Time again to drag out that hoary old saying about children growing up fast, which is true only in the same sense that one’s entire life goes by fast, once you’ve reached the point of having lived most of it already.
Regardless, this week Ann turned 23, now a grown woman, fully employed, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t have birthday cake, however.
Years ago, when we visited the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, I noted with satisfaction that Monty Python’s Spam Sketch was playing on demand in one of the exhibit rooms. I understand the museum has moved to a different location in Austin since then, but I hope they still play the sketch.
As far as I noticed, there was no clip of One, Two, Three playing at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta last month. The scene I’d pick is the back-and-forth about Soviet scientists’ efforts to replicate Coca-Cola without its famously secret formula: “Even the Albanians wouldn’t drink it.”
I’d have this clip playing, too.
Or even the jingle scene from The Coca-Cola Kid. Nice jingle.
The World of Coca-Cola shares a plaza with the Georgia Aquarium. Pemberton Plaza, named for the doctor who invented a particularly successful “brain tonic,” back in the days when enterprising doctors and druggists did that sort of thing. Interestingly, the museum doesn’t play up Lt. Col. John Pemberton’s military service for the CSA, or his morphine addiction, which drove him to experiment with a new wonder drug, cocaine, to kick his habit. That didn’t work out, but he did leave a lasting soft drink legacy.
At 300,000 square feet, the museum is expansive, a 1990s design by architectural firm Jerde.
In December, decorations outside and in.
As a museum, the place includes a number of interactive exhibits and activities, starting at the Coca-Cola Theater with a six-minute commercial. I mean, a short history of Coke. You can also see the vault where the secret formula supposedly resides —
— check out various smells associated with the cola-making process, “explore Coca-Cola’s iconic influence on art, music, fashion, sports, and entertainment,” and “engage with interactive displays and AI magic that bring Coca-Cola’s legacy to life in new, unforgettable ways,” the museum explains. You can even, if you register – maybe with some app? – stand in line to have your picture taken with a person in a polar bear suit.
“The Coca-Cola Polar Bear… became truly iconic in 1993 with the launch of the ‘Always Coca-Cola’ campaign. In the famous ‘Northern Lights’ commercial, created by Ken Stewart, animated bears gather to watch the aurora borealis while enjoying Coca-Cola — a scene that brought the Polar Bear to life and captured the hearts of viewers worldwide,” the museum notes.
Does it rise to the level of icon? Somehow the Coca-Cola Polar Bear had made only a faint impression on either of us, so we took a pass on it. Also, there was a line. And it cost extra? Always with the revenue streams. But I did enjoy the more standard sort of museum exhibits on offer at World of Coca-Cola.
A seasonal observation.
Artifacts from long ago.
Ads from long ago.
And from distant places.
I seem to remember a similar political cartoon of featuring the Earth being nursed back to health after the ravages of WWII, but I can’t quite place it.
There were video clips, including of course the “Hilltop” commercial. That, I remember. Many people old enough do too, which naturally gave the final moment of Mad Men its punch.
The museum also featured Coke product cans and bottles of various kinds (but not a collection of caps that I saw), many more than you see in everyday grocery stores. For instance, Sting and Bon Jovi had their own cans at one point, as part of a musician series.
Cans from around the world.
A very crowded room includes soda and water dispensers that allow visitors to sample Coca-Cola products from around the world. We went to town trying the various concoctions, as did a lot of people, and eventually I found my favorite: Bonbon Anglais, a wonderful fruit drink from Madagascar.
The web site Madagasikara tells us: La boisson gazeuse Bonbon Anglais est fabriquée à Madagascar, un pays reconnu pour ses produits naturels et son savoir-faire artisanal. I would expect no less.
The gift shop was crowded, too. I took pics but bought no Coke merch. (I might have bought a postcard, but found none.)
To my way of thinking, the Coca-Cola Co. should pay me – even a little – to advertise its products on my person. Also, while I’m on that particular hobby horse, the World of Coca-Cola shouldn’t charge admission, especially not as much as a standard museum.
I ran the numbers, and World of Coca-Cola admission costs more than twice as much as admission to the Taj Mahal. Sure, Georgia isn’t Uttar Pradesh, but it’s galling that you’re paying at all, just to be marketed to. Obviously Middle America disagrees with me – and Yuriko didn’t mind paying for both of us – so that idea will just have to be a quixotic hobby horse of mine.
Yesterday, behemoth retailer Amazon announced that its Amazon Fresh grocery stores are closing. All of them, about 70 locations, and closing soon, as in Sunday. I read about that this morning, and happened to mention the fact to Yuriko early this afternoon, so we decided to mosey over to the closest Amazon Fresh, about a 10-minute drive from our home here in the northwest suburbs.
We’d been there. In the store’s early days especially, a few years ago, weekly fliers came in the mail offering coupons that could, if used right, mean 40 percent or even 50 percent discounts. That was worth some visits. After a few months, however, the coupons got progressively more miserly or disappeared all together.
That was no surprise. The coupons’ main function was to get you in the door, and acquainted with the store, and ideally form a good opinion that inspires return visits. A good marketing plan, even if it relies on something as analog as paper coupons, and it might have worked but for one thing: there was very little distinctive, to an ordinary shopper, about Amazon Fresh.
The store promised to be something of a discounter, and sometimes it was. Until recently, for example, it sold sizable and reasonably good pizzas for $9 a pie or less than $2 a slice – entirely competitive. Other items were sometimes discounted as well, but in that the store was no different from any other store in the area.
Even that might not been a discouragement, if the store had competed on selection. By current standards, the NW suburban Amazon Fresh is mid-sized, so isn’t going to be able to offer everything under the sun. But even smaller stores can pull off a remarkable selection, if they try. Such as Trader Joe’s. Or even Aldi, whose more recent iterations are about the same size as the Amazon experiment in grocery stores.
But no. The Amazon Fresh selection is good enough, and certainly would be a boon in a food desert, or even at the edge of one. But the NW suburbs are the opposite of a food desert: we have hyperstores, warehouse stores, standard supermarkets of considerable size, discount grocers, and plenty of ethnic specialty grocery stores of varying sizes, all within a fairly reasonable driving radius. There are even dollar and convenience stores thrown into the mix, and every variety of take-out food that you can imagine. These parts are a highly competitive retail grocery and food & beverage environment, is what I’m saying.
And what did Amazon Fresh bring to the table in such an environment? A lot of meh.
Then there was this business of “Dash Cart.” Amazon Fresh made a big deal about how technically advanced the stores were, because you could “Skip the checkout line. Scan, bag and pay – right from your cart.” Well, OK. Some of the carts had consoles for self-scanning.
Did Amazon actually want its customers to adopt Dash Cart, or was it just showing off? I ask because any hint of any instruction about how to use the thing was lacking. Call it an engineers fallacy: this tech is so cutting-edge, so impressive, so neat that people will be eager to learn it. People will not. Maybe had there been an employee whose job it was to school us old timers, we might have been interested, but of course that costs money, and just wait until customers don’t even have to deal with checkout clerks, how much that will cut labor costs!
Besides, you still have to do the work the store should be doing – scanning your items – for free. That is the essential irritation of any self-scanning scheme. Turns out self-scanning isn’t going to completely replace clerks anyway, for various reasons, and I’m glad.
How could Dash Cart and its ilk actually work? One: activate the cart with a debit or credit card. No messing around with some app, no inputting some code that comes to your phone, or any of that nonsense. Two: the cart itself automatically scans items as you put them in, and shows in a highly visible way how much you’re paying, so that the price jibes with the price on the shelf. Three: That’s it, you leave. You are charged a total – again, a highly visible total – as you leave, just as you would be otherwise.
Is all that technically possible? How should I know, but I’m leaning toward yes. Or it could be.
Never mind all that, we figured the store might be knocking off 10 or 20 percent in the face of its demise. The first indication that we were wrong was the store parking lot, which was as crowded with cars as I’d ever seen it. The second clue was the lack of shopping carts outside — at all, including in corrals in the parking lot or next to the entrance. No shopping carts inside the door, either.
Hand baskets were available, and Yuriko started with that, her initial goal being vegetables. I waited inside the door (since it was about 15 F outside) and after a few minutes, got a cart that was being returned. While I was waiting, a store employee announced at the front of the store that checking out, even self-check, would involve and hour or hour-and-a-half wait. It was a thing that makes you go hmmmm.
Shopping cart delivered to Yuriko, I set out to investigate. The first thing I found out: the place was crowded. An entire large cross-section of the population of the nearby Chicago suburbs was loose in the store, younger and older, families with little kids, single shoppers, people whose ancestors (sometimes pretty recently) had come from Central Europe, East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Latin America and more. Put them all in the store and it was Supermarket Sweep time. I’ve never seen a grocery store so crowded or so many carts piled so high.
That resulted in some empty shelves, especially in the meat aisle and paper goods.
Sorry to say, the kitchen had already been closed permanently, its ovens cold and its workers presumably left to take their talents elsewhere, if possible. I’d wanted a slice of pizza at less than $2 just one more time, but no go.
But I’d misrepresent things if I left it at that. Many of the aisle and shelves still held the bounty of American agriculture and the never-ending efforts of food technologists.
What brought the crowd? Deep discounts, of course. It didn’t take long to work that out. Later I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and determined that nominal prices were back to late 1990s levels. Thirty years of inflation, slow and then fast, poof. That’ll pack ’em in. We joined the fun.
But the woman wasn’t kidding about the wait. The checkout line went back along the right-side aisle to the back of the store, turned a corner and went along the back aisle (dairy and such), and then turned a corner again at the left-side aisle, and ended about halfway back to the front of the store. Later, the line grew to go all the way around the store, back to the checkout area.
Before that happened, I got in line with the cart and Yuriko went out scouting for items, and later sometimes I did. This was a strategy employed by a number of couples in line. A view from the line:
I also went out to the car and re-arranged the items in the back, in anticipation of a large influx. Which happened, eventually, once we filled our cart – to the top – and got through checkout.
Checkout, which indeed had taken more than an hour to reach, was an anticlimax. It was just like any checkout, except more stuff than usual. Still, this is worth noting: We spent a shade over $250 on items that listed a few days ago for around $500. Definitely a deal, whatever you think of the behemoth retailer or its failed experiment in Amazon-branded supermarkets.
Moon jellies are mesmerizing.
I’m always glad to spend some time peering into a tank where the moon jellies drift, but also somehow contract their entire selves to glide along in deep quiet.
We’d come to the Georgia Aquarium, which keeps company in downtown Atlanta with the World of Coca-Cola, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and a large parking deck on about 20 acres of a plaza known on maps as Pemberton Place. To its south is Baker St. and Centennial Olympic Park; to the north, Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. and a massive substation behind walls. For just an instant I thought that was Irwin Allen Jr. Blvd., and was disappointed to realize otherwise.
At 11 million gallons – which is apparently how major public aquariums are measured – the Georgia Aquarium is listed on Wiki as the sixth largest in the world and the largest in the United States, and I believe it. The structure is hub-and-spoke, with an enormous, vaulting hall with sizable exhibit spaces radiating from that hall: Tropical Diver, Ocean Voyager, Explorers Cove, Cold Water Quest, Southern Company River Scout, Dolphin Coast, Truist Pier 225 and Aquanaut Adventure.
Five days before Christmas, much of the human population of Atlanta was there, gawking at the sea and land creatures. We did our own gawking.
The invertebrate collection included much more than moon jellies. There were other kinds of jellyfish, too, looking like the sort of thing that if you see on the beach in Australia (or anywhere), you’d better not to touch.
They puff along.
Other invertebrates. Such as the inspiration for Patrick Star.
And of course, fish. Many, many fish.
Including the inspiration for Nemo.
Small creatures can be intriguing or even enchanting, but what really packs ’em in are the likes of whale sharks, the largest fish species know to science, and one of the aquarium’s signature attractions. There’s no shortage of other kinds of sharks as well, it always being Shark Week at the facility: tiger sharks, silvertip sharks, blacktip reef sharks, and great hammerhead sharks.
More from the sea: Manta rays, goliath groupers, green sea turtles, Japanese spider crabs and weedy sea dragons. Freshwater creatures include, but are hardly limited to, Asian small-clawed otters; black spot piranhas — just how many kinds of piranhas are there, anyway? — snapping turtles; banded archerfish; discus fish; and shovelnose sturgeon.
A few birds are on hand, such as spoonbills and ibises. Ones that subsist on fish, in other words.
In case we hadn’t had enough gators in Florida, the aquarium had a few Georgia gators, including a rare albino. I take it Georgia gators were the inspiration for Albert in Pogo.
We saw the dolphin show. My still camera wasn’t the best for capturing the action, and there was a lot of jumping and splashing, but squint and the second shot looks like an impressionist work featuring a line of mid-air dolphins.
A separate show features seals and sea lions, doing seal and sea lion things for fish rewards.
About half as many people crowded into the aquarium would have made for a better experience, but I can’t begrudge the Georgia Aquarium its massive popularity, since it delivers the aquatic goods. Better a crowd than too few people. They’re out seeing real things. Often better, I believe, to see some part of the physical world than an electronic simulacrum.
The coolest building in downtown Jacksonville: the Old Morocco Building (a.k.a. the Morocco Temple).
That’s my opinion, formed pretty much instantaneously on December 18, during our wander around downtown. We only spent a few hours in that part of Jacksonville, meaning my exposure was necessarily limited, but I’m sticking with my opinion. After all, what could be cooler than an Egyptian revival-Prairie School structure with sphinx-like guards out front? (And how about them toes?)
“The main facade features Egyptian-style terra-cotta columns with lotus-leaf capitals, tinted art-glass, sphinx-like sculptures, and a terra-cotta sun disk ornament with cobra heads,” notes Prairie School Traveler.
The Shriners – who else? – tapped architect Henry John Klutho to design the building, which was completed in 1911. Klutho had been based in NYC, but after the Great Fire of 1901 in Jacksonville, he came south to participate in the redevelopment of the city. If he did nothing else, the Morocco Temple would be enough. I understand the interior is similarly exotic, though modified after the Shriners moved out in the 1980s, but we didn’t venture in.
The aftermath of the fire. Redevelopment opportunities galore.
We’d come to Jacksonville, two days after leaving Key West, for two reasons. One, to visit old friends. Last year, I managed to visit old friends in Austin, San Antonio, Tokyo, rural Tennessee, coastal North Carolina, central Georgia, Denver, New York, suburban Boston, and finally Jacksonville. An essential ingredient for the year, these visits.
Also, I wanted to visit the generally ignored Jacksonville. A place one doesn’t hear about much. Miami has its Vice and Orlando its Mouse and Key West its Jimmy Buffett. But Jacksonville?
We were advised that parking would not be an issue in downtown Jacksonville, even on a weekday. It wasn’t. We set out to see what we could see.
It was almost spooky how empty downtown was. Even the downtown Detroit of recent years is more active.
Downtown Jacksonville included some large but closed churches, such as the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.
But at least Padre Pio is near the basilica to greet you.
If I’d known what to look for – because I had to look him up later – I’d have noticed the bandages covering both of his wrists. Among other things, St. Pio was known for his stigmata.
Down the street, also closed: First Presbyterian.
St. John’s Cathedral, Episcopal. At first I assumed it was closed.
This is the third church on the site. An 1840s structure burned down (and sank into the swamp?) in 1862, during one of the times the city changed hands between Union and Confederate. A grander church replaced it after the war but, oops, along came the aforementioned Great Fire of 1901. The current structure dates from 1906, the work of noted church architect Howard Nott Potter.
We found a way in, almost hidden around back. We were well rewarded.
Fine stained glass. St. John makes an appearance, as you’d think.
So does St. Longinus.
You might say he had a bit part in during the crucifixion, mentioned in one line exactly (John 19:34) and not even by name. But from such small acorns large bodies of belief grow.
A few days ago, I sent the following email to the curator and historian at the Key West Art & Historical Society, Dr. Cori Convertito:
Dr. Convertito,
I recently visited Key West for another pleasant visit, and came away with a question I haven’t been able to answer, though perhaps I haven’t looked in the right places.
Who is credited with the creation of the Conch Republic flag? I understand that it appeared at the same time as the infamous roadblock and the “secession,” but detail on its creation is lacking. Do you happen to know that?
One reason to ask is that it’s a handsome design, though I’m not sure about the star pattern asterisms — is one or another supposed to be the Southern Cross?
Today she answered:
That’s a perceptive question, and a difficult one to answer definitively. The Conch Republic flag emerged alongside the 1982 ‘secession,’ but attribution is complicated by the fact that several individuals have, over the years, laid claim to the original iteration of the artwork, and reliable contemporary documentation is limited. As a result, it’s hard to credit a single creator with certainty.
What is clearer is the intent behind the design elements. In addition to the conch shell and sun, the star groupings are generally understood to represent two navigational asterisms: the Southern Cross and the Northern Cross (Cygnus). Their inclusion appears deliberate, reinforcing Key West’s maritime identity and its symbolic position between hemispheres.
I hope that helps clarify what is known, and what remains unresolved.
So the short answer is, like with a number of historical questions – even ones as recent as this – no one is sure. Good to know. Thanks, Dr. Convertito.
The Overseas Highway, from mainland Florida to Key West, or vice versa, is epic all around: an epic construction project once upon a time, and an epic drive in our time. Through the Upper Keys, the likes of Key Largo and Islamorada, the ocean isn’t usually visible, obscured behind thick development: commercial and residential buildings and omnipresent marinas. But it isn’t long before you’re skipping from key to key, some larger, some smaller, with water widely visible on both sides of the road.
The most epic section of the crossing, as far as I’m concerned: Seven-Mile Bridge.
On an ordinary highway, seven miles isn’t much of a stretch at highway speeds. Listen to one song or another on the radio and you’re practically done with it. Those same minutes have a different quality over the wide water, glinting in the sun and spotted with boats and occasional small keys in the distance. There’s a sense of the mildly impossible. Of course it’s entirely possible, via a feat of 20th-century civil engineering, as is the 100-plus miles of the whole highway. I don’t believe my civil engineer grandfather ever drove the Overseas Highway, but I’ll bet he read about it with considerable satisfaction.
“The original 7 Mile Bridge, also known as the Knights Key-Pigeon Key-Moser Channel-Pacet Channel Bridge, was constructed in the early 1900s as part of Henry Flagler’s ambitious Overseas Railroad project,” notes the Key West Blog. “This railroad connected mainland Florida to Key West, revolutionizing transportation and trade in the region. However, after a devastating hurricane in 1935, the railroad was destroyed, and the bridge was converted into a highway.”
The history is a little more complicated than that, with the current bridge a 1980s work, leaving part of the original as a pedestrian and (especially) a fishing bridge. I’m no sport fisherman, but I understand tarpon, snook, snapper, grouper, bonefish and barracuda swim these waters.
At Big Pine Key, we stopped for a visit to the National Key Deer Refuge, a place focused on giving key deer a place to live, as it says in the name. For human visitors, there is a trail.
It goes partly around a pond in the refuge. No deer were to be seen.
We did spot a gator, however. Or maybe a croc. Hard to tell at this angle. They both live in southern Florida.
A sign on the trail warns visitors not about reptiles, but a nearby poisonwood tree.
Poisonwood? A native to the Keys. It sounds bad, and it is.
“Metopium Toxiferum [poisonwood] is related to poison oak, poison ivy, and poison sumac,” says the Tree Care Guide. “The tree produces the same irritant, urushiol, which causes an itchy, blistering rash. The oils from Metopium toxiferum cause dermatitis ranging in severity from a light red rash to intense skin blistering. Tea made from Metopium toxiferum leaves and twigs combined with bleach has been used to induce abortions but has also tended to kill the patient.”
Yikes. We took the advice of the sign and didn’t go near it.
Across the road from the refuge parking lot, some undeveloped key landscape. There couldn’t be that much of that, at least on the keys connected by the highway.
In Islamorada, which is spread across five small keys much closer to the mainland than either Key West or Big Pine Key, we stopped to pay our respects at the memorial to those who died in the 1935 hurricane.
Also in Islamorada, we drove past Betsy the Lobster, but sorry to say, didn’t stop for a closer look. What was I thinking?
In Key West last month, we noticed the Conch Republic flag displayed in more than a few places.
More about the not-very-serious Conch Republic micronation, created in 1982, is in this Miami Take article. Curiously, the article doesn’t describe how the flag came to be, just that it was simultaneous with the declaration of the CR, which was a kind of protest against a surprise U.S. Border Patrol roadblock on US 1 at the entrance to the Keys. Still, the design works, and it’s something distinctively Key West.
Saw the very distinctive Sicilian flag in Key West, too, just off Duval, over a joint that promised southern Italian food.
The design is not only distinctive, but ancient. This is a silver drachma from Sicily, ca. 300 BC.
I digress. During one of our Key West walkabouts, we made a point of finding the southern terminus of highway US 1, which is at the intersection of Fleming and Whitehead streets.
A business taking advantage of its unique location. Locational branding, they might say in marketing.
Now that I’ve now seen the southern terminus of US 1, that clearly means I have to see the northern terminus. That happens to be in Fort Kent, Maine, so perhaps a summertime visit. A real epic would be driving the entire 2,369 miles between Key West and Fort Kent on that highway. People drive all of the 2,448-mile Route 66, and it’s not even a real highway anymore. I’ve been gifted, or cursed, with the ability to think up more long trips that I can possibly do.
Half a block away from the beginning/end of US 1 is the Monroe County courthouse.
A nearby sign says: The original wooden courthouse was completed in 1823. The county occupied most of the Southern Florida Peninsula. The county seat in Key West currently covers the Florida Keys, and portions of the Everglades National Park. The present red brick courthouse, built in a traditional county courthouse style, was completed in 1890. It features a 100-foot tall clock tower and is an architectural feature that can be observed from almost any part of Key West.
A traditional county courthouse? In the Northeast, yes. Looks like someone used one of those building-moving transit beams in Rocky Horror to transport an entire New England courthouse down to the Keys.
The courthouse grounds comes with this oddity.
At least, odd to me.
A kapok tree, ceiba pentandra. Odd to more than just me. Enough people that the city put a sign describing kapok trees, next to this example of one. The sign’s a bit worse for wear.
Java cotton is one name for its fiber, which surely evokes distant islands.
More Key West signs.
Is this not a handsome building? And looks solid enough to stand in any mere wind.
Formerly the island’s Custom House, Post Office, Federal Courthouse and 7th District Lighthouse Offices. Built – the early 1890s – when architectural beauty wasn’t considered in conflict with the practice of republican government. These days, it’s the Key West Museum of Art & History.
Sure, the chicken has been crossing the road for a long time now, but how often did you actually see it?
Pretty often in Key West, is the answer.
I’m hard pressed to think of any other North American town with footloose chickens. As in, on the streets and sidewalks. Not out in rural areas, but even there you don’t seem to see that many. Then again, the Conch Republic is only tangentially a North American town. North Caribbean is another way to describe it.
“When people stopped the laborious process of turning live chickens into Sunday dinner many decades ago, some backyard chickens gained their freedom,” notes Florida Rambler. “Other roosters were released when cock-fighting became illegal.”
So, for this rooster, his great- great- however many great-granddaddy was a champion cock, known to betting men from here to Savannah?
They’ve gone on to a career of being local color, these birds, with forays in behaving like pests in people’s yards. They are feral, after all, living in the lushness that is Key West. Was the chicken ever considered for the Conch Republic flag? Probably not; chickens don’t get a lot of respect from people, unless they’re dinner.
Land meets sea in Key West. For encounters with sea creatures, one can hire a boat and some deep-sea fishing gear and make like Hemingway. We went to the Key West Aquarium instead. A sedate sort of place, a legacy of early 20th-century Key West, when tourists started coming in numbers.
I managed to make one of the employees, or volunteers, laugh a bit. A youngish woman, she took our tickets and said that if we wanted to touch any of the sea creatures – there were a few large tanks with rays and the like, touching allowed – use only two fingers.
“So you’ll still have three, right?” I said.
Most of the aquatic life was in smaller tanks. A nice selection, “home to over 250 specimens of fish, sharks and four of the five species of sea turtles that inhabit the waters of the Florida Keys,” the Aquarium web site says. Also, the place is a more manageable size. Not a big-deal world-class mega-aquarium that takes all day to visit. Not that those can’t be impressive. But we had a good hour as childfree adults at Key West Aquarium, and that was about the right length for a visit.
Besides fish, there are fishermen. Depression-era murals of fishermen, that is.
What a pleasant surprise. By the Civil Works Administration, a short-lived predecessor to the WPA. Not the originals, however, which were by an artist named Alfred Crimi (d. 1994). The Living New Deal says they’re more recent replicas.
Come to think of it, Hemingway would have known about the aquarium. Key West isn’t that big a place, and the attraction would have been fairly new when he and Pauline lived mere blocks away. Wonder whether he ever went there.
Of course, we’re used to thinking of the youngish Earnest as a hard drinking, hard fishing sort of guy. Notions that, I believe, Hemingway carefully cultivated. Not only did he create memorable characters for his books, he did for himself as well.
On a whim, I turned to an AI writer available on line, and fed it the following prompt:
Write an account of visiting the Key West Aquarium, in the style of Earnest Hemingway. Three paragraphs is sufficient.
All of 15 seconds later, the machine gave me this.
The aquarium sat low and white against the glare, and the heat lay on the street like a weight. Inside, the air was cooler and smelled of salt and old wood. The tanks were clean and plain, and the fish moved with the calm certainty of things that belong where they are. A tarpon held itself still in the water, strong and watchful, and its eye followed me as if it knew I was only passing through.
I stood by the open pool where they fed the fish, and the water broke suddenly with life. The fish came hard and fast, flashing silver and green, their bodies cutting the surface and falling back again. It was violent in a small way and honest. The men who worked there spoke little, and when they did it was direct, as if there were no reason to waste words on what could be seen.
When I stepped back outside, the sun struck again and the sea wind came down the street. The aquarium stayed behind me, quiet and contained, holding its ordered slice of the ocean. I thought of how the fish swam without doubt, and how good it must be to live so close to what sustains you. Then I walked on, feeling the heat, and the day continued.
I was expecting something from a bad Hemingway writing contest, but no. This is pretty good. Better than that, actually. A little wow moment for me, and the day continued.
We joined the other Key West tourists, and who knows maybe a few locals, for an spontaneous sunset viewing party. I know if I lived around there, I’d be out at least occasionally, taking in something that never gets old. No organizer at all, just people collecting at the right place at the right time to see the disk of the sun transition from yellow to red and other colors, as it visibly creeps lower toward the horizon. Down the sun went, in its predictable splendor, and then — green.
I’m pretty sure what I saw was an inferior-mirage flash, to use a technical term I learned later. I checked later, finding that one characteristic of such a flash is an oval of light lasting no more than 2 seconds (I’d say it was no more than a single second, if that). They tend to happen when the surface is warmer than overlaying air, and close to sea level.
All that fits for the green flash — a variety of green intense and completely new to me — as the sun set our first day in Key West. The flash came exactly as the top edge of the disk of the sun dipped below the horizon. You have to, I believe, be looking straight at the exact right place at exactly the right moment to see it, as I was, by pure accident. I’d heard about green flashes for a long time, but I’d never seen one. A really long time: I remember them being mentioned during a planetarium show in San Antonio as a kid in the early ’70s.
We hadn’t come to Mallory Square to see a green flash or any other meteorological optical phenomena. We hadn’t even come to see the sun go down. We just happened to arrive at Mallory, a large public plaza near the north end of Duval St. and right at the water’s edge, just at the right time, after gadding about that part of Key West.
It’s a mildly festive place around sunset. Also, people are waiting. The sun was not to be hurried.
Lots of people around, not an overwhelming crowd, more of a happy milling of vacation-goers.
Live entertainment was on hand.
The star attraction, however – make that the solar attraction – was the sunset. Mallory Square has a fine view of the westward horizon, where sea and sky come together like a hazy kiss out on the ocean.
So now I’ve seen a green flash. A total solar eclipse (two, actually), lunar eclipses, the transit of Venus, double rainbows, ground-to-sky lightning, sun- and moondogs, meteors, planets through telescopes including the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the impressive whisp of the Milky Way in a dark sky, the Southern Cross and the Magellanic Clouds – add a green flash to the list.
But what other cool things to see in the sky that so far have eluded me? The aurora, for one. Aurora borealis would be great, and certainly more doable than aurora australis, but wouldn’t seeing the Southern Lights be a kick? I think I first learned about it in a Carl Barks Scrooge McDuck comic, and never forgot.
Back on Tuesday. A holiday’s a holiday, even if it comes in the pit of winter, where we definitely find ourselves. The memory of Sunny Florida gets a little more distant each time I feel the wind in single-digit temps.
In diminutive Key West, you’ve gone a long way after a few blocks. So a long way from Duval Street in that town is Key West Cemetery, which is also at a distance from the ocean — one measured in a few thousand feet. At the cemetery you’ll find a mix of above-ground tombs and standard stones. Styles from Old Florida and later, in other words.
We drove into Old Town Key West our second day rather than take the hotel shuttle, which we had the first day. I was gambling that the local parking information I’d picked up first-hand more than a decade earlier wasn’t obsolete yet, which it could well have been. The town has notoriously tight parking, for obvious reasons.
Two prayers for such a situation.
O Lord, by your grace
Help me find a parking space
…
O Jesus, full of grace
Help me find a parking space
Just the thing, provided you’re sure one of the many attributes of the Almighty is a sense of humor. Parking is perhaps a function of Plastic Jesus? (And I like this version, among the many out there.)
Then again, asking for a parking intercession might only seem to be praying for something trivial. For all we know, parking a certain car in a certain place on a certain day might via the butterfly effect prevent a deadly typhoon somewhere.
Anyway, my strategy worked out and we parked for no charge a stone’s throw – and I mean that almost literally – from Key West Cemetery.
Once upon a time, mid-19th century Key West had a burial ground nearer to the water. A hurricane in 1846 applied a large amount of water and wind to that location in a short time, smashing tombs and markers and returning bodies to the open air. Gruesome to consider, but the incident did inspire Key West city fathers to open a new cemetery on high ground. High for Key West, that is, 16 feet above sea level.
That has worked out. As many as 100,000 permanent residents now rest across 19 acres, roughly three times the living population of the city: all races and stations of life; Protestants, Catholics and Jews; Cuban cigar workers and Bahamian mariners; soldiers, sailors and civilians.
Many sad stories, as usual. Even if we can’t know the details at this distance.
Other residents include one Abraham Sawyer (d. 1939), a dwarf who reportedly refused to be a part of carnivals, instead working for manufacturers to advertise their products. He requested to be buried in a full-sized grave, but since I didn’t read of him until later (today), I didn’t go looking for him.
There is also the story of Elena Hoyos (d. 1931). Read the Find a Grave story, which I promise will be one of the stranger things you’ve read in a while, true or not.
The U.S. Navy Plot is square in the middle of the cemetery.
The centerpiece is a memorial to the dead of the Maine. Note the mast behind the sailor statue. That’s from the Maine.
The monument’s granite base says:
IN MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS OF THE DISASTER OF THE U.S. BATTLESHIP ‘MAINE’ IN HAVANA HARBOR FEB. 15, 1898, ERECTED BY THE CITIZENS OF KEY WEST, FLA.
Some of the men who died on the Maine ended up in the Navy Plot: the closest U.S. cemetery when they needed to be interred, and fast. Twenty-four of them, only seven of whom were identified.
Other sailors repose there as well. Such as Sub-Lieutenant Donald Henry Smith, Royal Navy.
That’s a little odd, but foreign servicemen do sometimes end up in American soil (such as at Vicksburg). I looked around a little, then asked Google AI how Sub-Lieutenant Smith came to be there.
The hive bots said: Donald Henry Smith (1929-1952) is buried in the Key West Cemetery, specifically in the U.S. Navy Plot, likely because he was a young man who died at age 23, possibly serving in the Navy or connected to the naval community, with the plot itself dedicated to fallen sailors, a common burial spot for service members in Key West.
So, navy guys get buried with other navy guys, sometimes. Or maybe because a navy is a navy? Thanks for nothing, AI.
I spotted a Cuban flag and went to investigate.
A Los Martires de Cuba.
Not all of them are with Jose Marti in Cuba itself. Guess this counts as another of the Little Cubas to be found in warm climes close to the home island.
The cemetery is under the flight path for planes headed for Key West International (EYW).
Then again, most of the island must be.
