Friday evening in Key West, walking down Greene Street, I came upon a short man with straggly blond hair holding a large paperback book.
“Can I read you a poem by Anna Akhmatova?” he asked me.
I told him I was surprised he wasn’t offering a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. (Just the fact that a man was reading poetry on the street would have been surprising in any American city other than Key West – and perhaps San Francisco.)
“No,” he said flatly. “I only read poems that give me pleasure.”
Looking down, I noticed a violin in its case.
“Do you play?” I asked him.
“Not anymore,” he said.
“Did you used to play – on Duval Street?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Are you Swedish?”
“Yes.”
I thought he had looked familiar, minus a few teeth. At the last literary seminar I had attended, in 2006, I had been walking with Tim Cahill and his wife and a few other people down Duval when we had come across a busker playing the violin. Stopping to chat, we learned that he was from Sweden. I immediately told of the midsummer I had spent in Dalarna, where I had been treated to exquisite fiddling; Tim inquired about the instrument and the music it produced. (I wanted to impress; Tim wanted to learn.)
The Swede had seemed then, as he seemed this night, an integral part of the Key West experience – almost a kind of chamber of commerce emissary – though he was simply an independent contractor of the sort that fey island attracts.
