Edward L. Glaeser, New York Times:

Cracking open the Champagne [UD‘s not much of a drinker] does not exactly feel in tune with today’s spirit of national austerity, but recessions get worse when prosperous people do not spend. In fact, if you can afford it, then this is exactly the moment to redo your kitchen [UD does not cook] or buy a car [UD does not drive]. Not only will you be able to get a good deal, but your spending will help revive the economy. The economist John Maynard Keynes convincingly argued 70 years ago that thrift was no virtue during a recession.

How, UD asked herself, to avoid the vice of thrift?

She could help keep Key West afloat!

So she has rented a palmy apartment here with excellent books in the living room and fine art (the owner’s an artist) in the kitchen. This morning she slept late (7:30) and then lay in bed, sometimes reading, sometimes gazing at the palms swaying outside her bedroom windows.

She blogged a little, and she felt the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe, as a calm darkens among water-lights…

No, no, no. That last bit was Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning. UD felt neither darkness nor encroachment. She felt fortunate, and light in spirit.

She did some writing.

Her breakfast was leftover bread from last night’s dinner at a Duval Street bistro. She dipped the bread in some flavored olive oil she found in a cupboard. Also she had the two weeny biscottis she’d been given on her flight to Fort Lauderdale.

All sinfully thrifty, but this was her first morning on the island, and her old ways lingered.

She fixed things right away this afternoon. She went to Panini Panini and bought THREE salads, each ridiculously expensive, and she’s now having one of them for dinner.

**************

For hours she walked through the sunlit streets of Key West. The wind took the edge off the sun and made the palms sway, and the palms made shadows on the white houses.

On Margaret Street (there’s a Margaret Street nearby), a man in painter’s trousers greeted UD. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Beautiful!” said UD, and then she wondered whether – since almost every day is beautiful – the greeting Beautiful day isn’t it gets a bit old around these parts. Maybe people eventually say it to one another sardonically, like that character in the film White Mischief – “Oh God not another fucking beautiful day.”

Here was the main cemetery for the island, everyone buried above ground in white body boxes with flowers and photos and dates of birth and death on them. A rooster and his girlfriend poked among the tombs. One of the boxes was a sculpted casket; it was sustained at a strange angle by four gray marble columns underneath it. It sort of looked like a model for an airplane.

Without the wings and shit.

“Ma’am,” said a fellow tourist to UD, who hates being called ma’am. “Do you happen to know where the marker is that says I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK?”

“Is that here? It seems every graveyard claims it, it’s so clever. No, I don’t know where it is.”

Then the guy found it, and he ran and got UD to show her.

Among the hypercharming houses across from the cemetery was one with the same tree that overlooks UD‘s bedroom windows. She wrote about this stunner yesterday; its bright copper leaves have fallen all over her balcony. The house’s owner had nailed a paragraph of description to the tree’s trunk:

TERMINALIA CATAPPA
NATIVE OF SOUTH ASIA
FLESH IS SWEET AND TART

“In Key West,” thought UD, “even botanical markers sound decadent.”