Notes from My Journal:
K surprised me with a three-day visit to Key West, which is a favorite place of mine to spend a few days. I like San Francisco. I like New Orleans better. But Key West is my favorite place in the US that doesn’t feel like the US. It feels more like what the natives call it: the Conch Republic – a city that feels like it seceded from the US 100 years ago.
Everything that matters to me is different there. The look of the place – an accidental mix of stately Victorian mansions, wooden conch houses, and shotgun cottages – is unlike that of any other city in the world. Its literary history (having hosted the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, John Dos Passos, and Judy Blume) – second in the Americas only to New York City’s – is a treasure for fiction and poetry buffs like me. And its culture – distinctively contrarian and insistently anti-bourgeois – is just what my spiritual doctor ordered.
We hit all the regular sites – the Hemingway Home, the Audubon House, and Truman’s Little White House, as well as Sloppy Joe’s Bar, the lighthouse, the Custom House, the quirky cemetery, and Mallory Square. We spent a full afternoon enjoying my favorite Key West pastime – walking the old town. And we availed ourselves of mouthwatering meals at the many modest but delightful little cafés and restaurants that populate almost every city block: a delicious breakfast at the Harbour View Café, fresh snapper at the Red Shoe Island Bistro, a juicy New York strip at the Prime Steakhouse, and superb pasta dishes at Antonia’s.
I did my best to limit my “working” time while we were there to just a couple of hours a day, but that was more than enough to discover all sorts of unappealing things that were happening up north in the USA, such as the following…
