It's the hour when Orion is plunging headfirst into the Gulf, chased by a solstice moon, and I'm packing to chase him west, too.
We're going to the Yucatan for Christmas, slow-sailing from Tampa Monday night, so Robert's nephews can clamber around Chichén Itzá, and I can once again climb a ruin instead of just feeling like one.
We'll be back in about a week. Hasta luego.
Until last week or so, he patroled one block south, but now he's strutting up and down our street, too, doing his call-and- response with the other early birds you can hear from 5 a.m. or so.
His "Ai-a-raii-oh" is a far cry from cockadoodle-doo (where did people come up with that, anyway?), and quite distinct, once you become a rooster connoisseur, from the calls coming from Duval House down the block, or from over on Olivia.
It's a pity Katha Sheehan's Chicken Store has flown the coop, replaced by a condo, of all things. She had a ton of things themed to our fowl climate, including the phenomenally popular "I like cocks" and "I like chicks" bumper stickers.
She did not, however, carry the sticker I've seen around town and now want for myself: "I love Key West's chickens . . . with black beans and rice."
Janie -- the former Janie Loomis, whom Robert took to the prom in the Dark Ages -- came over for dinner the other night, along with Paul the audio guy and his partner Steve, who's the head of gay tourism here, and Robert thought we should have a seasonal centerpiece.
So instead of flowers, we went over to MARC, where they'd just sold the last of their 1,800 trees, and pulled a few huge remnants from the trash pile. Then on to Albertson's for fresh fruit and nuts. Then Ben Franklin for some little skewers. Then home to the drill, to get a few dozen nuts ready for sticking.
And a few hours later, voila. Martha Stewart, eat your heart out.
Yes, that's St. Peter's behind him, and a sign from the city that reminds people to pick up their dogs' waste.
I'd noticed him before, of course: the guy who brings his pit bulls down our street and checks around to see who's watching. If I'm behind some foliage, the dogs poop at will. If he spots me, he makes a big show of stalking over to a waste can, rummaging for paper or a plastic bag, picking up some of the mess and dropping it loose into a can.
This time Linda, who runs the guest house just up the street, had spotted him and asked him to do two things: bag the waste and drop it in his own can. And I could hear his top-of-the-lungs profanities three houses away, so I grabbed my camera and went to her aid.
By the time I got there, so had the priest and sexton from St. Peter's, all asking him in normal tones to pipe down. So he got louder, dared us to take a swing at him and called the police, saying we were threatening him and restraining him unlawfully.
Our white-haired vicar meekly pointed out that he beat us in height by several inches, had a distinct advantage in age and had two hefty and surly dogs to boot, which inspired a bit more invective in the minutes until the two cruisers pulled up. The lead cop, a woman, spoke briefly with us and asked us to leave, which of course we did.
Not five minutes later, he and the pit bulls retreated down the street, apologized to me briefly over his shoulder in quite a lovely tone, said the cops had told him to bag and tie his waste and carry it home, and that I wouldn't see him again. And I haven't.
We went to MARC -- the daycare and learning facility for the developmentally disabled, with the best plants in town -- for a wreath for our door a few weeks back.
It was a lovely little thing, in fraser fir that smells quite wonderfully out of place in the tropics.
But then there was Wednesday. La Te Da was having a wreath auction benefiting AIDS Help, and one thing led to another.
Actually two others, after a few cuba libres. We picked up JT Thompson's lovely eucalyptus wreath, which is now scenting the entire house from its spot above the flitch beam, and this from J-Ho, with his signature starfish, plus sea urchins, balls and deely-bobbers we had to wrestle into place to get the damned front door to close.
Linda, who owns the guest house just up the block, has been enter- taining her best friend for the last week.
Vicky had been scheduled to fly home to Missouri on Monday -- but then the ice came, and she couldn't get a guaranteed flight until Thursday morning.
We had her over for drinks Tuesday night, and learned more about university politics than we might care to remember. But one thing was hard to think about:
With the Glass Reunions wind chime tinkling in the high-70s breezes, ice seemed so far away.
We went to Alice's to celebrate our 30th -- we'd gone there for our 29th, too -- and though Alice had the night off, the kitchen was in top form, and of course Tony provided his usual wry but perfect service.
So we feasted on two kinds of duck (Shu-Mai, and glazed with cranberry), coconut shrimp and the velvet robe of perfect night air.
We were about to go when the guys at the next table, who'd been together 38 years, sent over perfect little glasses of bubbly moscato to toast our little celebration.
Perfect.
Robert talked me into taking a dozen images into the art shop and seeing if they'd translate well into large- format prints, so I've spent the last few days looking at pictures and culling some we both like.
This one I took this morning, looking down into a licuala palm next to our front steps. The big, ribbed leaves are quite remarkable: The texture is like thick, green parchment.
It's a little abstract for him, but I like it.
Our tastes on things like that differ a lot, but it seems to work anyway: We met 30 years ago today.
That little stump you see behind the garbage can used to be a schefflera, and the schefflera used to fill that gap in the green wall -- and camouflage the can pretty well.
But Arthur, our next-door neighbor, hacked the plant up a few days ago. He and Franka probably want a little more light through that jalousie, with the thready days of winter coming on. It's their plant, after all.
When Jon did our plantings, he asked whether we wanted to cut out the random stuff hanging over this edge of our lot. Absolutely not, we said, and I still tend those plants as well as I can, taking yellowed leaves off but still leaving as much of the wild look as possible.
Scheffleras being what they are, I expect to see a dozen tiny umbrellas springing from the stump in a month or so, and a full growback in about a year. I'll keep you updated.
The old harbor, stretched out from the Pier House, had a glow I could feel Thursday night.
We'd gone there to give me a one-night-early birthday present: Carmen Rodriguez singing in the Wine Room, whose huge doors open onto the patio where I got this shot.
She was in fine form, and so was Donna the bartender, radiant in anticipation of a move to St. Thomas.
The night was balmy -- as was my birthday itself. To my mind, weather doesn't get better than southerly breezes in the 80s, and I couldn't stop smiling at the palms swaying and flags snapping around town.
We ended with a glow, too: Vie and Mike from the Flamingo came over for drinks, and closed a perfect day.
I've been watching the financial- market mess with dismay, of course -- and not a little anger.
It's tough seeing your portfolio melting like ice on Higgs Beach, and maddening to know that the markets are just now tumbling to lending practices that are both stupid and greedy.
I reserve a special place in fiscal hades for the ratings agencies -- Moody's, Standard & Poor's and the like -- that looked at crazy "packages" of loans and blessed them with AAA ratings, which in some cases have soured to no rating at all in weeks. These people get paid for that kind of judgment?
And then there are the direct perps -- agencies like Freddie Mac that were foolish enough to embrace a category of borrowers known as NINAs and brazen enough to value their debts Grade A. NINA, after all, stands for "no income, no assets." These are creditworthy?
And as the credit market sneezes, Wall Street catches not a cold but pneumonia.
So the other day, when the market laid yet another egg, I had only one response:
Make a frittata.
Old Sol is almost at his weakest, and yet. . . .
There are a few golden moments every day when the chandelier lights up and sprinkles a thousand prismatic glimmers around the dining room -- even painting spots in the den.
Click on the picture and you'll see the tiny rainbows.
Sometimes I feel as if my eyes are imitating old Dom Pérignon's tongue: "I am tasting stars!"
The yellow elder at the corner of our front fence has been particularly glorious this year -- I think it liked the trimming Jon gave it when he put in the rest of the garden.
But those hundreds of globes of bright-yellow flowers have their downside: down under, there's a mess of dead and dying flowerets that coat the lower plants and of course our parked sedan.
It's one of those price-of-paradise things, trading one good thing for one not so good.
This morning, for example, we had the second day of blooms from a slew of hibiscuses -- they usually last only a day -- because it had been so cold overnight, down into the upper 60s. We broke out the fleece slippers for our coffee on the porch. Not to worry about cold toes too long, though: It flirted with 80 this afternoon.
Here's Esmond giving Addison a taste of mango sorbet at a lunch we had on the beach after parasailing, one of Addie's quieter moments at a res- taurant. By the end of the visit we were eating mostly at home.
For clear sailing, for health, for family, and for
Malinda, Esmond, E.A., Michelle, Fletcher, Crawford, Natalie, Ari, Aiden and Addison arrive Wednesday and stay until Sunday.
All but three of them are sleeping here (we've rented the guest cottage across the street for the unmarried adult kids). The two little boys are on an inflatable queen-size bed in the loft, where my "office" used to be but now reminds me of the Hindenburg hangar.
Robert's sister and her brood can be quite a handful, and Robert (and I) have spent hundreds of hours over the last 10 or 12 weeks planning their every step and nibble. Executing the plan is likely to leave me not a huge amount of time to check in here, for which I apologize in advance.
Happy Thanksgiving.
We made our way up to the Waterfront Playhouse the other night, where my socks would have been knocked off if I hadn't been wearing flip-flops.
It was the season opener -- a benefit to show off the new lobby and the new landscaping (done by Jon, our plant guy) -- and between goosebumps I kept reminding Robert how amazing it was to have so much talent on an island of 24,000 people.
About 30 singers did "A Lot of Night Music," a revue of Sondheim songs culled by Danny Weathers, the playhouse's artistic director. Carmen Rodriguez, who's glittering in the picture, did "Being Alive," from "Company," and was absolutely electric. I've never heard anyone, anywhere, sing better, which is saying a lot, and she sang the song as if she owned it. When I told her later how much I'd loved it (think the affect of Cyd Charisse, and the voice of Barbara Cook), she cried and I cried and we were both alive indeed.
But there were so many others with great passion and talent, too -- from Clinton Curtis ("Joanna") and Bruce Moore ("Something's Coming"), both home for a few days from Broadway, to Laurie Breakwell ("Some People") and Mary Falconer ("Broadway Baby") and Vicki Roush's "The Ladies Who Lunch." ["I don't call him Sondheim," Vicki said later. "I call him f-ing Sondheim." The song is hard, though of course a show-stopper.]
Randy Roberts, who appeared in full fig, brought down the house with a boffo belt-out of "I'm Still Here."
After the show, at the reception in the sculpture garden, Robert gasped when Mike McCabe, the strapping, bearded hunk who sang "Barcelona" with the tiny Nulita Loder, ran across the pavement to kiss his boyfriend hello.
"Oh, thank God," Robert said. "He's one of ours!"
Slowly but surely, the plumbagos on the street side are poking through the fence to bloom on the house side. Meanwhile, the hibiscuses inside are poking through to the street side.
Altogether they're making a little wall of colorful blossoms, soon I hope to be a continuous thing, which is the best kind of wall I can imagine.
There were a few artists at the Armory and elsewhere showing pictures much like this. I need to get a better printer, and a better-developed ego, and then learn matting and framing.
Our friend Ferron, the itinerant artist, pedaled up last week.
"I've been thinking about you," I told him. "There's a little something I'd like to commission from you."
"And I've been thinking about you," he said. "I'm going to be at Night on White tonight, in the Armory."
Night on White is a gallery walk up and down that street, on the east edge of Old Town, and the Armory, at the corner of Southard, is the home of the Studios of Key West, which provides work space for artists in a variety of media.
I told him about my "commission," and said we'd see him that night.
Well, he hadn't set up in the big downstairs space by the time we were there -- there's exhibition space downstairs, and studios up -- so we went on down to the Harrison Gallery, where we saw some great chickens by Cindy Kulp, then to the Red Ribbon show at the new appraiser's space, then on down toward Moe's . . . .
Nice night. And the next day Ferron pedaled up to tell us he was sorry to miss us, to have a couple glasses of tea and to deliver what I'd asked for: a thick, old shutter slat with one message for afternoons, and another, garnished with plumbago, for every other hour.
I walked up to Wal- green's to pick up some eye meds, with double sunglasses and a cap to keep the sun under control, and when I came back down our street the light was just right. . . .
It's a far cry from where we started. The bougainvillea is getting established, the plumbago along the street is blooming in riots, the other plantings are filling in, the new palms are vigorous and happy.
And so am I.
These have been a few rough days for eyes -- or rather eye, since the right has been signed and sealed as healed. It's been enough to keep me from reading, which discourages me from writing, and the camera has been mostly a paperweight.
Light is unpleasant. Still, the vision when I do look! And with those birds in the sky. . . quite truly hundreds of buzzards and hawks perning in gyres all day, to get all Yeats about it, and above them a frigatebird or two.
Must have been an adventure for them: The World Cup fastboat races have been in town, and with them a squadron of photo helicopters swooping over the harbors and near-shore waters, and then roaring low over the town, and around the giant wheeling masses of birds, to get back to the airport for refueling before roaring back to the action.
Turns out they're turkey buzzards on their way from Ohio to Central America, waiting here for the right breezes to blow them south (at 6 feet from tip to tip they're great gliders, but not terrific fliers).
As usual, The Citizen's Rob O'Neal came through with a spectacular shot -- but not as breathtaking as watching a hundred or more slow-swirling around an aerial drain.
So I lift up my eyes, and and then close them and think of Byzantium and Yeats:
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
It's not fair to have snapshots of Fantasy Fest and not post them, so here are the four of us decked out for the Masquerade March.
The year's theme was "Gnomes, Toads and White Rabbit Tea Parties," which Robert took seriously, going as a gnome with frogs all over his drawers. (If you're planning early for '08, the theme will be "Pirates, Pundits and Political Party Animals," given the election -- though this year's parade already had a rolling mensroom cubicle.)
Ben wore a many-colored coat. I used the big coq-feather mask for the first time, since I don't need glasses anymore (the bikini top and coin belt were leftovers from previous years; theme schmeme). And Ken found a gnome suit on markdown somewhere on the mainland.
Good time had by all.
This one, on the Clarks' side of the driveway, started doing its thing just before Ben and Ken got here -- and it's still lovely two weeks later.
I'm fascinated by the contrasting intensities and gentlenesses of color, and of course by the shapes. Art Deco can eat its heart out.
I'm also fascinated by the birds around here in general. For the first time in many years I can actually see them in good detail, from the hummingbird perching in the deadwood on our sapodilla to the little yellow-breasted warblers that seem to think of our palm trees as home and the squadrons of pigeons that make wide arrows against the dawn sky.
Such a blessing actually to see.
There was scuffling in the Clarks' palm trees next door. An arboreal rat? A cat?
Then a short sighing sound, and the hawk rose out of the fronds to take the killed dove to the top of the power pole across the street.
He plucked it, spitting feathers on a VW parked below, ate half and took the leftovers off for later.
For a while, during Fantasy Fest, the house looked like an explosion in a glitter factory.
Beads, bangles, funky threads everywhere -- plus the odd leopard lampshade hat or rice-paddy topper.
I'll fill in some blanks in the coming days.
I've been spending a lot of inward time, probably too much, so I'll point you toward this hibiscus along our front gate -- intense color, perfect shape, a vessel for images of passion and joy. And I'll reflect on the fact that it blooms for one day, one short day, before withering. So. In the last week:
