Hasta luego

When Castro gets a cold, we sneeze, so there was a great a-choo around town when he turned over power to Raúl.

In the end it meant nothing immediate, of course. But I still know that someday we will be the gateway to Cuba by boat. (We were that reverse gateway Saturday morning, when 24 Cubans came ashore at Smathers Beach on a handmade craft powered by an old Mercedes diesel, the indigenous lust for freedom being what it is. Since they met the "dry foot" test, having actually made it to shore, they're now our fellow Americans. Bienvenidos.)

This burnt-out wall on Petronia, and the fancy deck behind it, always remind me of the potential that lies ahead.

Give me the glow

Pardon my hiatus, but Robert got back over the week- end, and things got busy fast. My time's not quite my own when he's here.

He loves being out and about, so there was Sunday brunch with a Tennessee mash-up: his old prom date and her husband, and their childhood friend Lulie (baptized Lula Bell, I swear) and her husband, now from big-D Dallas, and her parents.

And then the Oscar party at Steve and Paul's house, where I actually got to see at least five minutes of the Oscars, but then sat through an hour of home movies of painfully bad lip-synch drag.

And then cocktails before dinner here the next night for the same bunch, except the guests didn't go to dinner and I kept feeling as if I had to keep bringing out food.

And then the share-dish at Dwight's, because his mother and stepfather and uncle are leaving tomorrow and wanted to see us again, and the dozen and a half other people who showed up.

These are all nice folks, mind you, even the woman who was all too happy to display nether piercings that remind me why some things used to be called private parts, and the ones who ask again and again how various parts of my own anatomy are sized. All things being equal I'd rather be at home on the deck.

This is how it looks with the garden lights we finally got installed. Soft-glowing, quite private, serene. I just want to lock the door.

Breezin'

When the winds pick up -- and they've picked way up lately -- the Balinese flags we found in Islamorada have a snapping good time.

But all of them, including the red one around the corner to the left, are starting to show signs of stress. The bamboo poles are wearing through the fabric, which isn't visible from the street, or much from the deck, but obvious from the upstairs shower.

We'll probably have to wrestle them down and see if smoothing the tip with something like duct tape can prevent further damage.

When we first fell in love with flags like this, in Bali, we brought the flags home but had to fashion poles out of PVC for our deck in Wisconsin.

And speaking of deck: Notice the silver buttonwoods growing 4 or 5 feet over the fence? When they went in last summer, they were a foot below the top.

It's a riot out there

Every morning I primp -- not myself, heaven knows, but the face the house gives to the street.

Pluck yesterday's hibiscus, now shriveled (this morning there were 15). Pull fallen sapodilla leaves out of the plumbago. Trim seed pods from the yellow elder. Gather aralia leaves and stems that have dropped into the ferns. Check the dwarf plumeria for rust. Snip errant stems from the night jasmine. Saw off dying palm fronds or emerging seed pods. Cull browning foliage from the oleander and the Clarks' weird and wonderful tropicals behind them. Nip here, tuck there. . . .

Keeping up appearances takes all of about 15 minutes, during which my coffee has had a chance to cool to less than scalding and the detritus has gone into a paper bag on the corner of the porch, to be composted, and after which the sun is welcome to emerge in earnest to light up the stage set.

At least once a day I see people stop and take a picture. (My little zen office is on the floor of the loft, looking out the high window, so I see them and they don't see me.) If I'm on the porch, they usually say a nice word about the house, or ask the name of those blue things (they're the plumbagos) or just give a thumbs-up and a wave and grin and go on their way.

I think the plants must be soaking up the love.

There goes the neighborhood

So now the city, in the guise of the Bight Board, which owns the property around the old seaport, is saying that Schooner Wharf may have to be demolished and built to FEMA standards.

This has nothing to do, cough, cough, with the erection of luxury condos, cookie-cuttered and Disneyfied and uglified as the new "Harbor Walk" across the street. Not that those folks might not want to look out at ordinary people having one hell of a good time.

Oh, no. The city, as the property owner, has to make sure it's all safe, and meets FEMA standards (as if anyone is going to seek shelter by boogying down to the water's edge to hear Caffeine Carl get his riffs off during a Cat 4?; as if FEMA and its great track record ought to move in formaldehyde trailers to make it all better?).

At least there is this. The Wharf rightfully advertises itself as "a last little piece of Old Key West." And the Bight Board, to its credit, recognizes that one factor it needs to preserve is "funkiness." (At its best, the Wharf makes Blue Heaven look like a sterile lab.)

How you adequately specify that in a request for proposals is beyond me. But what's not beyond me is that if the Wharf goes, that last little piece of Old Key West goes, too.

Thank you so much, Mayor McPherson.

Chartreuseter

There is only so much time that you can spend watching your Conch Republic flag billowing in the breeze, wrapping itself lazily around the pole and wondering if it will unwrap itself, and magically it does, until you realize it might be a good day for errands, with Robert in Sarasota for a big bridge tournament, and there's a nice clear sky after the overnight storm, and it's in the low 80s.

So there was the driver's license office (renew the registration on the Keysmobile and get the new stickers for the plate, now two years at a clip, and get a new license that doesn't require that I wear glasses, thanks to the cararact fixes); then to KMart for some tumblers (after the Cleveland Quartet all wanted glass and left me with plastic, which I hate, Robert finally agreed that four in the cabinet didn't cut it); then to Publix for some staples; then to the library to turn two books in and take two out (with the clerk saying rather pointedly as she scanned my Grishams in, "Looks as if we finally need a break from literature, don't we?"); and to Fausto's for a precious little piece of veal and a bottle of marsala (quarter of a cup for the veal, and a half or so for the cook), a cold-case packet of gratinéed potatoes from Switzerland that have to be tasted to be believed, and some rainwater madeira for a rainy day (good lord, is malmsey next?), I was heading home when. . . .

Yes, that green-feathered rooster.

I have grown accustomed to some serious plumage here, including the speckled fella who gave flurrious challenge to our glorious orange-and-auburn George (in the right corner) to cock-of-the-walk space on our street a few days ago.

But: green?

Yes. A vigorous yes.

And this to answer sweet bam, my Chicago anchor, who asked in a comment the other day whether Hemingway's cats still roamed here. Or was it his roosters?

To set the record somewhat straight: His descendants say he had no cats, though his tourist-attraction house two blocks from us (which our architect rehabbed, by the way) has a collection of polydactyls that they trumpet as original -- and has brought them grief from animal activists, who have got them in trouble with the feds by claiming that they operate as a zoo. Give me a break.

And in the rooster roster, Papa was apparently a big fan of cockfights (which continue here in clandestine fashion to this day, according to my barber, Armando, whom I'm overdue in seeing). And our gypsy chickens, proliferating by leaps and bounds, blossom in colors I've not dreamed of, though obviously the Parisiennes did when they specified "coq" for its iridescent sheen.

A good day, though that's true of any day with a flapping flag and veal marsala with some Swiss potatoes.

They're in season

Tourist time is peaking, and parking is tightening, but not thanks to these guys, here from Canada for the big regatta (along with Denmark's crown prince and a few thousand others from a dozen other countries).

The Vancouver boys, who stayed across the street, did all their business by bike and moped, so the only other vehicle they left on the street was a very heavy-duty pickup they'd used to pull their sailboat almost 3,600 miles.

In season here, you get used to the "Hey! I've got a horn!" beeps, echoed by others who have recently discovered their own buttons. Charming at first, they begin to grate after the 20th or 50th or 100th in a day. And of course they're a huge hazard: heedless of danger (this is paradise, after all; what could happen?), clueless about safe operation of an unfamiliar vehicle in strange territory, and often tipsy -- but in those factors they are identical to other tourists in cars or on foot. Here, you drive at their own risk.

But at least they're not roaring in on 90-decibel Harleys. Our friend Sullins contends, along with a letter-writer in the Citizen this week, that it might be nice if the cops actually enforced existing state laws limiting motorcycle noise to reasonable limits, instead of declaring all bets off.

Go for quality in tourists, he says, not quantity -- and he wants a team with noise-meters at the Cow Key Bridge to turn the offenders back. I say let's put it in Largo and head 'em off at the pass.

If the nihil fits . . .

It was Parmenides whispering in my ear as I looked over at the schefflera Arthur had whacked off back in early December.

Sure enough, the little green umbrellas were proving the species' resilience, and I was wrong to write the stump off.

Ex nihilo nihil fit, the old Eleatic said, "Nothing comes from nothing," and the stump was not nothing.

And as I wandered down the presocratic maze, my toes started tapping: It was the cosmogeny of William Everett Preston, bopping that same message with the joy of fresh green leaves.

A visit from Roy G. Biv

Robert spent a few hours cleaning the chandelier crystal by crystal, and now it's even harder to look at when the sun illuminates it through the high window.

Sir Isaac would have recognized those bands of light painting the room: spectra, hundreds of them.

Let a thousand rainbows bloom.

Boomerang arrow

Maryl, JY, Gary and Muggs were over for drinks Thursday before dinner at Louie's, and I don't remember which one of them associated Valentine's Day with its initials. . . .

Which spun me back those many years to my early days on the editorial page, where I'd been brought in to add a bit of sauce to the ink. And in my bad-boy way, I proposed a ValDay editorial based on VD awareness. Brilliant, they said, so I did my reporting on STD rates, VD hotline numbers, condom use (this was waay before safe-sex campaigns) and even tracked down the head of the board of health, Dr. Eric Oldberg, for a pithy quote.

The good doctor, a society gynecologist, had received his appointment because one of his more prominent patients was Sis Daley, the mayor's wife, and I had to track him down at his home in Lake Forest for the quote. But I got it, put it in the editorial and smiled smugly at my thoroughness and wit.

Which was shot full of arrows the next morning. Dr. Oldberg called, not to congratulate me but to point out that the number I'd printed for the VD hotline was his home number, and Mrs. Oldberg was taking phone calls that started with "I've got this discharge. . . ."

Another paver on the road to hell, but it does get a laugh at a cocktail party.

Lavendoor

Colors always seem so much clearer after a good rain, and when I finally got back on the porch I was reminded just how much the door on Conch Casa, the rental cottage across the street, tickled my Aunt Liz a few weeks back.

It's hard to tell in the sodium-vapor streetlight, but the cottage itself is about the color of Tennessee Williams' favorite drink: well-blended grasshopper.

Brace for foul weather

Despite appear- ances, this is NOT the Bush Recession about to make landfall.

It's yet another relatively rare winter thunderstorm, and a severe one, about to paste us at midday Wednesday.

They started Tuesday, just as two friends from Dalton came through on a cruise, drinks on the deck and brunch. So much for the deck. They continued Tuesday night, when four friends from Cleveland came by for dinner, and the deck awning creaked over our heads before pouring gallons in theatrical cascades all around the table, though not directly on us, thank heaven.

We need to work on our deck karma.

Not in a million years . . .

You can't garden around here without a tree saw -- at least if you want to keep your OCD demon happy -- and I pulled it out the other day to lop a few hundred stringbean-shaped seed pods off our yellow elder to force new blooms.

About two-thirds of the way through the job, I noticed the blade waving wildly: that nut you see at the base had fallen off, lost somewhere in the mulch.

I had visions of trekking out to Home Depot -- it's just across the island, 2 miles at best; but sometimes it seems like the other side of the earth -- wrangling a new saw out of the display, jockeying it across the store to the nut display to find the right size . . . . Because I could never, ever, find the nut under all our plants.

Dispirited at the prospect of all that exertion, I hung up the wobbly saw and got out the clippers to get some low fronds off the licualas flanking the front steps (apparently they're fairly rare and hard to grow -- except they seem to like me). And there, in the mulch below, the shiny little nut gleamed like a diamond on a trash pile.

It was a sign. I got the saw back out, twisted the nut home and took some frond bases and shark-sleek seed pods from the Christmas palms out front.

The gods smile on the OCD-afflicted.

The green wall

In late afternoon, when sun makes reading on the porch hard, I retreat to the wing chair in the den.

Yesterday, looking over my shoulder to the front door, I noticed the wall outside -- a lattice of green, with licualas at the bottom, hibiscus in the middle and the big birds of paradise fanning over all.

And yet again, for about the third time in the day and the millionth in a lifetime, I fell in love with this place.

On not writing

Maybe it's the same thing Samuel Beckett was talking about in 1937:

"It is indeed becoming more difficult, even senseless, for me to write in English. More and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart to get at the things (or the nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style, to me they seem to have become ass irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the impeturbability of the true gentleman: a mask. . . ."

Or maybe it's winter blahs; my version of Seasonal Affective Disorder persists, I think, even under relatively sunny skies. It's the day length as well as the brightness.

Or maybe it's just writer's block.

Which I will try, try, to step on and, lifted, look around a bit.