Author: Joanne Nanos

When I first found out I had MS, I saw a therapist to get my arms around it. She said, “Look at it this way, no one can ever importune you again. “Will you collect money in your neighborhood for underprivileged crocodiles.” You say, ”Oh, I’m sorry, I wish I could but I have MS and can’t walk too well.” The person then says, “Oh, you just have to phone around.” You say,” “Oh, my hand doesn’t work too well either.” These people are persistent, because someone’s importuning them. Finally she says, ”I’m so sorry to have bothered you. Please forgive me.” Which is a polite way of hanging up on you. And you go back to your crossword puzzle, which the doctor suggested I do to keep my brain doing its best job, ”Thinking.”

I was visiting my friend Sally a few years go and we were doing the crossword puzzle together. A young Tibetan Buddhist monk was also visiting and curious about what we were doing, Sally asked him to look up some things from her reference books, so much more fun than messing with an I-phone. We finished the crossword and Sally scrunched it up in her hand and walked over and threw in in the trashcan. The young monk immediately said, “ What a supreme waste of time.” Sally immediately said, “No, it wasn’t. We all had an hour or so of enjoyment. We maybe learned something. It was relaxing and fun. So no, not a waste of time.” I don’t think he was convinced.

I used to think that people who did crosswords were very smart, but as with everything, it is a learning process. So I started buying Easy Crosswords magazines from the rack at the local drugstore. You soon find out that most of those short words that are used over and over are full of vowels. Some examples are: Oahu, Ames, Oman, Agra, Etna, Laos, Peru, Erie, and Oslo. You get the idea. So, there’s a good start. Vowels are the key in other answers also, so words with lots of vowels are used a lot. The rest you can fill in with what you learned in school, or on the job or in the newspaper. Also, I got a Crossword Puzzle Dictionary. Actually I worked through to tatters a number of them. That was before “The Internet”, which has replaced all those reference books, which bears repeating since it should scare us all silly, all that stuff out there in the ether somewhere. What happens if it goes away and we have no books?

I have done acrostics for many years. A good friend told me that her three daughters got up early Saturday morning to get the acrostic from the newspaper. The first one to call her with the answer won. There was no prize. Being the first was the prize. I told her that if her daughters could do it, I certainly could. She was that kind of friend that I could say that, the kind of friend that if you called her at three in the morning to come get you stranded on the beltway, would say “What in the dickens are you doing on the beltway at three in the morning?” but would come and get you. So I learned to do acrostics. You end with an author and quote. It’s usually interesting and worth the hours it took.

Peter does Sudoku puzzles. He does the Super-duper Hexagonal Samurai Sudoku he gets I don’t know where. I think he picks it up on the Metro. I do the ones in the Post. They start out Monday (lay-downs,) Tuesday (doable), Wednesday (challenging) Thursday (try, but often fail), Friday (only once), and Saturday (never).

At this point, you’re wondering if I have a life. I do. I do puzzles.

In 1947, my father built a house down the street from Key West High School, which was built in the mid-thirties. Behind the school were two houses and a grocery store and a gymnasium, which was catty cornered to our house. Students had to cross the street to get to the gym. Behind the gym were a few homes, but most of the rest of the block held two abandoned houses and a couple of vacant lots filled with brush. Sometime in the early 50’s, the school board closed the street, and tore down the abandoned houses and cleared the vacant lots. Then they covered the whole area with tar, making tennis courts, basketball hoops, volleyball poles and hopscotch drawings. It was completely enclosed by a 12-foot chain link fence with spikes sticking out of the top. The schoolyard was my childhood playground.

My earliest memory is the day they moved the two houses behind the school diagonally across the intersection. One was a rather large house, the other quite small. The family in the big house had five children, four boys and a girl. They decorated the house every Christmas with Santa and reindeer on the roof, wooden carolers, plaster snowmen and singing elves holding bells ringing the yard. They always won the city-decorating prize. Cars constantly lined up to drive by, making Christmas exciting.

Back to the school. They built more classrooms and a cafeteria where those houses used to be. We often climbed the fence to avoid having to walk all the way around to the entrance. There were lots of children; we always had playmates. We skated on the sidewalk around two sides of the school with our skate keys hanging around our necks, being careful not to step on a crack, sold Kool Aid to passers-by for a nickel a cup, hid on the fire escapes and in the bushes, climbed onto the roof, played baseball and kickball on the Volley ball court using the poles as bases, and played Horse on the basketball courts. All with hardly any adult supervision.

The biggest excitement was the time they filmed part of the movie, “The Rose Tattoo,” with Burt Lancaster and Anna Magnani at the school. It was the fire-escape scene. We kids got to watch all the doings. One day a huge publicity trailer pulled up across from my house. They were giving out 5 inch rose tattoos. All of us kids got two, one on the leg and one on the arm. Must have been henna, as it did not come off too easily, even though my Mom scrubbed us raw. We simply could not go to school that way. There were standards back then.

The Lion’s Club met in a building behind the gym on Thursday nights. They had supper and a meeting and if we kids hung around the kitchen, they would give us the leftover desserts.

We were outside all the time when not in school; no television to keep us home. Always barefoot, we all had either ringworm or impetigo at one time or another. I remember once stepping on a nail. When I went home and told my father, he put me in the car and drove to the doctor’s house. Cleaning the wound and getting a tetanus shot took a half hour. Small town. Simpler time.

We had a 3-foot high concrete block fence around our yard. After lunch the high school students would bring their cokes and sit on the wall, dropping their coke bottles inside the yard. Dad would come home from work and collect the bottles and each week take them to the store and get 2 cents a bottle. The Principal called him one day and told him that the bottles belonged to the school and that he had to return them. My father told the Principal that the bottles were in his yard and were his and that if the School wanted the bottles, he could keep his students off our wall. Well that didn’t happen, so my father continued his nightly bottle collecting.

At the end of every school year, the teachers would put in the trash down the street: old papers, and books, erasers, pencil sharpeners, and other paraphernalia, most of it broken. We would haul it all over to our garage and play school, but now we were the teachers. Of course my father had to haul it back. I don’t ever remember him complaining about it. Well, on second thought, maybe just a little.

One more story. They had Friday night dances in the gym and the boys would go outside and gamble on the dark street outside. On Saturday mornings, I would get up early and go over there and regularly find two or three dollars in change and bills on the ground. Found money, like treasure. My father always said that childhood was the best part of our lives. We didn’t believe it then and only realized much later the truth of it, especially in the halcyon Fifties.

P. S. Now that the old Key West High School is going to be the new City Hall, the adventure continues. And that is probably a whole other story.

When I was about ready to start High School, my father bought me a set of encyclopedias from a door-to door salesman. I think he paid a down payment and $6 a month for two years. It was called the American Peoples Encyclopedia. The books came with a coffee table bookcase with the encyclopedias filed under glass, binding up, on each side. It was quite handsome. It also came with an extra volume of quotes from famous people in history, listed under the subject matter of the quote. I spent many hours reading this book and have loved quotes ever since. Peter’s mother on the other hand went out and bought him a Funk and Wagnall’s volume each week from the A&P Supermarket. I became the President of the Honor Society at my school while Peter was blackballed from his the first year; something about a teacher who disliked him. I wonder why? All this doesn’t matter. It just goes to show that sometimes beginnings can be auspicious and vice-versa. But I digress.

Back to my love of words and quotes. My favorite quotes came from Andy Rooney. I have below Brainy Quotes, a site, which lists some of his quotes. They left out my two favorites. “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper, but bare in mind that most of it is true.” And “In a conversation, keep in mind that you’re more interested in what you have to say than anyone else is.”

Another fun site is Heather Carreiro’s “20 obsolete English words that should make a comeback”. It’s on Matador network (website below). Can you make a new sentence using one of the words? I liked the word jargogle meaning “to confuse, jumble.” Ms. Carreiro said “I’m planning on using it the next time my husband attempts to explain complicated physics concepts for fun. Seriously, I don’t need you to further jargogle my brain.“ l also liked twitter-light. Twitter-light is my favorite time of day; sunlight getting softer, city lights coming on, families gathering for dinner, lovers walking in the park, animals settling down for the day, fireflies coming out in the heat of summer, the earth quieting along with us. It’s a time to deliciate in the beauty of the earth. Please forgive all the perissology in that last sentence.

I have to end with my Mother’s favorite saying which I have often used. “ The more you stir in garbage, the worse it stinks.” This means, “Stay right out of it.” Of course, she used a better word than garbage. My Mom was not one to mince words.

Brainy Quote: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/andy_rooney.html

Heather Carriero, “20 Obsolete Words that Should Make a Comeback”: http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/20-obsolete-english-words-that-should-make-a-comeback/

Peter is at a meeting in San Francisco this week and we were talking last night about the time a few years ago when I went with him to a Giants versus Padres game at their new stadium, Candlestick Park, right on the Bay. It was a beautiful California summer night and we took a streetcar to the stadium.

The first thing I noticed was that there were older grandmotherly women dressed in red shorts, sneakers and white shirts working the stands, greeting people, helping with children and seating. I found out that they were a volunteer group that helped the fans and kept order. What a great idea. I think many other teams do this also.

When a home run was hit, the ball usually went into the water, and there were boats out there waiting. Someone usually jumped into the water and retrieved the ball, which floated. Who knew? And it was shown on the jumbotron, which provided some entertainment. And with the crackerjacks, the wave, hot dogs, and the Seventh Inning Stretch done to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”, it was all a lot of fun. I heard later that the boats were sent away, too dangerous, people jumping into the water, but later still, they came back. I don’t know what the situation is now, but that was then.

Back in the mid-70’s when our son George was about seven, and we were living in the Norfolk, VA area, Peter took him and a few of his friends to a Tidewater Tides baseball game. The tickets were from the ship’s Welfare and Rec Fund and were $2 a piece plus $1 for better upfront seats. What a deal. When he came home, he said the whole afternoon cost him a bloody fortune (his exact words), the baseball cards, the baseball caps, the hot dogs, sodas and popcorn. But you shouldn’t put a price on a memory, and you never know when you’re creating one.

Which reminds me of another time at a Nats game at RFK stadium. Peter said he would really like a beer. I said this man here is walking up and down the stands selling beer. Peter said yeah, but that’s Budweiser and it’s probably warm. I’d really like a Michelob. Well, I needed to stretch my legs anyway so I went up to get Peter a Michelob. I stood in a long line and when I got to the front was told that they were out of Michelob. After a big sigh, I said, “My husband really wants a Michelob.” The man then said, “no problem, I’ll put Budweiser in a Michelob cup and he probably won’t know the difference. I took the Bud in a Michelob cup back to Peter and waited for my big moment. After a while, I said. How’s your beer? He said, Great. I said, “It’s Budweiser, they were out of Michelob.” And my next words were to be, “The man up there said you probably wouldn’t know the difference. ” But I didn’t say them. Peter said, “Well, at least it’s cold.” I let him have the last word.

During my voluminous research for this blog, here are a few things I learned.The 2014 World Series champs were the San Francisco Giants. Hitting flies at home or at home plate is called swatting, a 1980’s Red Sox hurler was called Oil Can Boyd. And a bench-clearing fight is a rhubarb and a great baseball tradition.           (From Saturday’s Baseball acrostic puzzle)

Let me root, root, root for the home team,

If they don’t win, it’s a shame,

For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out

At the old Ball Game.”

Here is a good website to hear all three verses of “Take Me out to the Ball Game” sung at a ball game in 1908: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4-gsdLSSQ0

 

 

We have a very old Poinciana Tree in our back yard. This time of year it is beautiful with bright red orchid-like blossoms. There are many of these trees in Key West; you can hardly turn a corner without seeing one. Unfortunately, they are also very messy trees most of the year, and this one hangs over our patio and back door. In the last hurricane, a very large branch broke off near the base, leaving a snare drum size hole going down into the bowels of the tree.

Now, the bees.   Ah, the bees. We first noticed them a few years ago in the All Spice tree just outside the porch. There was a huge swarm there.  By the next day, they had moved into the bowels of the Poinciana Tree. It was all kind of cool. We liked the bees. They fertilized the fruit trees and pretty much took care of themselves.

Then, last year we decided to cut down the Poinciana Tree. We called the tree removal guy, got a permit for six months, and hired a Beekeeper to relocate the bees to a man-made hive we would put in the far reaches of our back yard. He sealed the hive with a white concrete-like stuff and a little tunnel object which let the bees out, but not back in. That was last September. It took some time to get all the other paths into the hive plugged.

Now I am beginning to dislike the bees. In April, I had to e-mail the City Tree Removal Person asking for a six-month extension of the permit, saying that removal of the bees was proving more difficult than imagined.

Since then, the bees have been camping outdoors and it is now June and the whole apparatus for luring the Queen Bee out is collapsing. (I’m beginning to dislike her, particularly). We don’t know where she is, but the bees are still living outside supposedly not being able to get back in. The Queen is supposed to get distressed and come out and go into a little hive with sugar water bringing the bees with her and then the bees are removed and we can cut down the tree. Or, at least that was the plan.

Well, here it is June, and we are dealing with recalcitrant confused bees, and a messy, failing Poinciana tree and I don’t know how or when it’s going to end. In retrospect, we might have done things differently; but retrospect is so often irretrievable.

My father, William Knowles, was a third generation Conch. . My father did not talk a lot, so I tended to listen. These are things he taught me.

When I was about eight, I asked my father why he named me Joanne. He said, “You must like it, you’ve been answering to it all these years.” (Joanne, don’t ask silly questions.)

When Key West was threatened with Hurricane Donna in 1960. I asked him why we didn’t evacuate. He said, “If this house goes, we’re going with it.” He didn’t believe in insurance. “Waste of money,” he said. When Hurricane Donna did not show up after all that preparation and excitement, he said, ‘They don’t know were that hurricane is, but I know it’s not here. I’m going to bed.” (Joanne, when it’s over it’s over.)

When the Cuban Missile Crises loomed, my father opened an old septic tank in the backyard to see if we could use it for a bomb shelter. He said that we could either die of radiation poisoning or stink. When my aunt in Tampa called and told him to send the children to her. He said, “Sarah, those missiles are going to go right over Key West and hit Tampa.” (Joanne, stay here with me. It’s safer.)

One time during college I picked up a cigarette and lit it. My father looked at me and said. “I didn’t know you smoked”, and without missing a beat said, “BECAUSE, when I started smoking many years ago, we didn’t know what we know now, and I’m finding it hard to stop. But you, knowing what you know now, if you start smoking, I will consider that one of the more stupid things you have ever done in your life and I used to think you were a pretty smart girl. (Joanne, respect your body and guard your health.)

One time while home I was reading the newspaper. There was a story about the houseboat people on the boulevard, paying no taxes and dumping sewage into the ocean. They had even become a tourist attraction. I mentioned to my father how terrible I thought that was. He said, ”I don’t know. They’re not bothering me.” (Joanne, mind your own business.)

Once, when he was in his 80’s, he was on the roof fixing something. I said, Dad, you shouldn’t be up there. He gently said, “Hush, Joanne.” (I’m the parent.)

My father was with Peter and me at breakfast and we got him talking about his experience during the war. He was in North Africa and Italy doing engineering repairs after the fighting. He said every time they moved camp, he dug a foxhole and the other men would laugh at him. One night, they were strafed and he found himself and several others in his foxhole. Two men who couldn’t be bothered to get up were killed. (Joanne, always think ahead and prepare.)

My father told me that when he was a child, they got all their water from rainwater collected in cisterns. He said there were all sorts of vermin running around inside of them, but no one ever died. I thought about that for a while and realized that it was probably true.

My father was a man of his times. He was born in 1906 and died in 2003 at the age of 97. He reached adulthood in the Roaring Twenties, suffered during the Great Depression, was drafted at age 36 and went to war. Built his house in 1947 with wood salvaged from barracks built during the war and no longer needed, bought his first car, used, in 1952, raised his children during the Fifties, made sure they got a good education, while he nor my Mom barely finished eighth grade, swam in the ocean a couple of times a day, but put his swimsuit away on Labor Day and took it out on Memorial Day. Even when he could no longer swim in the ocean, he got up every morning at 5:30 AM and walked to the beach. He loved the ocean and the sun and his little tropical island of Key West.

Market Street, San Francisco in 1906. Film shot from a trolley car: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q5Nur642BU

 

 

 

 

Peter took this picture of the Southernmost Point in the early 70’s. The Shell Man sold conch shells to the tourists who were not so many then or as world-weary. Then after the sign getting stolen almost as fast as they could put up a new one, by hoodlums, pranksters, tourists, delinquents, or by your son or daughter.

So, a new more permanent edifice appeared one day, not necessarily a better marker, but definitely a more permanent one.

Not everyone was pleased. The lady who lived across from the large buoy was so upset that she flew the America flag upside down as a symbol of her distress.

President Clinton was invited to be the dedication speaker and told that if he did come, they would rename the street in his honor. He turned them down and it remains South Street and since it points South to Havana it’s probably best. I have a few other blogs in mind, one a Christmas story and the other, how Cuba opening up will affect Key West. Later.

We are just getting the website going and Peter and I are barely speaking. He said he wished I would stop whining. I told him, “It’s my blog and I’ll whine if I want to. I hope soon he’ll just lose interest and butt out.

Sorry for venting (better word than whining). I’m inviting some special people to join me on the site, just look at it or make comments. You’ll know you’re special if you get this.

Joanne