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.
Yesterday afternoon we drove down to Miami International Airport to meet the eldest son of the Alsatian family whose farm I worked on in the summer of 1976. A doctor, Théo had already left the farm by then, leaving behind his brother Dany, but he stopped by for special occasions.
I drove him and his Finnish partner Marja down Calle Ocho, through Brickell, and then to Coral Way – that stunning, non-Alsatian lineup of banyans – and into Coral Gables. We took a walk through the Biltmore, had hot chocolate at Books & Books, and then looked for a restaurant for dinner. The first two – a new Peruvian place and a Middle Eastern restaurant – were too loud, so we ended up at Graziano’s, where no music played. After 47 years, we needed a place that was conducive to conversation.
The chill this morning doesn’t faze me, since Philadelphia last week was in the 30s and 40s. I had to buy a new coat, as I hadn’t been expecting such cold in November. It made walking unpleasant, at least when the wind picked up, but cafes cozy and warm. Sitting at a counter at Reading Terminal Market last Thursday, I was served a steaming chicken pot pie by a young Mennonite woman.
At our first lunch in Italy – in a Milan restaurant called Stendhal – our waiter brought a basket of bread and breadsticks for me and a separate basket of gluten-free bread and crackers for Hania – bread being such a mainstay that even celiacs should not be denied it.
I'm off to Poland tomorrow - and then to Italy - coming back here on Sept. 17 (barring any hurricanes).