On a more positive note, writing the book is actually a work in progress. So far I have written 10,000 or so words [...]]]> Since last we met, I have still not been able to move into my apartment as repairs are yet again not completed. This place had better resemble the Taj Mahal when it's finished.

On a more positive note, writing the book is actually a work in progress. So far I have written 10,000 or so words or four chapters.

A week ago Wednesday, I had lunch with the woman who heads the New Hampshire Writers Project. We discussed the book and she promised to contact a couple of publishers that are part of the Project and ask if they'd like to see what I have so far. I went home and wrote what is called in the trade a "Query letter." That's basically a short, one-page letter (or in this case an email) asking if the editor would like to consider the book for publication. Along with the email, I would send the introduction to the book and two chapters.

Linda emailed me earlier this week as told me to get that stuff to her ASAP. I did so and she forwarded it on to two publishers here in N.H.

The safest and least crushingly disappointing thing to do is to just assume it will be rejected. That way I won't get my hopes up. However, gentle readers, I will forever be grateful for any entreaties addressed on my behalf to the deities of your choice.

More later . . .  

Even at 30 minutes past midnight, the place was jumping. Two booths and two tables were occupied. I and another person sat at the counter. A shift of three women, the oldest of whom could not have [...]]]> When last we left our hero, he was sitting at the counter in a Waffle House restaurant in Kingsland, Georgia.

Even at 30 minutes past midnight, the place was jumping. Two booths and two tables were occupied. I and another person sat at the counter. A shift of three women, the oldest of whom could not have been more than 30, worked behind the counter.

Once worked the griddle, a second made sandwiches or prepared plates, the third took orders. They seemed to rotate jobs without saying anything.

"Watcha having to drink, babydoll,?" one asked me as I sat down.

Babydoll?

I asked for water.

Three young women worked behind the counter, the oldest, maybe 30. One worked the griddle. Her hands performed an elaborate ballet as she ladled oil on the griddle, cracked eggs, slapped on bacon, flipped burgers, all the while keeping up a running banter with the other two girls.

A second girl prepared plates, doling out slices of American cheese, toasting bread and biscuits. The third girl took orders, delivered the food and bussed tables.

All three spoke of their kids, none sported a wedding ring.

Back to me.

"Watcha gonna have, sweetie pie?"

Now I'm a sweetie pie.

"Egg biscuit and hash browns, please."

At table to my left, two couples ate and murmured to each other. At the other end of the counter, a group of four young men bantered with each other and the waitresses. Their youth and close shave heads revealed them as military; their demeanor as enlisted.

The guy sitting next to me at the counter overheard me ask the waitress if overnight was her usual shift and she agreed that it was. He agreed and we all ended up saying the best shift was the second. Still time left to do stuff when the shift of over; all the bosses go home and leave the worker to just get on with things.

Three large steamed up windows fronted the parking lot and beyond it a four-lane road. Flashing lights kept drawing my eye; blue, police; red, fire, followed by ambulance. The trinity, I used to call it when I worked ambulance. Police, followed by fire, with ambulance the tail end charlie.

"Here you go darling," the waitress said, handing me my plate.

Darling, for Christ's sake. I mean, if she has to be overly familiar, couldn't she call me stud muffin?

I suppose not.

The next morning was just as steamy as so many that had preceded it. 85 degrees and only 10 am when I cranked up the Duck and headed north. More later . . .

The water off the shore of Key West seems to change colors like a kalidescope, depending on the light. The colors ranged from opaline blue to a shade of pink I don't think I'd ever seen before. I am not sure what the pink is coming from.

The water is very shallow and clear as a [...]]]>

The water off the shore of Key West seems to change colors like a kalidescope, depending on the light. The colors ranged from opaline blue to a shade of pink I don't think I'd ever seen before. I am not sure what the pink is coming from.

The water is very shallow and clear as a bell. I had hoped to take a ride on a glass-bottomed boat get some underwater video but a stiff onshore breeze made the water choppy and stirred up lots of silt from the bottom. I'll try again tomorrow but I'm not too confident since the weather service is predicting thunderstorms and high winds.

This is the marker that denotes the southernmost point on the North American continent. Isn't it cute, pastel colors and all.

This is it, the spot that marks the end of U.S. Route 1. I was hoping there would be something more — oh, I don't know, ceremonial looking? — but this is it. I got the people in the picture to gather around for the shot. No, I'm kidding of course. They were just standing there.

A chicken. Why does he have a picture of a chicken on the page? Well, first of all, it'sa rooster. And there's a colorful story behind it. What is it? Well, I am glad you asked. I got this story from a guy selling flavored ice on the street near the southernmost point marker.

According to him, a few years ago, maybe seven or eight years, the Key West city council decided that cock fighting had to stop. They assessed the situation and concluded that the toll it took on the animals, fighting cocks like the one above, was just too much for animal lovers to tolerate any further. So they passed a law banning it. And they passed a law fining anyone found in possession of these animals $500. This encouraged former owners of fighting birds to become former owners. What to do with these birds, they asked themselves. Simple. Release them. So they did.

Now, Key West is awash in feral — can chickens actually be called feral? — birds that are reproducing like, well, chickens and roaming free all over the place. I saw them running around auto repair shops, in people's yards, hell, in front of a fire station.

The chickens are all over the place. I rode passed this bunch on my bicycle. At first, I didn't believe what I was seeing. Why would chickens be running around free? Many cities allow people to possess chickens but they are supposed to be kept in cages or coops. No one seems the least bothered by the birds.

I left the hotel at 9 am, hopped on a #36 bus, transferred to the metro and went downtown. Much of the metro system and its smaller twin, a people mover that loops around the downtown, parallel US Route 1. In town, the [...]]]> Miami is strangely clean. At least the parts of it I saw were.

I left the hotel at 9 am, hopped on a #36 bus, transferred to the metro and went downtown. Much of the metro system and its smaller twin, a people mover that loops around the downtown, parallel US Route 1. In town, the road is called Biscayne Blvd. for most of its length. From the financial section south it is named Brickell Ave. I got off the people mover downtown and started walking north on Biscayne.

Someone is paying very close attention to cleanliness. Biscayne Blvd is immaculate, no trash on the street, trash cans are not overflowing. It was a little eerie, really, a busy downtown street in a major American inner city that isn’t knee deep in trash. I was impressed.

The #3 bus runs straight up Biscayne Blvd. I bought an all day pass for $5 and jumped on and off the bus as I explored the US 1 in town.

There’s a beautiful park adjacent to the financial district, which fronts on Biscayne Bay. A stiff breeze off the water cooled things down, even though the humidity hit me like a damp towel under my clothes every time I stepped off the rather aggressively air conditioned busses.

Perioidically along the road are signs that say “No panhandling zone.” Evidently this prohibition is strictly enforced as I wasn’t hit up for a single dime as I walked along, camera dangling from my neck, marking me clearly as a tourist.

Biscayne Bay sparkled in the sunlight. Sailboats tacked through the water and power boats zoomed along, ignoring no wake zones. Across from the park was the backside of the cruise ship pier and I could see the tops of gigantic cruise liners, their v-shaped structures sticking above the tops of the buildings between me and them. No idea what those things are for.

The downtown is framed between high rise banks and other financial institutions and equally high rise high-dollar hotels. Not many restaurants thought.

The wind was peeling palm frond of the trees and depositing them in the streets, where they looked like strips of tread peeled off semi tires until I got closer to them and notcied they were the wrong color. Slightly north of the park, three police cruisers, light bars flashing, clustered around a man sitting on the ground. Three officers were standing around him. He was looking up at them and talking. The absence of an ambulance led me to conclude that it was either a drunk or a homeless guy who had done something to attract their attention.

The homeless were there, you just had to look to see them, even in that high-end location. Mostly they were men, walking or sometimes riding bicycles, bags of clothing and other possessions on their backs and dangling from handlebars. I saw them sitting in bus kiosks or hanging around fast food joints. They were the only people on the street who seemed to have nowhere to go and all the time in the world to get there.

Go north from the downtown and the character of the road and its surroundings change. fewer banks and expensive hotels, more restaurants with names like Cuban Cafe and more cheaper motels. I’ll bet some of them rent by the week or the month and people at the margins live in them all year round. Occasionally, trailer parks are sandwiched into open spaces, always with names that sound better than the surroundings. Despite the change, the road is still clean.

Along the way, I passed street vendors selling flowers and a truck selling Salvadorean specialties. Ever since I came down with a case of food poisoning a few years ago from eating from a felafel truck in Brooklyn, I give people selling food from trucks a wide berth.

I eaten nothing for breakfast, so I was pretty hungry. I stopped in a Cubano restaurant and ordered the flank steak sandwich with red onions and an order of tostones, mashed plantains breaded and fried. I hadn’t eaten plantains since I’d spent a year  Dominican Republic in 1980. They were called plantanos there and I didn’t like them much. The tostones reminded me of that fact but the steak sandwich was delicious, the meat pounded thin and grilled to perfection.

Further north on the road, it changes character again. The Miami Jockey Club is an oasis of green calm and the houses along the road are expensive and expensively roomed. At the northern end of the road, there is a mall called Aventura, which I thing means adventure. The #3 bus line ends there, so I wandered around the stores for a bit, just for the air conditioning, then headed back to the hotel.

On the bus I sat next to a young man who told me that he had come to the US from the Dominican Republic a decade ago and joined the military. He suffered some kind of injury as he told me he was on disability benefits from the Veterans Administration. His injuries were service-related but he didn’t go into details and I felt constrained to ask him.

We played the “do you know” game, comparing places we’d been in the D.R. He told me he was from a small village near the border with Haiti, the one place in the country I never went. when I was there, Americans were being warned against going there because of some unrest. But he’d lived for a while in the capital, Santo Domingo, and we compared notes. his ultimate goal, he said, was to live someplace quiet in Puerto Rico. I wished him luck and got off the bus at the hotel. More later  . . .