Christmoss eve

Daily advent

We're in central Florida -- the land of lakes that swelter in summer and, in winter. . . .

Well, the foggy dawns are in the high 30s, and I've got real shoes on instead of flipflops for the first time in a few years.

But there's great warmth, too: precious days with Sharon, Hoyle, Ro-Ro and John Hoyle -- "quality time," as little Robert put it.

It's the best gift of Christmas.

Fair warning

When the Weather Service tells me a cold front's on the way, I get ready for anti-chill food.

In this case, it was a pot roast -- a beautifully marbled chunk from Fausto's -- that I browned thoroughly, covered in garlic cloves, further blanketed with onions, celery, carrots, little red potatoes, drizzled in red wine and stock, buttoned up tightly and slow-roasted at maybe 225 for several long, savory-smelling hours.

Then very carefully spoon and lift it all out in reverse order into another dish, so you can strain and reduce the liquid and let it all sleep overnight in the fridge (isn't this why they give you long-range weather forecasts?), which makes the liquid a snap to skim before pouring back over everything and slowly reheating.

Sure enough, the cold arrived: It dipped into the 60s this morning. Brrr.

Spuh-LASH!

It started raining Thursday night, and by the time Friday morning rolled around the storm bands were rolling in, big time, from down Cuba way: howling winds, tornado warnings, walls of rain, flood advisories, darkness at noon.

The gusts got up to 50, which is well into tropical storm land, and by the time it tapered off Friday night we had more total rain on the official meter -- almost 3½ inches -- than even Wilma brought us. (She was just over 2, but it was the storm surge that did real damage.)

When one of these blows in, you hunker down, which is of course why Emilio came by in the middle of it all to pick up the dog. Truth be told, I would have gladly rented him a boat and crew.

Furballs

It's nasty when a cat cacks up a furball, but at least it's pretty easy to clean the damn thing up. Ohhh, how different with Sailor, the Australian shepherd we've been dog-sitting for two weeks and counting. He leaves them in slow-motion.

You'd think that with four or five walks daily to rub up against every urine-smelling bush along the track, and with the brushings we give him, there might be some relief. It's utter futility. Every square inch of floor in the house has either silky wisps or clumps like this mess on the deck.

I started trying to cope with twice-daily sweeping, then added a damp Swiffer (which also helped with the little issue drool marks on the hardwood). And slowly, dejected, cut back to one damp sweep a day. And now, admitting defeat, I'm just letting the disgusting debris pile up in drifts, waiting for Gregory to work his Murphy's Oil Soap magic on Friday.

And even Robert has vowed: No big dog, ever. No shedder, ever. Those are vows it will take him about 10 minutes and one wagging tail to forget utterly.

Silly season

I used to think it was odd, putting up Christmas decorations without snow on the ground.

Now I look at the weather reports and wonder how I ever survived the cold.

And I'm almost accustomed to Santa-capped flamingos and garlands of orchids as icons of the holiday.

Salut!

Once you've put all the carb in carbonara, the taste is marvelous, but so are the asso- ciations:

Grating the cheese for dinner, I hauled out the grater Ben had given me for the Kitchen-Aid, and started counting the days till he and Ken get here after Christmas.

And then I raised a glass in a toast: To absent friends.

Deck the Hulls

We went to the lighted boat parade Saturday night -- to the convivial bunch at Mallory Square, not the raucous crowd around the judging stand at the Wharf.
Dinghies to schooners, cutters to whaleboats, big cats to fastboats, it was a laid-back, slow-motion blast.

¡Suéñalo!

The band's name translates roughly as "We'll ring it!, and we went to hear the commotion Friday night at the release party for their fourth CD at the Green Parrot. They rang all right, and the place rang back.

Combine salsa, cumbia, reggae, funk, Afro-Cuban jazz and a whole lotta soul and you get a little idea of what they can do. Better idea: Get to their homepage and click on the "play" button. What you won't get are the goosebumps I got hearing their trombonist play a conch shell above their wall of sound just like a bugler plays a bugle -- chromatics even without valves. Amazing.

Even sweeter: Ginger King, the legendary Fantasy Fest queen and fundraiser extraordinaire, found us in the throng and came over to squirm to the beat shoulder to shoulder with us for a couple hours. It was the best we could do: The place was too packed to really dance, and even the sidewalks on Southard and Whitehead were overflowing.

The other cheek?

"[T]he job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That's our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment."

--Bayard Rustin; From Montgomery to Stonewall (1986)

A note on the picture: The photo, by Daniel Carvalho of the Yale Daily News staff, shows student reaction to a visit by an evangelical preacher last week.

Another country

We saw on the news the other day that something involving snow, high winds and freezing temperatures was gripping the United States.

Thank heaven we're not part of that, though I have had to resort to hoodies on nights that dipped into the low 70s.

This orchid tree on Elizabeth sure wouldn't have put up with it.

It's a wrap

Sometimes I forget that our little island is a looong way from the rest of the world.

That idea struck again the other day when we were looking for ribbon to candy-cane the porch columns. Not at the craft store, not at Home Depot or Walgreen's or CVS -- not until the lady at the fabric store directed us to a company that makes gift baskets.

What they had was four inches wide -- the size of the ribbon on the gate -- so we had to hand-split it for the two-inch strips in the fence and on the columns.

But I will say, the half-dozen picture-takers a day lead me to think it paid off.

Bad timing

So here we are, in the days between holidays, tourism doldrums. The street at twilight is empty for an hour or more -- no pedestrians, no dog-walkers, no bikes, no scooters, no motorcycles, no cars, no trucks. No one.

The light fades, I put my book down, and the streetlights come on. No one.

A man walks unsteadily around the corner. He squeezes between the two cars nearest the corner, into the walkway. Odd, I think: There's no one saying in that unit. Then it's clear: he wedges himself into the space between car and garden, fiddles with his trousers and is obviously peeing.

Not five seconds into it, cue the crowd: A car comes south, headlights on full. The man keeps going, head turning. Then one car north. Then four people going down to the bars. The streetlight is bright. Then a dog-walker. Then another, and then a scooter. Then another knot of tourists on foot, then another.

One more car passes. The man shakes his head a few times, steadies himself against the car hood, zips up, shakes his head again and walks unsteadily back around the corner.

Not his day to play the lottery.

Happy

I was walking the (borrowed) dog on a typically long pattern late Monday afternoon -- Olivia to Elizabeth, down to Truman, back west -- when I saw a couple coming toward me on the narrow sidewalk near the Deli.

"Aren't you . . . ?", the man said, looking up from the dog's riveting eyes. "John!," the woman said.

I've got your skillet, I said.

And there they were, Arthur and Consuelo, who we met two seasons ago, and who'd trusted the well-seasoned cast-iron pan to me rather than pack it for their trek back north.

Connie had looked for us at the Christmas parade -- they were at Martin's next door, and we were one table away, at 915 -- but we made up for lost time at drinks Tuesday (Mount Gay and tonic -- how could one forget?), and then Arthur took his well-seasoned skillet away to their rental for a while, in the basket on his bike. They're bringing a daughter and son-in-law over for us to meet Saturday.

It's a gift to have them back.

What a rush (street)

Looking back on it, it seems clear that one of the brothers was coming on to me.

But I was in my 20s, better tuned to calls on the police radio than to vibes from restaurateurs. And when I walked into the Corona Cafe, on lower Rush Street just out the newspaper truck bays, I was looking for late-night food.

Mostly it was at the backroom counter. When I felt flush, it was in the front room. And Harry Moroni (or was it Aldo?) came up one night and talked me out of my usual bistecca Romana, with a glass of red, and persuaded me to order ravioli al forno.

I made it the other night -- heavy on garlic, of course: cook the ravioli, drain, slip into a porcelain dish with an oil-butter-garlic sauce, dust with cheese and broil. And when I lifted a forkful to my mouth, I jumped back 35 years.

Angels on Duval

This afternoon we went to the Marquesas Room at the Hyatt on Front Street -- felt about 10 feet from Wisteria Island, with every bit of the wind coming right at you, no matter which direction you faced -- for the 90th birthday party for Betty, who plays bridge with Robert.

Turns out that her son's partner knew Ro two years before I did in Chicago, but the better part was talking with the people in the Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday rotation who I only got to meet last year at the Christmas party we threw.

But then, fortified by the party's rum punch, we rolled on to 915 for streetside seats at the city's great Christmas parade. I think I've told you in previous years how proud I was to have the city take the parade back from the ministerial association when evangelicals blocked gay floats -- which is why I took a blurry picture of the MCC float, all angels.

Goes vroom

The economy continues to go putt-putt-putt, but we have a little spurt of fuel here.

Some say it's other Floridians, coming here because it's close if not cheap. But in any event, the bed fillings were up in the last few months and Fantasy Fest is supposed to have been good at least on the dollar end.

For me, there's no better barometer than the number of rental scooters and bikes at the inns and cottages along the block. They tell me that the people flew in, used a cab, felt flush enough to rent a house, are going to restaurants and the grocery, and have enough left over to cover relatively costly temporary transport.

I'll take a hundred of these, staying for a long weekend, over a thousand cruise-ship passengers thumbing the goods in the T-shirt shops for a five-hour port call.

Nothing to sniff at

Pepperidge Farm has come out with a new cracker -- one that Robert, not me, got at the market -- that has, to my mind, an odd form. Is it just me, or is there something a little strange about a snack food shaped like a bicycle seat?

Wooh. Let's put some cheese on that!

Hey, Sailor!

Emilio plays bridge with Robert (and was one of my phone-bank Obamarobos last year), and he and Hugh were going on a cruise while their regular dog-sitter was out of town. . . .

So here we are. His name is Sailor, an Australian shepherd with one ice-blue eye and one nut-brown, and he's the perfect gentleman. Except for a drinking problem: out of the toilet. And like some others I know, he also drools on the floor.

Despite vigorous daily brushings, he sheds. By the time Emilio and Hugh get back in a week or so, I'll either have enough raw material for a sweater or a very good start on another dog.
- - - -
Aside: BAPTIST CHILD TO MOTHER:
Is it true that 'Out of dust we come, and to dust we return'?
Yes, son.
Well, then someone's either coming or going under my bed.

Smash hit

Cuban bread looks a lot like French bread -- a long baguette about 3 inches thick -- but the crust, though crisp, is thin, and the interior is soft. Lots of flour, a bit of yeast and sugar and water, and you get an interior that reminds you most of WonderBread, but with big air holes.

But:

-- Stout enough that a stale loaf is the official weapon of the Conch Republic (wielded like a sword);

-- Supple enough that it can be cut into lengths filled with spiced meat, breaded and fried for the Caribbean version of a pastie;

-- Sweet enough that it can be buttered and pressed, maybe with a sprinkle of cheese, into Cuban toast for breakfast;

-- And filled with multiple variations on a theme of pig -- accented with onion, mustard, pickles and maybe cheese -- to form the iconic Cuban sandwich.

There are lunch counters here that have made their bones on Cubans -- Sandy's and Kim's foremost among them -- but when I had some leftover roast pork, and brought home a fresh loaf (it has to be fresh) from Publix, and put it all together to squeeze in my sandwich press for the perfect smash-and-crisp, even Robert admitted that this inch-thin homemade was about as good as it gets.