Arrived home yesterday from three days in Key West. I always tell people headed there to get off Duval and wander the side streets, and I followed my advice, discovering, near the cemetery, a street with the now absurd name of Poorhouse Lane. On a nearby street a man coming out his front door with a friend asked if he could help me.
“I’m just taking pictures of the beautiful houses,” I told him.
“You want to buy one?” his friend asked.
“I don’t think I can afford it,” I said.
“I can’t either,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
The Eastern European work force was still around but in smaller numbers. “Nobody rides a bicycle like a Russian girl,” a female travel writer remarked to me once, and I saw some young women looking elegant and unapproachable even on three-wheelers. But many of the Czechs and Poles had been replaced by people from even farther east – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.
Eventually, inevitably, I found myself back on Duval Street. This had its good side – the Lighted Bike Parade, with hundreds of people on decorated bicycles – and its down side: the pro-Trump messages on the T-shirts in shop windows. They seemed out of place in a quaint, whimsical, literary town (three adjectives one never attaches to our president) that people have long used as a refuge from the rest of the country. But they were probably a better indicator of next year’s election than all the editorials and political talk shows.
