Why it's called hardwood

That's Deco, nailing in a course of mahogany by the front door.

And with the big room three-fourths done, the space certainly takes on a different aspect.

It finally feels 36 feet long, for one thing, and the similarities and differences in tone and texture from the ceilings and doors add a little interest.

But just a few minutes after I took this picture, the nail gun jammed.

"Hardwood," Dave harumphed. "Oak wouldn't bother this gun, but mahogany. . . . Sometimes it's just too tough for the nails."

"Aye," said Deco, "that's the downside. The upside is that it's going to be here for a century or so."

Ain't no justice

No, I haven't been locked up in a jury room all this time, but I might as well have been: Monday I spent at the courthouse, and Tuesday my back went out for some reason -- maybe because of all of Monday's standing around in drafty A/C.

I got to the courthouse for jury call at 8:30 Monday morning, along with 150 or so of my fellow citizens in a courtroom that held about 80. It was SRO.

A judge fluttered in after about 90 minutes, swore us in, led us through some statements en masse, and told us that our good turnout had been so discouraging to some criminal defendants that a few dozen of them had pled out.

My number came up, and I was among the 20 prospective jurors who assembled in a civil courtroom on the fourth floor. The case involved two sisters suing a brother for misappropriating $300,000 of their mother's money via a power of attorney.

The judge had each of us give a short life story, asked if we knew any of the parties to the case and turned us over to the plaintiffs' lawyer for questioning. I raised my hand when he asked if anyone had ever used a power of attorney.

He zeroed in on me for specifics, and when I used words like "fiduciary," "ethical responsibility" and "full accounting" I saw his eyes light up. He probed for details on how we'd handled John Gray's affairs for the last 10 years.

He peppered other prospective jurors on an array of topics, and we broke for lunch.

When we resumed, the defendant's lawyer questioned us for a good, long while. Then all the parties, the judge and the court reporter went into the jury room to make the selection. An hour later, I was the first prospect to be excused, thanked and sent home.

I was half disappointed; it could have been an interesting case.

Robert and I went out to La Trat for dinner -- and there at the next table was the plaintiffs' lawyer with his expert witness CPA.

"You would have made a terrific juror for me," he said, "but the defense wouldn't have you. You did things the right way, and they were afraid of anyone who'd follow the rules that closely."

I took it as a compliment.

Finally, some sun

It's been overcast for the last few days -- drizzly one, windy and chilly the other -- and Robert has been in bed with a cold.

But the front has moved through, and the sun finally broke through today.

As I took a look at the house, I got a lesson in color values. Sure, it's yellow -- but not as bright as the yellow elder creeping in at the right of the picture. Once it's properly trimmed, it ought to be stunning.

- - -

My posts may be a little spotty in the next few days. Jury duty starts at 8:30 in the morning. Considering how seriously big buildings take air-conditioning here, I'll pack a sweater.

Ruffled feathers at lunch

Almost nobody turned a head the other day, on the beach at Salute, when a fairly exotic looking woman walked into the restaurant with her pet cockatoo.

The table of four -- three human, one avian -- had a relatively uneventful lunch. It's a pet-friendly town, after all.

That's one thing we love about the place. Dogs go everywhere. Schooner Wharf Bar, which has music and food as well as terrific drinks, is "where the big dogs hang out" in more ways than one. Big and small, retrievers to Yorkies, pets are always welcome.

Just the other day, eating fish nuggets on the water out at Hurricane Joe's, we had fun watching two human toddlers from one table playing with a big Golden at the next.

Which was why we were surprised Friday at the Hogfish, on the stylish Isle of Stock. It's conchier even than the norm, but when a guy walked in with his little dachshund . . . he was asked to please take the dog dockside. (The lunch crowd booed in support of the dog.) Seems a health inspector got his nose out of joint last week and threatened to write the place up if dogs were allowed.

What's this world coming to?

Just for reference

Sometimes I find a new image of my island that just takes my breath away. This one is from EarthBrowser, a program I've supported for a few years. It just keeps getting better: It does all sorts of geeky things, in remarkable detail, about weather, cloud movement, earthquakes, sea-surface temperatures, hurricane tracking.

The green dot is about where our house is. The big leg up north of our 2-by-4 island is Fleming Key, named for the guy who dredged it up to build a place to manage Flagler's rail cars a century ago (the Navy took it over after the collapse of the Overseas Railroad).

The first island to the right is Stock Island. The second big one, with the crisscrossed runways, is Boca Chica, home of Naval Air Station Key West. It's always fun sitting outside this time of the year, because Navy fly boys from all over the country come down here to practice their maneuvers, and you get to see them coming home, loudly, in formation.

The thread you see roughly going left from the top right is US 1. We're a short block and a half north of it, just the tiniest bit from the end of the road. Just so far, and far enough.

Beyond the door

Here's where the floor stood -- or lay, I suppose -- as of noon.

By the end of the day, Dave and Deco had finished the guest room and were going off sideways into closets.

One reason it's a bit slow around the edges is that the nailer -- that device at the end of the blue pneumatic line -- doesn't work close to walls. To avoid nailing through the face of the wood (which apparently lesser floor guys do), they angle countersunk screws.

Takes longer, looks better: just fine with us.

The little things

When last you met our twig door pulls, I was flipping out over various little setbacks, all set up in a row to hit me like rail cars braking quickly.

Today, armed with a new drill, proper bolts and a manual screwdriver, I managed to get two of them actually installed. (I'm delaying the ones in the den until I can get the doors open; right now they're blocked by stacks of flooring.)

Robert's happy with them -- he thinks they look like bronzed coral, and I'm so happy he's happy that I'm not going to argue strongly for twigs. And I'm happy with the color, which is close enough to the various versions of oil-rubbed bronze that dot the place.

Including the doorbell -- which our audio-video consultant, Paul, twisted and rang in earnest for the first time today.

He was delighted with it, which I found ironic: The guy advising us on the highest-tech parts of the house having fun with a manual bell.

I think it is the little things that count.

It's a start!

"Ah, my old friend mahogany," Deco said a few weeks ago, caressing a board, when we showed him and Dave a sample of the Santos we were ordering. This morning the two of them started getting reacquainted with their friend.

The upstairs, they said, would be trickiest -- the transitions from the guest room to the hall to the loft especially, with all the closets joining along the way -- so that's where they started.

They found a few issues they hadn't anticipated -- jamb heights, one short course of tongue-and-groove that will require a little padding just above the little guest room -- but nothing insurmountable.

"If you look at this hour by hour, you'll go crazy," Deco said late in the day, more to Robert than to me, I think. "Give it a day, and we'll knock your eyes out."

Just add water, eventually

Our plumber, DeWitt, is a great guy, but he certainly lives in his own time zone.

The bathroom faucets and shower controls went in last week. Then nothing for a few days. Now the kitchen faucets and garbage disposal.

The main line still isn't hooked up, and I'm still waiting for DeWitt's office to fax over his estimate on the "deduct meter," which will count our garden and pool water so the city doesn't charge us sewerage fees on it.

The next delay I can't blame on him: We're still trying to unscrew enough of the deck boards at the outdoor shower so DeWitt's guy can get under there and plumb it.

I've been through several screwdriver bits (finally broke down and bought a drill), and got zero traction from a tapping bit. Those deck screws are just too darned stubborn.

Finally

The shutters are up, and aside from a few problems with hooks and eyes and lying flat . . . there they are.

The folded ones are held together with hooks and eyes that the installer, Troy, screwed up when he screwed 'em in. So at this point they stick out from the plane of the house.

That turns out to be a good thing in the short term: They're painted in latex, which takes about a jillion times longer to dry here than it does in the real world because of our humidity; so if they laid flat on each other they'd stick and pull for the next 60 days or so.

That's when we'll install special clips to hold 'em flat to the house.

Barefoot boy with cheek

Pardon my silence, but we've been on the road. Back the same day in each case, but tired enough that I can claim fatigue (though I think it was actually a rare light dusting of writer's block).

Saturday Robert was determined to get our closet organizers nailed down (figuratively; they'll actually take screwing together), but the Home Depot here didn't have the pieces we needed.

The HD up the Overseas Highway in Marathon had just what we wanted, so we logged the 100-mile round trip, loaded up the 400 pounds or so and threw in dinner at Bobalu's, on the way home on Big Coppitt, as a deal sweetener.

Sunday we went all the way to the mainland, to the Four Seasons Miami, to visit our old friend Sidney, down from Chicago for the winter. We thought his wife, Deanna, was going to be there (and brought her roses from Publix in Key Largo), but she'd flown north for a bat mitzvah or two. Still, Sidney was incredibly well attended by his Filipino assistant, John.

Sidney, who's 88, met us poolside, stretched out like Meyer Lansky on a hot day in Havana. We caught up on old times, and then John pulled the cabana sides closed so Sidney could dress for lunch. We poured ourselves into his s spanking new Lexus (long version, quite spiffy) and motored off to the southest part of South Beach: La Piaggia, on its very tony bottom.

Turns out they don't mind if guests at their tables in the sand take their shoes off, and Sidney loves to wiggle his toeses while he eats. He also loves to ogle the flesh, which was as common at Piaggia as his hamburger was rare. Thanks to various marvels of plastic surgery, there were some very tony bottoms as well as some incredible vistas up high, too.

It was a great lunch. An apparently youngish woman came up to Sidney at one point, trailing clouds of expensive perfume, and gushed at him for a while. He feigned deafness. After she left, he said, "Brooke [his daughter and great protector] knows her from New York. Brooke said, 'Daaaaaddy, that one will be really expensive.' "

He'd rather spend it on the Lexus.

On our way home, the sunset blazed directly into my westbound eyes for the second day in a row. The backlight on Flagler's old rail bridge at Bahia Honda made up for it:

Southern(most) fried

Onelia's lunch counter fed several generations of conchs at Dennis Pharmacy, down on United Street, so there was great lamentation when the place closed (soon to be a fancy bank).

I always thought it was brilliant for the food -- hearty breakfasts and lunches -- to be so close to a wide, deep array of antacids. Delicious, yes, but the sort of stuff to make a nutrition nanny faint.

So mouths started watering all around when they announced the lunch counter would reopen just down Petronia from our house, in the Village, inside Henrietta's the Art of Baking.

Henrietta, you see, has baking down pat (especially coconut strips and coconut cake) but has had trouble with the Art of Breakfasting, Souping and Sandwiching, which Onelia can do blindfolded.

So we stopped in at the reborn Dennis for cholesterol's sake and I had to order a mollete (mo-yay-tay). Imagine: Slice a piece of Cuban bread lengthwise; fill with picadillo (spiced ground beef); close up and roll in egg and crumbs; deep-fry till crisp; serve with hot sauce.

Robert had trouble with the idea of fried bread, but I reminded him it's in the solid tradition of things like Cornish pasties that can be cooked, wrapped up in newspaper, pocketed and pulled out for joyous sustenance during a busy workday.

You could take it out on a boat while fishing -- but it was just as good to eat it with a group of Creole ladies at the next formica table, Cubans just beyond them, cops getting bag after bag of carryout and an old guy in a guayabera in the back of the dining room, patiently using a hammer and table-mounted vise to bust open an endless pile of coconuts for their sweet milk and meat. Todo sabroso.

Higgs Beach, 10 minutes to sunset

Two by two

Roy got most of the hardware attached to most of the shutters Friday, and we got almost all of the first-floor windows finished.

They look great.

The paint didn't dry as well as anyone expected -- it's the humidity, I think -- so there are some places that need a little TLC later. But no big deal. They still look great.

And yes, that little dark thing smack in the middle of the front door is the bell. You can hear it here.

Double the fun

The mirror guys showed up exactly as promised today -- acutally, a little early -- and got everything installed absolutely as they said they would. Bingo. Little rooms suddenly doubled by two.

Wild and free

The van was in our rental house's driveway when we walked up: KW CHICK said the license plate.

There was a woman with a rooster in her arms nearby, and I walked over to say hello.

Aren't you Katha Sheehan?, I asked. She was -- the woman who runs the Chicken Store, renowned patron of our gypsy chickens. The friend in her arms was Diablo, son of "Public Enemy No. 1" in the Key West rooster roster.

She was there to coax a hen out of a mahogany tree on our rental's lot line. People had complained.

I told her how much I appreciated her work. She agreed to a photo, shy as ever, and I thanked her and left her to do her best with the hen.

Here's why I appreciate her so, from her website:

To me, they aren't yardbirds or even picturesque Key West chickens. To me, they are Kiwi, Curly Toes, Pecky Hen, Fluffy, Ranger, Scotty, Tony and Red Rover.

I wish everyone could live, if only for a day, the life of a Key West chicken. To be born wild and free, to stop traffic on U.S. 1 on a whim, just because the grass may be greener on the other side, or because you see a handsome rooster there. To eat 4-inch scorpions for breakfast, while creatures 20 times your size cower or run from them. To fight and mate on impulse, in the passion of the moment, with no regard for the consequences.

We humans have become the prisoners of our own rules, but there still are a few creatures out there who remind us of the breathtaking freedom and unbridled joy we have given up in favor of the safeguards of civilization. Key West's gypsy chickens are the creatures that have reawakened my creative energies and taught my heart to sing.

I think when it sings it's the rooster's salute to the dawn.

Historically accurate, but temporary

The last few days have been cool and windy -- 60s overnight, 70s daytime, gusts up to 30 -- so Roy was happy to start priming our shutters today during relative calm.

They're going to be an intense blue, so he went to Sherwin Williams with an order for tinted primer that would work. They came up with this. And at that point, my Wayback Machine kicked in.

After World War II, the Navy started shutting down in Key West and elsewhere. It had to dump hundreds of gallons of battleship gray paint -- and impoverished Key Westers (the economy had tanked postwar) scarfed them up. Nature here is brutal, and everything needs painting a lot.

When you scrape houses down here, you find battleship gray. Ditto, when you scrape our shutters down a few decades from now, under the brilliant blue that will adorn them oh, so soon.

Gravity won

"We was expectin' a delivery," Dave said in his wonderful brogue, "bot we din' know it was gonna be an air drop."

Definitely not on plan.

The 42-foot semi delivering our flooring had to swing around on Olivia from Duval -- it wouldn't make it up our narrow street -- but that let us position it to block only one of the four ways out of the intersection during the delivery.

The first pallet of mahogany, all 2,000 pounds of it, came down the lift gate just fine. Dave, Ted and the driver wrestled it on its pallet jack up to the front of the house, where a Canadian tourist had courteously and intelligently parked blocking our gate. We parked the wood in front of the Canadian tourist.

The second pallet -- 3,800 pounds worth -- didn't want to budge. Dave tried to get the driver to split it up to offload. No dice. So they pried and prodded and finally got the thing moved to the lift gate. Then the lift gate broke in half, spilling the load into the intersection.

Some of the goods were damaged, but thank God no one was injured.

The hurt came later, as we carried each 70-pound bundle up the street and into the house. Neyda, our wood lady in Miami, was not amused that her people had packed it that way, and promised to ship replacements for any bad boards along with the stair materials coming later this week.

Watts up!

If you want to look like a new- comer here, you talk about Keys Energy Services.

"City Electric" is much more direct, and it harks back to the days when Bascom Grooms' grandfather ran the company almost a century ago.

So I was definitely energized when the big City Electric bucket truck pulled up today and the driver, Ray, went up to run current directly to our weather head, instead of down our temporary pole.

We had to get all sorts of notarized signatures to allow the hookup -- technically, it gives us a 30-day deadline to get a full certificate of occupancy. The race is on.

Such incredible hatred

I try not to get political here, but every so often something so odious crosses my personal radar that I can't help myself.

Of course it's Ann Coulter, whom Republicans and conservatives have made rich and famous, and her "faggot" reference to John Edwards. It's nothing particularly new for her; she's used that, or a variant, with both Clintons, Al Gore and heaven knows how many others who've caught the attention of her reptilian mind.

Some of us learned years ago to deal with that kind slur and its variants. But my heart goes out to a generation of kids still coming up who cringe in pain when they hear its hatred -- or those who hear it and feel empowered to inflict that pain. One sick, sad woman.

A lovely shade of green

The mahogany didn't make it out of Miami today -- they say it's coming tomorrow -- but the electrical inspector made it around. Hoo. RAY!

He left the loveliest sticker on our permanent meter box -- which I think means we can get rid of our temporary pole, which means we can pour the pad for our propane tank, which means we can hook the gas line up, which means we can hook up the cooktop, which means we can install the oven under it. . . .

Also today: Roy finished varnishing the front door, we picked up the last (almost) of the door hardware, we ordered vanity mirrors and Southernmost Kitchen and Bath delivered our three toilets.

A royal flush of a day.

Too pooped to post

Saturday was tiring -- but incredibly productive.

We'd already swept and vacuumed the house earlier in the week, but Kenny the HVAC guy thought we ought to do it again before he fired up the system. So Robert swept and vacuumed, and I mopped the whole floor.

We probably got 20 pounds of dust out, most of it in beautifully tinted water like this.

By the end of the day, only the 4-ton unit was running. The 2½-ton just wouldn't get going.

Kenny said he'd be there to get it going Monday -- but as usual, I wonder which particular Monday that might be.

A few things I do know will be there Monday: us, Dave and the boyos and about 5,000 pounds of mahogany.

So proudly he waves

We were about to check out at Home Depot, with a length of chain for the chandelier, when a little old Conch, who came up to about the middle of my T-shirt, walked toward me with his finger pointed at my chest.

"I designed that flag," he said, breaking into a twinkly smile.

I was thrilled finally to meet Claude Valdez, who designed the flag of the City of Key West in 1967. It was revised to reflect the creation of the Conch Republic during our Secession of 1982.

Valdez is a delightful guy, and didn't seem to mind a bit that the bright blue of my shirt had aged to blue-gray.

Indeed, he said, "Are you guys parked in the parking lot?" I assured him we were. "Meet me there."

We followed him to his white Caddy. He opened the trunk, pulled out a CR license plate and presented it to us with a happy handshake.

Credit where it's due

Arnold put the new plaque up today.

When I pulled it out of the package over the weekend, it took him a few moments, thinking about how it ought to be mounted, before he took a good look at it and recognized himself on the last line.

"When I did that church in Albany [Georgia, the civil rights museum there], they put a brick in front with my name. That was going to be my last big job.

"Then I got here. And here's my name on my really last project. . . ."

One that anyone coming through our front door will see as long as the house stands.

Artist in the kitchen

Hank, the genius who masquer- ades as a tile setter, finished our kitchen backsplash today. He grouts it all tomorrow.

A few minutes before I got to the house, I'd stopped by the post office to get the official notice of my hearing to appeal the historic commission's order to tear our our front windows. I was not in a good mood. But then I looked at Hank's work. I couldn't help getting tears in my eyes.

Around the corner later, at Bobby's bar, I ran into Vie and Mike from Flamingo's Cafe, and had to show them in the camera viewfinder the place I''d finally cook for them after all these months. They loved it.

No matter what happens to other parts of the house, there are things about it that will be beautiful forever.