The Survivors Who Lunch

Clark modeling the Miami J Collar

Are you a survivor? Survivors are the people who stay heartily engaged in living, no matter what fortune, good or bad, throws their way. They are people who remain valid. They count. They function in a way that enhances far more than detracts from the world in which they live.
    In the last two days I’ve been out to lunch. Twice I’ve dined on fish sandwiches in busy restaurants with some very impressive people, survivors all, who still sparkle with vitality and glow with love and enthusiasm for life. First, with the girls. Then, with Clark and Barb.
    The cancer survivors — my group — are perhaps the most obviously thankful to be breathing and dining and laughing and hugging. Cancer, just the word, plunges our imaginations into a very dark place. We survivors have been to that place, and climbed out of the blackness and back into the light. Today we can tell stories about our adventures, and laugh at them. Cancer and heart disease are our most constant calamities.

Clark's Key West album. It's a good one.

    Our friend Clark had a tumor on his spine. The surgery to remove it was long and torturous and painful. Then he needed to wear a Miami J Collar. You’ve seen them; they hold your spine utterly still while you attempt to live your life in spite of it.  Clark wore his to the restaurant where he works. For three months! One of his customers said “Oh, I see you’re wearing the Miami J Collar. I did time in one of those things, too,” the lady said. “Ugh!” 
    “Why did you have to wear it?” Clark asked. “What happened to you?”
    “Rough sex,” she replied, while the man behind her shrugged and grinned.
    In the grocery store Clark and his wife, my great friend Barb, were approached by an old timer who recognized the Miami J  and commented on it. “How long you been wearing it?” he asked.
    “A month or so, but I’m supposed to wear it for three months,” Clark said.
    “Well do like the doctor tells you,” the old guy said. “I took mine off too soon and I still can’t swaller right.” Then he grimaced and demonstrated his bizarre swallowing technique.
    The occasion of the lunch was to celebrate Clark’s recent PET scan. The news is good. No evidence of cancer.
    The funniest story I have about my cancer is remembering the day Barb, who is a nurse, removed a drain tube from my throat, after my lymphectomy surgery. I was very happy to be having the nuisance tube, that threaded around and about within my neck, and exited beneath my chin, removed. At last! With easy confidence Barb cut through the stitches holding the tube in place, grasped it firmly, and pulled. And pulled. That sucker was a foot long, and as it continued to emerge, like a trail of scarves pulled from a magician's sleeve, Barb’s eyes grew bigger and bigger. I was watching them. Finally her face relaxed again. The tube was out. At last!

A fuzzy photo of survivors June, Barb and Natale

    Our friend Natale was at lunch, too. Natale is a beauty, attracting the eyes of everyone in the room wherever she goes. She looks like an angel. She is an angel. But she’s been to hell, too. She grew up in Siberia. Her parents died in a car crash when she was 16 years old. She lost her husband to heart disease while she was still very young.  She raised a son, alone. She has worked hard just about every day of her life. And still, she smiles her Mona Lisa smile and maintains her sweet grace.
    Also at lunch the other day, Barb’s friend Jane. In the course of our conversation, the drug Synthroid came up.
    “Why do you take Synthroid?” is the question that inevitably follows.
    “I had cancer. The radiation treatment destroyed my thyroid,” I explained to Jane. “What about you?”
    “I was struck by lightning,” she said, popping a French fry into her mouth.
    OMG!!  Really?  Really.

June and Barb with Electro-Girl

    I demanded to know everything, every little detail, of this event — Jane being the first person I’ve ever known to be struck by lightning.  It happened on a clear, sunny day in Tuckahoe, New York. Jane walked out of her office and into the street and remembers nothing until she awakened in the hospital a week later. Her doctors weren’t quite clear on what had happened to burn her, paralyze her, and knock her consciousness right out of her head. She is just below 5 feet tall. A very tiny target! To see her you wouldn’t guess she’d had a problem in the world. Then you notice the medallion she wears on a chain around her neck to alert paramedics that she has seizures as a result of scars on her brain from that lightning strike.
    Barb told me that when Jane told her the story of being hit by lightning she said “Well, you don’t have to worry about that happening again. Lightning never strikes in the same place twice.”
    Turns out, it does. Some people simply attract lightning strikes. And Jane is very cautious about venturing out of the house, no matter what the weather report says.
    Barb’s brother David, seven years her junior, is battling pancreatic cancer back in her native Kentucky. The good news is that he’s doing very well on chemo. But there’s more. The brother she never knew very well has become very close to her. The two talk on the phone, or text each other, multiple times each day. They talk about the tiny dramas of daily life — the dinner menu, the progress of the neighborhood's new kittens, their mom, their families. They are just getting around to making solid a bond they never quite got around to before. It is very sweet indeed.
    My husband Michael has survived two cancers, but he rarely refers to them. It happened long ago and far away and he’s happy to distance himself from the memories. Nonetheless, cancer has changed our lives. We appreciate our days so much more than before. We work on keeping difficulties in perspective.
    Barb told me that at the end of each day she and Clark review the day and talk about the highs and lows of its course. Michael and I do that, too.
    The other day, as Barb and I posed for Natale’s camera, and Natale showed Jane how it worked, the sun was high in the sky but not too hot, and the breeze was balmy and just right. We had a moment together and I said to her “This is it, Barb. This is our life.”
    “I know it is, June,” she said. “And it’s just fine.”
    And then we smiled for the camera.

Henry Flagler's Doomed Wives

The magnificent Whitehall in Palm Beach. You should see it for yourself.

The ballroom in Whitehall.

This week in Paradise we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first train arriving in Key West, via Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railroad. Some called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. It was also called Flagler’s Folly. Both names were accurate. Yes, it was a wonder that one man, Henry Flagler, had the vision of a train reaching from the mainland to Key West, and that the same man had the $25 million to finance the project. But it was a foolish and costly endeavor, and that makes it a folly, too. The railroad never turned a profit, ended up in bankruptcy, and was ultimately irreparably damaged by a hurricane.
    Stories, legends and myths surrounding the building of the railroad abound. The history that most intrigues me is Flagler’s marriages, and, via his wives, the disbursement of his fantastic fortune. 

Henry, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and wife #1, the sickly Mary Harkness.

    Flagler was 51 years old, and already a millionaire, when he became a widower. Soon after the first Mrs. Flagler died, he took a second wife. She was Alice Ida Shrouds, who’d been employed by Henry to nurse the sickly first Mrs. Flagler. Mr. and Mrs. Flagler honeymooned in St. Augustine, Florida. Shortly after the wedding, Alice Ida began communicating with other worlds via a Ouija board. She confided to her husband that she’d learned that it was her fate to marry the czar of Russia. In fact, Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, was then just 20 years away from his own strange fate, which was to be murdered, along with his wife and children, by the Bolsheviks in 1918. But who knows? Perhaps Alice Ida was right. Maybe she and Nicholas II were destined to meet and to unite in some other realm, at some other time. But to Henry Flagler, she just sounded nuts. He got a physician friend to agree that Alice Ida was mentally incompetent and had her committed to a sanitarium.    

Easy Mary Lily . . . he's an old man!

   Meanwhile, Flagler, a natural born entrepreneur, began exploring business opportunities in Florida. He was well aware of the area’s great potential and set his sights on creating what he called a new “American Riviera.”  As his mentally ill wife languished in a New York institution, Flagler completed the 1,100-room Royal Poinciana Hotel on the shores of Lake Worth in Palm Beach. The Royal Poinciana Hotel was at the time the largest wooden structure in the world. Two years later, Flagler built the Palm Beach Inn (renamed Breakers Hotel Complex in 1901) overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach.

Whoever labeled this photo spelled Mary Lily's name wrong.

    Florida welcomed Henry Flagler, his money and his grand ideas for creating jobs and making more money. Somewhere along the way he was introduced to a Mary Lily Kenan, a singer and pianist. She was 24; Flagler was 70, and still a married man. Flagler took his problem in front of the the Florida legislature and they passed a bill that made incurable insanity grounds for divorce. Flagler divorced Ida and married Mary. Mary’s wedding gift was the luxurious Whitehall, a 60,000 square foot, 55-room mansion in Palm Beach that is today a museum with a fascinating story. What I recall as being the most remarkable room in Whitehall is the ballroom. Utterly fantastic. Our guide showed us the chairs upon which the Flagler’s would host many events. There was a piano, upon which Mary played. And there was a barely visible door, which lead to a secret stair that the aging Flagler would use to inconspicuously disappear to the comfort of his bedroom while young Mary and their guests partied till the wee hours. It was on that stairway that Flagler took the fall that led to his death at the age of 83. Flagler’s will left his wife Mary $108 million.

Flagler was a rambling man. Here is his own personal train car, the Rambler. See it for yourself at Whitehall in Palm Beach.

    Mary Lily Flagler next married Robert Bingham, a Kentucky politician. Before the wedding Bingham signed a prenuptial agreement, giving up claim to the Flagler fortune should his wife die before him. Eight months later, she died. One month before her death there had been a codicil added to her will, stating that upon her death her husband would receive $5 million.

Flagler Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine where you can see the graves of Henry and his first wife Mary Harkness.

    Mary Lily’s family was outraged, suspecting foul play. They arranged to have her body exhumed and autopsied at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. They promised the media that the results of the autopsy would be made public. But that never happened. The results remained a secret giving rise to wild speculation that she had been a user of laudanum (a form of opium) and had accidentally overdosed. There was also a rumor that Bingham was so furious at Mary Lily’s family for their interfering in the matter of his inheritance that he threatened to release a story to the press that she had died of syphilis if the family didn’t back off.
    Bingham’s fortune financed his purchase of the Louisville Courier newspaper, which survives to this day. The paper has also had an infamous history related to family and inherited money. But that’s another story, for another day. 
    Henry Flagler left $2 million in his will for his second wife, Crazy Alice Ida. She outlived him by 17 years, dying at the age of 82, and claiming, till the day she died, that her next husband would be a Russian czar.

Once He Built A Railroad

This bridge, the Long Key Viaduct, is now part of the US 1 Overseas Highway.

On the centennial anniversary of the completion of the Flagler’s famous folly, the Florida Keys Overseas Railroad, the man behind the monumental undertaking, that irascible old millionaire Henry Flagler, is once again in the news. Were it not for his trailblazing tenacity, the Overseas Highway, our well-worn thoroughfare to the mainland, most certainly would not exist. That’s the news. But there’s so much more to the story.

Flagler's folly, the East Coast Railroad, arriving in Key West for the very first time, January 22, 1912.

    Flagler’s railroad cost him $25 million. He’d made his vast fortune in Standard Oil, the company he founded with John D. Rockefeller. Flagler was told that his idea was insane. But he persisted.
    Key West was the very last in a chain of coral rock islands, overgrown by subtropical jungle, mostly untouched by civilization, and separated by varying spans of ten to thirty-feet-deep ocean water. More than half of the planned railroad would have to traverse water. When asked about his crazy plan, Flagler said “It is perfectly simple. All you have to do is build one concrete arch, and then another, and pretty soon you will find yourself in Key West.”
    Five hundred men lost their lives before the job was done. The work was backbreaking and fraught with sub-tropics sun, humidity, mosquitos and disease. Alcohol was strictly forbidden to the men, and so a cutthroat bootlegging industry bustled just outside the worker's camps.

Pineapple harvesting. Rough work.

    Meanwhile, the pineapple growers of the Florida Keys, watched and waited with high hopes for the future, when the railroad would provide them with a trade route for their pineapples to the busy markets of the east coast. 
    The Overseas Railroad chugged into Key West for the first time on January 22, 1912. Soon the train simply drove right onto a ferry that carried it to Havana, where it was loaded down with passengers and . . . pineapples. It was cheaper to ship the Cuban pineapples north than to stop at the Keys stations for their more expensive fruit. Between the cheaper trade from Cuba and the hurricanes, the pineapple growers of the Keys were wiped out. Forever.
     From the very start, the train business was besieged with problems. The train never ran on time, mostly due to weather. The tradewinds made bridge crossings dangerous and slow. Passengers were scarce. The train never began to turn a profit to pay for its construction. It didn’t even make enough profit to pay for its upkeep. Twenty years after its grand completion, in 1932, the railroad went into bankruptcy.

Flagler knew the Panama Canal was coming in 1914. Key West had the closest U.S. deep water harbor.

    Still, the train ran, and those who rode it recall it as one of the most memorable experiences of their lives. Wilhelmina Harvey, onetime Monroe County Mayor and Key West native, once described to me the experience of taking the train to New York. She was a little girl and recalled climbing aboard the train and watching out the windows as the train rode up the Keys. On the bridges, she said, it seemed that the train rode on water, the train and passengers spectacularly suspended between the sky and sea. She would be put into her little berth bed in the Keys, she said, and would awaken to an entirely new vista outside, of oak and fir trees, the train having arrived on the mainland during the night.
    Other frequent passengers on the railroad were the Hemingways, who lived in Key West during the 1930s and traveled often to the mainland.    

This is the end, my friend. September, 1935.

    In 1935 the infamous Labor Day Hurricane, the gargantuan storm that killed hundreds of people, and tore a naked swath through the jungle-like Florida Keys, also destroyed over 40 miles of the roadbed. The Overseas Railroad’s receivers decided that rather than spending several million dollars to repair the damage, they would sell it to the highest bidder. The State of Florida paid $640,000 for all of the railroad property, including the rail bed and its remarkable bridges. One bridge alone cost Flagler over $640,000 to build. There are forty-two of them. Upon the path blazed by Flagler and many millions of dollars, and his workers' gallons of sweat, blood and tears, a highway was constructed and completed in 1938.
    When you drive to Key West, and cross the mighty bridges that have miraculously withstood the test of time, you can thank Henry Flagler for making it possible. And then, you might ask yourself, who was this Henry Flagler who amassed such a fortune in the days before income taxes and had the audacity, at the very end of his long life, to demand the building of a railroad doomed to fail?
    For that information you’ll need to come here next week, when I will tell you the fascinating story of Flagler’s three wives, and the divvying up his great fortune after his death in 1913. 
    See you Thursday!

The Provocative Art of the Tear Jerk

What's going on in your back seat?

 Yesterday Michael and I saw the The Descendants, now playing at the incredibly cool Tropic Cinema, located just a short hike away from our house. As always Michael examined reviews of the movie before agreeing to see it. The reviews were good, he reported. And so we went. In the bustle of people leaving the theater, as we waited on line to buy tickets, I heard a woman say: “I used every Kleenex in my purse!” and assumed she had seen the Marilyn Monroe film, Marilyn’s being one of the most heartbreakingly poignant stories imaginable.

Key West's Tropic Theater: a treasure

    The Descendants is set in Hawaii, and features scenes of not only downtown Honolulu, and the bustling tourist center of Waikiki, but also sweeping and magnificent images of pristine areas on other, less frequented Hawaiian islands. George Clooney very artfully plays the husband of a mortally wounded woman, comatose on her deathbed, as the drama of her demise plays out. It is sad. And funny. And authentic, but for the fact that the husband is a multimillionaire. In the very beginning of the film, he narrates that when people know you live in a place like Hawaii, a paradise, they don’t think you experience life’s darker truths. But it is true, he assures us, that people in Hawaii suffer deadly cancers and addictions and boat accidents just like they do everywhere else on the planet.

Inside the Tropic, voted the best movie theater in Florida!

    Where can this go? Just where you think it will of course. The story plays out. We learn terrible secrets about the wife and about her husband’s regrets. We see children losing their mother. Elderly parents losing their adult child. As the story spooled toward it’s inevitable end, the sound of tearful sighs, nose-blowing and sniffling came from every corner of the theater. I saw Michael’s eyes shining with brimming tears. But I wasn’t buying it. I don’t like being played like a violin.  
    Later Michael said that the experience reminded him of seeing the movie Love Story, in a packed to the brim New York City theater, full of hard-bitten New Yorkers, who sniffled and sobbed every time the heroine or the hero spoke the immortal words: “love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  If only!
    I was reminded of seeing the film West Side Story, which came around when I was 10 years old. I saw it with my cousin, who was older, wiser, and, in my mind’s eye, cooler than me in every way imaginable. Everyone seemed to be sniveling, but not her. She didn’t cry. So I wouldn’t cry. I think I sprained something deep in my throat, and perhaps my soul, with the effort.
    This morning I talked with son Miguel. I told him about the film. He said he believes that people like sob stories; they appeal to the voyeuristic instinct in all of us. We know of life’s inevitable truths — loss and death — but when, as children, we watch Bambi, or Old Yeller, or Charlotte’s Web, we witness someone else's tragedy. Not our own. We get to leave the theater, go home, unscathed, our Kleenex used and tossed into the trash along with our temporary heartache.

Where do I begin?

    When I slogged through cancer treatments, radiation and chemotherapy, I felt pretty awful, but I never imagined that I would die. Chemo takes you right to the brink of death, hopefully without killing you along with the cancer cells. It’s pathetic indeed. I felt truly sorry for those who love me having to bear witness to my suffering. But I survived. We all did. And when it was all over, when I went back to work and rejoined the human race, people had many questions about my cancer, my prognosis, and my feelings about it.
    I soon realized that I wasn’t the only one in denial of my destiny. We all are. No matter how green your paradise, no matter how many millions in your bank account, no matter how wonderful or horrible you are, you will die. So I say live creatively, love lavishly, create irony, so that when the tragedy of your death occurs, perhaps the drama of your story will be fodder for a Golden Globe-winning, tear-jerking film. The world will cry for you. And you will go down in cinematic history.

Do You Love Me Now That It's 2012?

Michael's holiday Butter Ball Turkey at the beach

    What is your theme song for the new year? Have you chosen one yet? You need a theme song. You need to choose a song you know all the words to, so that when you are happy, like the way you feel at the beach on a stunning clear day, you can sing your song loud and well into the wild surf. When you’re in a rough spot, say sitting in the dentist office waiting room, for your turn in the chair of certain torture, you can hum it to yourself, or whistle it into the dark when you walk past the cemetery.
    What will you do with next year's turkey leftovers? That’s a question I need to answer before Thanksgiving, 2012, which is just around the corner. What will we do with those damned turkey leftovers? I need a recipe to completely disguise that funky turkey flavor. My husband, who always seeks out the biggest turkey in the store, and fancies himself to be an expert at holiday turkey preparation, says “Yuck” when I begin turning the holiday turkey carcass into turkey soup.
    “Can you at least find another name for it?” he asks. “Country turkey chowder? Bistro turkey bisque?”
    Is this the year you join the gym and get into shape? My friends just bought a gym and say this past week has been the most lucrative one yet. People with flaccid muscles and sagging self images are lining up to sign on for a year of self-improvement. The year ahead will be different from the one behind, they hope.

Why can't every night be New Year's Eve?

    What about money? The Internet news is warning of a very rough economy in the year ahead. I can’t imagine things getting any worse, but, according to those in the know, they may. I am thinking of cutting out the land line phone, and canceling the Comcast cable TV. But Michael needs the news. “It’s an election year!” he says. Cut out the land line? Crazy talk! Sometimes, he argues, you need a land line, to send a FAX. And so, we stand at the ready for any and all avenues of communication, from the Macintosh or the Kindle or the iPhone. We also pay accordingly and absurdly.
    Like most people we have considered eliminating meat from our diet as a money saving measure. But replacing meat and chicken with fish and vegetables yields no real reduction in the grocery bill. Vegetarian cooking relies on esoteric stuff, like miso, grapeseed oil, and pricey spices, like saffron and imported curry powders. Organic ain’t economic. 
    Aside from the myth of the economy of the vegetarian diet, my spouse and I have other food issues. Michael, who is inclined to remain trim no matter how horrifically fatty his diet, grew up in South Carolina eating streak ‘o lean basted vegetables, buttery grits, and chicken-fried everything smothered in gravy. He tries to be a good sport, but finds little satisfaction in a hearty bowl of beans and brown rice. He accuses me often of using too much apple cider vinegar in my cooking, which in Nova Scotia, my home base, is about as exotic as it gets in most thrifty households. Will the battle of tastes reach a truce in 2012? So far, I’m losing badly. I was a vegetarian when I met this man, 25 years ago. Nowadays, to my utter disgust, my mouth waters at the thought of a fatty ribeye steak sizzling on the grill.
    We have agreed to stop buying bacon. A small, but important, victory. Our friends, the same ones who now own a gym, are eating turkey bacon these days. I cannot go there. Not now. Maybe never. I prefer to keep turkey in its place. And I’m certain turkey bacon costs more than pig bacon.
    I recently told my son that I’d decided to make a conscious effort not to talk so much in the new year. Instead, I explained, I want to try very hard to listen to what other people have to say, which is truly difficult for me to do. Frankly, I’d rather do the talking, or at least lead the conversation, manage the direction and the flow.
    “Mom,” Miguel said, “Do you really think you can change your personality at this point in your life? Why not work on a goal you might reasonably expect to accomplish?”
    He’s right. It’s too late for me to stop talking. I can quit eating sweets. I can give up bacon. I can give up the “Housewives of -- name the city --” on Bravo TV. I can quit trying to reinvent uses for leftover turkey. But I certainly can’t shut up, any more than I can stop singing or dancing, or needing to be loved.
    So here, with heartfelt thanks to the fabulous Contours, is my own personal anthem for 2012. Call me if you would like to discuss my choice. We'll talk . . . uh, I'll talk.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Judy Garland in "Meet Me In St. Louis"

At Christmastime a songwriter dreams of writing a Christmastime hit, a yuletide standard, with an eternity of holiday seasons ahead and a lifetime of regular perennial hit royalty checks. Think of Mel Torme’s "Christmas Song." You know it: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . .  .”  or Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas.”  How about "Blue Christmas?"  “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you . . . " sung by Elvis, the king. These are the songs that make their creators well, which in country music talk is another way of saying flush with cash.

   My husband, who with his Nashville partner, Dave Lindsey, has written a currently number one hit on the bluegrass charts, is yet to pen his yuletide standard. But he’s still trying. Michael is an intellectual sort of songwriter. He doesn’t sit around strumming a guitar and trying words on for size like a regular sort of songwriter. He studies the business of songs, their structure, their power and their writers, like a stock broker studies the market. His research has turned up a fascinating array of facts and figures, many of which lend themselves to interesting conversation, none of which have made us particularly well. Yet.

Noshville Cafe, Nashville

   A couple of months ago we were having breakfast at the Noshville Cafe in Nashville, trying to remember the words to The Lovin Spoonful’s song “Nashville Cats,” which was parodied by Bob Weinstein into the very funny “Noshville Katz.” To pursue such trivia means never to be bored with your longtime companion. There is a portrait of Judy Garland on the wall at the Noshville and Michael was reminded that he’d just read that Hugh Martin, the writer of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” had recently died at the age of 96, which means he had a nice long run of being well. Then Michael said that the original words to the song were so dark that Garland refused to sing them in the film “Meet Me In St. Louis.” The words were modified for the film. When the great Frank Sinatra got around to performing the song, he too, found the words depressing and asked Martin to further modify the next to the final line. Martin did. Instead of, "we'll have to muddle through somehow" it goes “hang a shining star upon the highest bough.” Today, it’s the modified version we hear, not the original, written during the era of the Second World War.

The Lovin' Spoonful

    As Michael and I were attempting to recall the words to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” our waiter came ‘round to refill our coffee cups. Overhearing our conversation he volunteered, “Do you want the revised edition of the song, or the original words that Garland refused to sing because they were too depressing?” Those Nashville Cats!
    So now, for your edification, here are the original words to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas":

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, pop that champagne cork,
Next year we will all be living in New York.


No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more.
                                                    But at least we all will be together, if the Fates allow,
                                                   From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow.
                                                   So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.


    As we do indeed muddle along, somehow, the original words seem to ring true again. That line about living in New York? Truly tragic. Have you checked the weather up there lately?
    Besides lots of lively conversation about music, there’s another benefit to living with a songwriter, his head ever aswarm with song lyrics, past, present and future. He is oh so pie-eyed optimistic. He expects everything to turn out all right. Yesterday, for example, he bought a pound of chestnuts, paying homage to Mel Torme’s suggestion of the same roasting on an open fire. No, we don’t have a fireplace. And how the hell do you get those chestnuts out of their hard little shells? Did you know there’s both an outer and an inner shell on chestnuts? All of these small details are beside the point for Michael, whose heart is light, his troubles always out of sight. We have chestnuts. We have palm trees and sunny skies. We’re gonna have ourselves a Merry Little Christmas.

Paste the link below in your browser to see Judy Garland sing the movie version of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas."
                                   http://youtu.be/5g4lY8Y3eoo

Easy Come, Easy Go. My Recycled Life

The find of the day on my last day at Secondhand Sam's.
Vintage. Terra cotta. Divine.

Tis the season to be jolly, but how jolly can I be as the glorious era of Secondhand Sam’s, Key West’s most grandiose thrift shop, dwindles down to its inevitable, lost-their-lease, demise?  What will our island's legion of thrifters do with those long, hot afternoons of summer we once spent in sweet and meditative joy examining each and every cast-aside object sadly outgrown its purpose for someone? For many years Sam’s has inhabited a cavernous warehouse, that previously housed a carpeting business, across the street from where the infamous Key West Dog Track once operated. Lots of “once was” and “used to be” places on the island these days . . . Now, the dog track is history and at Sam’s the ancient showrooms are busy with activity, as workers scurry about, shoving furniture and massive bins and boxes full of every imaginable thing, into better merchandising position for last chance bargain shoppers. Some items are destined for the warehouse’s loading platform, where they are lifted onto trucks headed for who knows where. And then it happens again; the stuff someone once wanted is no longer useful to its newest owners.  It’s doubly unwanted.

Elmira Leto, Executive Director of Samuel’s House.
Money raised at Secondhand Sam’s goes there.

Shopper Maggie told me she doesn’t read much. These
books are for her mom, Callie Morehouse, a private chef,
who reads anything non-fiction. “What will we do without
this place?” Callie said.

The fact that you are unlikely to find something sensational for the man in your life on the racks at a secondhand store had lead me to understand that men do not recycle their clothes. They wear them until they fall apart.  Or they forget them on the bus.  Or until the rats shred them. Or, like my husband, they store them in dusty drawers or closets for the remainder of the owner’s natural life, awaiting that one special event — a trip to Alaska perhaps? — when they will become useful again.

Ashleigh waitresses at Jack Flat’s and shops at Secondhand Sam’s.  Just look at the selection!!! She and her bud Jennifer were shopping for ugly sweaters. I didn’t ask why.

Hair design genius Jackie Gray, a devout Saturday morning yard sale maven, models her double-purposed, hand-stitched Christmas tree skirt. She wore it to host her Christmas party. After the party, it went back beneath the tree.

    The younger people in my life are far too impatient to dedicate long hours to treasure hunting in thrift shops. They have not lived long enough to appreciate that secondhand clothes are fully engaged, washed, dried, survivors of wear and tear. Sturdy. That’s one reason to love recycled clothes. They’ve stood the test of time. No more heartbreaking “it shrunk in the wash” moments for this recycler. My clothes are mature, seasoned. And if they take themselves too seriously, expect special treatment, they go into my ever-present recycling bin and back to the thrift shop. 

Recycling fan Mary Pfund re-purposed her family’s warehouse
in Key West as her home and studio. One of her customers
abandoned a storage unit full of awning material, canvas and
vinyl. On her trusty sewing machine, which she bought second-hand twenty five years ago, she makes these Key West boat bags, sturdy enough to outlive us all.

Musician Dan Simpson posted the following on Facebook Wednesday morning:

I'm doing sound for Fantazimo – A Jolly Ole Burlesque Odyssey @ TSKW (a great show BTW), and need a suit, at least a jacket and tie. Yes, I have never worn one in KW (since 1978), so I figger it's a good occasion to bust one out. I also don't want to spend a whole lot, so I'll look at the good old Salvation Army, maybe Ross... any other suggestions? Actually, I'm envisioning a Miami Vice style... HAR! Styling Gel?!Not much to work with :) Hopefully I'll remember the ol' tie knot...

Dan posted the picture above with this on Wednesday afternoon:

RE: Suit Quest. Second Hand Sam’s comes through.

    Many years ago my roommate Eileen bought a secondhand lamp to use in her room at my house. She left it here when she moved. And here it stayed, for several decades. About a year ago my super-organizer friend Tina and I did a massive purge of my house, making several hefty deliveries to Secondhand Sam’s. Among the give-aways was Eileen’s lamp. Several weeks later another friend, Jane, feathering her own temporary nest in Key West, told me about a great lamp she’d purchased at Sam’s. “I think I know that lamp,” I told her. Sure enough, it was Eileen’s lamp, which had lived with me here for the past 25 years. Jane moved up to Sebring, to her boyfriend’s house there, and took the lamp. Then she broke up with that boyfriend and returned to Key West. When she relocated to Colorado to care for her ailing mother, she stored a stash of items in my loft to await her return to the island. Among those things, yes, Eileen’s lamp.

    I paid my final visit to Secondhand Sam’s yesterday. I shopped for many hours. I spent $18. Among other treasures, I bought a vintage suede jacket for 50 cents. From the moment I laid eyes on it I knew we were destined to be together forever — or at least until it needs to be dry-cleaned.