I got seriously side-tracked by life... Where were we? Key West! (an vague overview)

We fit an awful lot of adventure into our 2-3 years in Key West. I can honestly say that it is one of the few places we've lived that I would love to go back to. 

Here's what you need to know about Key West. It's tiny. Really. Go Google it. I'll wait....
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Now zoom out until you can see the bottom of Florida and Cuba.
....

See what I mean? It's small. It's a tiny island. Now here's what you need to know about Sigsbee Island. It's WAY smaller and connected to Key West by a tiny two lane road. Now... see where the pin is stuck? THAT is an even smaller island attached by a road on the west and a footbridge on the north to Sigsbee. It basically consisted of a road that looped the island with rows of duplexes on either side.

We lived on the non-water side of the road, but it was okay because all of the waterfront houses on the Key West side had docks and they were 'public' property. Everyone was allowed to use them. I fell in love with the ocean while we lived here and I still love the ocean.

Key West and Sigsbee Island.

Living on this island as a kid was great. Once we got settled in and made all the new friends there was no end to the things that we found to entertain us. Everyone had fishing poles and drag nets, so on most days I would be found over on the dock fishing. I don't remember actually catching anything other than junk fish off that dock though. We used to get the tiniest hooks we could find and see who could catch a needlefish for grins and giggles. I don't think any of us ever did... If we weren't fishing off the dock, we were using a drag net on the shore to catch minnows for bait.

At night we were on the shore with a hand net, shining a flashlight into the water looking for glowing eyes. We would scoop up shrimp and whatever else glowed at us. One night we scooped up an eel that we didn't know what to do with but usually it was just shrimp which we sold to my dad. Dad made the mistake of offering us actual money for live shrimp to be used as bait. They were alive when we sold them to him but usually dead by the next morning.

On the Key West side there was a lot of shallow water. The only deep water was right next to Sigsbee Island so boats could get in to the dock areas. The majority of the water between the two islands was one to two feet deep, maybe 3 feet in parts. Thanks to Google you can see what I'm talking about here:

All the pale green/blue is the shallows and that tiny bit of land in the lower right is Key West.

You can see on the picture how they dredged out the area around the island to make the water deeper for boats to get in and out. We used to call that the 'drop off' because, well... the bottom dropped off. It was a sudden drop. If you were walking in the shallows and took a wrong step you would be in over your head. We used to tell stories about what might live in the deep part. Scary stories. Sea monster stories. None of us ever went swimming out there. Monsters lived down in the depths. We were all quite sure of this.

One month dad borrowed a little Boston Whaler 2-3 person sailboat from a friend who was going on vacation. He took us sailing over in those shallows on the other side of the drop off. It was really cool once we got clear of the monster infested deep water. The shallows were so clear that you could see everything that was living down there and got more interesting when we got closer to the mangroves (green blobs on the satellite picture above).

The mangroves were really pretty neat  Having never lived in the tropics before I naturally assumed that trees needed to be on land. They need dirt and they need fresh water. Fresh. Water. Here are these huge trees growing in the middle of the shallow salt water with no sold ground under them. The fish loved them because they offered shelter from the bigger fish. They would have been a lot neater if my dad hadn't started making up stories about strange animals that only lived in the mangroves and how they would jump from the branches onto unsuspecting boats that got too close and gnaw on children...


Next time I think I will go into more boat stuff, because you know that my dad wasn't going to live on this island and NOT have a boat!

It took almost a YEAR to drive to Key West!

Wow.. did you miss me? So yeah. The title is misleading. I didn't take a year to drive to Key West... It's been almost a year since the last time I wrote something here. My bad. Where were we....? Oh yes. Moving to Key West, Florida. 

This was a road trip of no events other than we discovered that, at the time (1967-68) stopping for Mexican food in Virginia was NOT a good idea. They apparently had no idea what Mexican food was supposed to taste like. I'm sure they''re better now. I mean they have to have learned something in the last 45 years, right?

When we got to Key West, we stayed iat some sort of rooming house until we found a place to rent. It was near the water and, honestly, there is very little I remember about the place other than that was where I discovered Playboy magazines. A huge pile of them. In a storage shed. I don't remember the naked women, I remember the cartoons. That grandma with the boobies down to her knees and… Little Oral Annie. I'm not going to pretend that I understood anything that was going on in those comics, I just knew they were comics and I was bored. I'm gonna say that I knew enough that I was very careful to put them all back in the same order that I found them in.

We moved into our rental house and I started school at Poinsettia Elementary. I don't remember this house that well. I remember getting in trouble for not coming straight home from school one day. I imagine that if someone had *told* me that a hurricane was on it's way that I might not have taken my time. It might also have helped if someone explained exactly what a hurricane was… I mean... I was familiar with Connecticut weather and they had no hurricanes. I got in trouble for goofing off that day.

Eventually we got into housing out on Sigsbee Island. 1135B Gilmore Dr. The girl that lived next door was Beth Kocher and she had a dog named Snoopy. She had an older mentally disabled sister named Laurie and a brother who apparently made no impression on me since I can't remember his name. (edit: His name was Terry and I'm remembering this TEN years after original post! Go me!!)  The ocean was across the street. Across. The. Street.

I think of Key West as the beginning of the tomboy years for me. Once we moved into that house on Sigsbee Island, I spent ALL my time on a dock fishing, in the water netting things, exploring the area and playing games in the street after dark. So starts the Key West chapters of this bloggie thing.

We had a vacation in Charelston SC.

I only remember taking one vacation while we were living in CT. Dad was out on his submarine and ended up for an extended stay in Charleston SC. Mom packed us all up and we got on a train to go visit for a few weeks. I remember very little about the train ride down, I think most of it must have been really boring. I do remember my brothers reaction when the porter came to our 'cabin' though.

The porter came in to get our tickets and see if we needed anything. He was the biggest, blackest man we had ever seen... EVER. I would compare him to Michael Clarke Duncan from the Green Mile... or maybe even bigger. Then again, as 6 and 8 year olds, he might have only seemed that big to us. He could have been much more normal in size but he was still the blackest man we've ever seen. My brother backed himself up against the wall, stood straight as a board and just stared, his eyes as big as saucers... You have to remember that this was the mid 60's and in our day to day lives, us kids hardly EVER saw a black person. Mom was very embarrassed and apologized to him and they laughed. I guess she had had her own fair share of staring, being (usually) the only Japanese woman at any social function that my parents went to.

We had a small house to stay in while we were in Charleston. It was near the water and we would go out crabbing almost every day. I actually don't remember doing anything else while we were there... Crabbing for us consisted of just going to the shore with a length of string, tying an old, smelly, people-can't-eat-this chicken leg to it and throwing it out into the water. We let the chicken sit out there for a few minutes them we s-l-o-w-l-y pulled it in. Usually there were 2-3 crabs following the chicken and noshing on it's nastiness. Then we just waded in and grabbed the crab and threw them into a bucket. I don't remember ever eating these but I'm assuming that mom cooked them. lol!

The train ride back to CT was non-eventful. I only remember almost freaking out because on one stretch there was a wall of rock on one side of the train and the other side was the ocean... and the ocean was hundreds of feet down a cliff. Sometimes you couldn't even see the ground that the track was on on that side... I didn't approve of that.

Facts that may or may not be true about Connecticut

My first bicycle wreck. I was going downhill with someone riding on the handlebars. We hit a rock and while my passenger was able to just jump ship and land on her feet, I did not escape being introduced to asphalt face first. I tell people that this is why my nose is so small.

I almost fell out of a car while being carpooled to school. Too many kids in the backseat and the door popped open. There were no seatbelts back in the day so I guess I was lucky that the person sitting next to me grabbed my and pulled me back in.

I got stuck up on some huge rocks that we were climbing near the stream. Dad had to come rescue me.

Near the same stream there were the remains of some building. At least I think it was remains... There was a wall with dirt against it that was about one and a half stories high. Kinda like what was left was the basement part of the building. You could get to the top by walking and when you looked down on the other side of the wall you could see that people were using that as a dump. There were mattresses in the 'dump' and we used to jump off the wall onto the mattresses. We were stupid.

We used to go up to Devil's Hopyard which was some big park thing. Riding in someone else's car, their mom driving, she got going as fast as 100 mph... on a twisty, hilly, country road. I'm surprised that we survived Connecticut.

Don ran around in the house and tripped and had to get stitches (again) from his encounter with the coffee table.

That reminds me... After Scotty moved a family with 3 daughters moved into his house. One day while we were all running around in the boulder field behind the house I was stuck by a thought. I wonder what would happen if I deliberately tripped this girl. So I stuck out my foot and tripped her. She went head first into a boulder. Stitches. I don't know why people kept playing with me.

Mom got us a 'vaccuu-form' from a garage sale. We spent many hours letting that thing get hot enough to cook an egg and making dumb things out of sheets of plastic. I burned myself more than a few times on that thing.

I started doing paint-by-numbers here. I didn't always follow the color key. When there was leftover paint I always saved it. This will be important later when we move to Guam.

We had a small raised garden bed behind our house where I planted watermelon seeds. I grew a watermelon that was about 2 feet long, but no one told me that I should rotate it every once in a while, so while it looked pretty amazeballs from the top, the underneaths were all brown and got rotten. I was sad about that cause I wanted to eat that watermelon that I grew myself.

I took ballet lessons. Sometimes I didn't want to go. On one of those times I threw my ballet slippers out the car window on the way. Mom was not pleased.

Dad went to Puerto Rico on his submarine. Whenever he came home he brought presents. He brought me a 6 foot long blue fuzzy snake this time. I bragged about this stuffed snake coming from Puerto Rico for YEARS. I loved that snake. Much later, when I was over 30, my mom finally told me that the snake came from some toy store in Groton because dad forgot to pick up gifts in Puerto Rico. Even after all that time and the fact that I hadn't actually had that snake for almost 20 years, this made me a little sad. Stupid american snake.

Huh... I"m pretty sure most of this stuff is true. 

Wow... I look back at some of this and realize... kids just don't have dangerous fun any more. How do they learn?

We got our first pets in Connecticut

My parents got into tropical fish while we were in CT. When I say 'got into' I mean seriously. We had 4 tanks that held a variety of fish. No goldfish... nothing that common. My favorites were the neons. Tiny little swimming rainbows! There was a Jack Dempsey and of course little catfish for gravel cleaning and plecostomus' for glass cleaning. I remember sitting in front of the tanks and just watching them swim in their happy little homes. They had live plants and real rocks, none of that plastic junk for these fishies.

Neons... tiny swimming rainbows!

 I remember trips to the fish store well. It was an adventure. There were no PetsMarts are any kind of chain stores then. This store was set up in what used to be an old house. It was warm and smelled swampy and damp inside and there were dozens of tanks set up holding all kinds of fish. I wish there were still small mom and pop tropical fish stores. You could tell that they were run by people who really liked fish and took excellent care of their stock. Fish are cool. I would like to have some again if I ever move into a place with enough room.


Our first pets were turtles. Tiny little red ear turtles with shells that measured about 1 inch around.. We each had a little plastic turtle home which consisted of a plastic circle, flat-bottomed bowl with a plastic palm tree and island in the middle.

My turtle island didn't have gravel.

 Mom used to give us little balls of ground beef for a turtle treat about once a week which they actually loved. I don't remember what we named those turtles but they were really cute and we liked them a lot. One of us liked his turtle a little too much and held it for extended periods of time which eventually resulted in a turtle death. My turtle survived and grew to 3 to 4 inches around before we moved and I had to give it away.

After the turtle incident we got gerbils. We named them Hansel and Gretel. Gerbils are really good escape artists. That's what we learned. We also learned that Don shouldn't have a small pet. He also held his gerbil a lot and once held it by the tail when it really wanted to not be held... the tail skin and fur decided to leave the actual tail so he ended up with a gerbil with a naked tail. It grew back eventually. In the end, the neighbors' bathroom wall was torn out to get Gretel back into her cage. We aren't sure, but we think that she had babies while she was 'on vacation' in the wall... Not that it mattered since the exterminator was there shortly after her rescue.

So... our next pet was a puppy.

If you take the brown off this dog and add more tail.....

 We named her Princess and she had short white fur with black spots. Not dalmation spots...big spots.She was a small mutt... I want to say she was at least part terrier. Lots of energy. We had little dog treats that were shaped like people that I used to try and teach her tricks... useful tricks like sitting. I don't know if those treats are still made... they weren't shaped like just ANY people... They were shaped like people that dogs are good at biting. You know - mailmen and postmen. She also had milkbone treats and one day I decided to sample one. Hey, if it's good enough for my dog... Mom broke a wooden spoon that day in an effort to make me stop chewing and spit out said Milkbone. She broke it on the table, not me... but it made a really loud noise. I continued chewing and she told dad when he got home. Dad then had to talk to me and explain that I shouldn't eat those. I think it might have been hard for him to keep a straight face during that talk.

When dad got orders to go to Key West we had to give Princess away. We kept in touch with the people who took her in and were told that Princess had run away from them at least 2 times and went back to our old house. I guess she eventually settled in at her new house though. Either that or my parents stopped telling us about her escapes.

Enough about pets now. Next time, things that I remember that may or may not be true.

OMG....

Well, obviously I got side-tracked by who knows what... It is late so I am making a promise to myself that tomorrow I will continue this blog and stop getting side-tracked by life. I have to finish up Connecticut cause seriously... some awesome thing happened in Florida.

My mom played BINGO!

One of the most amusing memories that I have of Groton centers around the fact that my mom played bingo. A lot.

The base had a bingo night and that was probably one of my mom's only 'non-family' things to do. Her escape from dad and us kids. The base couldn't give cash prizes to the winners but they always gave good prizes. All of our Corning Ware was the result of bingo winnings. We had sets of towels (like we needed more!) and other household goods that were bingo winnings.

She continued playing bingo whenever she could so it was not surprising that she went to a game shortly before we moved to Key West. When I say shortly before I mean she went to play AFTER the movers had come and picked up our main shipment of household goods that were heading to Key West before us. We were to leave in a few days so really, we didn't need anything. Dad sold the boat and we had to give our dog away...for some reason that was beyond me. Dad said it was because of quarantine rules moving to Florida... I suspect it was that he didn't want to road trip with a dog in the car.

Mom got home from bingo that night and had an odd look about her. We knew something was up but we didn't know what. When asked if she won anything she replied with a slow 'Ye-e-e-es'. So we asked her what she won. The reply? "A sailboat"  O.O

Mom had won one of those personal sized sailboats that were made out of extra strong lightweight stuff...
A boat. Yeah. We *just* sold one of those....

It was just like this.. only blue and white and without a trailer.

 So... We advertised that to be sold as well... What were we supposed to do? Our stuff was already on the way to Florida. We kept it in the house leaning up against the stairwell wall, until someone bought the thing. Looking back I wish we had just brought it with  us. Key West would have been the best place EVER for a kid to have one of those.

When I got older, mom would occasionally take me to bingo with her. Especially in Washington. I never won anything... I take it back. I won a $25 prize once but I had to split it 6 ways with the other people who also won. Mom? She never walked out without winning at least enough to cover the cost of her bingo cards and usually walked out with more. After she passed we discovered her secret. She had a little toiletries box (the kind that an airline would give you if you got stuck overnight somewhere unexpectedly) that was stuffed to overflowing with good luck charms, Japanese, Indian and American versions, that she kept in the bottom of her purse. Snake skins, four leaf clovers, little elephant figurines, horse shoes... you name the good luck charm and odds are they were represented in that little box. Sneaky lady....