It’s the end of the month.  The 31st day of January. Tomorrow – the 1st day of February – is the start of the most popular season on the Florida Keys; namely, the months of February, March and April. It’s the time when most so-called “snowbirds” from northern places such as Michigan and Canada traditionally make their way here to escape the rigours of winter. Recently I heard it said by someone who had the air of first-hand knowledge that anything in the Keys beyond the month of April is intolerable, that the ambient temperatures are by then unforgiving.

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Located Bayside in Key Largo, the diving capital of the world at mile marker 96. Buttonwood Bay is a 280 unit condominium community on a lush 40-acre tropical hammock that fronts Florida Bay to the West for spectacular sunsets every night. The community was thoughtfully designed to surround a magnificent protected coral rock harbor with boat slips for every unit.

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Being within a 2-hr drive on the Overseas Highway to Key West, the tip of which is 90 miles from Cuba; and given the romantic penchant for the allusion to the nefarious import of ambrosial hand-rolled cigars, it is no shock on a brilliantly sunny morning while reclining under the azure sky by the pool in Key Largo suddenly to discern the pleasing waft of a good cigar in the ether.

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This morning while munching a sliced green Granny apple and sipping a strong black java, the clever people at Apple Music lured me into a selection under their Listen Now category called New Music Mix. I am listening to it now, piped into my Bose Micro SoundLink to which my MacBook Pro is connected by Bluetooth. What a marvellous abbreviation of domestic technology!  Often I proclaim to anyone in sight that Apple Music is one of the best things to happen! Before Apple Music I confined my musical research to retail music stores which displayed their CDs in the manner of files in a cabinet through which one sorted by flipping plastic covers.

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For reasons immaterial I’ve lately had occasion to read “bios”, those short biographical profiles normally written by oneself or one’s agent or publicist for predominantly commercial purposes. The bumf contained in the bios is invariably complimentary; and, as a result, the substance is somewhat suspicious or sufficiently attenuated as to be both uninventive and in some measure questionable. Especially when one knows the person about whom the bio is written, there is often a frigid disparity between that personal acquaintance and what one reads. It isn’t so much that there are incongruities but rather critical gaps.  What it is that expresses a person’s particular characteristics is seldom reflected in these so-called life stories of limitless triumph. It causes me to doubt or to diminish the profitability of the production.

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We regularly quip, as I did by email this Friday morning with my longstanding friend Fiona St Clair in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that we’re having to endure another day of unbridled climatic flawlessness on Key Largo.  The magnificence of the azure sky has blended with an uncommonly arid and cool northerly wind of 31Km/hr. It has made for an exceptionally reinvigorating atmosphere throughout the island.

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Joe Walsh, Commissioner of the Greater Northeast Athletic Conference, is from Boston. He and his wife Deb are longtime winter residents of Buttonwood Bay Club. They reside for the season in a townhouse here in Key Largo immediately next to our own. We both happened to be at the central pool this morning. Joe approached me, in his inimitable way with clipboard in hand and the indisputable air of an estate agent, to enquire whether I approved of Buttonwood Bay Club (by which I interpreted he meant Key Largo as well).  I replied succinctly that we had already contracted with the owner’s agent to return next year.  Joe’s casual enquiry revived a number of personal recollections about the Florida Keys in particular and the State of Florida in general.

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It must be another sign of my unobstructed curmudgeonly decomposition that almost everyone whom I meet these days comes across to me as moderately odd. I say this with sizeable reservation for several reasons. I realize the assessment appears to sanction my own behaviour as less peculiar (which I am quite certain without investigation is not true). I acknowledge too that my upbringing from boarding school at St. Andrew’s College to law school at Dalhousie University was not without its perplexing flavours. And being a country lawyer in a small town of rural Ontario is not traditionally adjudged to be without character or distinctiveness.

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The events of life can be precipitous. In 2007 at 59 years of age I had sudden open heart surgery which sidelined me from my law practice for three months. Ten years later at Daytona Beach Shores I suffered a serious fall from my bicycle (my heart stopped) which kept me at Halifax hospital for almost a month.  My next casualty may not be so lucky.

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The field of ritual studies has seen a number of conflicting definitions of the term. One given by Kyriakidis is that a ritual is an outsider’s or “etic” category for a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical. The term can be used also by the insider or “emic” performer as an acknowledgement that this activity can be seen as such by the uninitiated onlooker.

Emic and etic are derived from the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic, respectively, where phonemics effectively regard elements of meaning and phonetics regard elements of sound. The possibility of a truly objective description was discounted by Pike himself in his original work; he proposed the emic-etic dichotomy in anthropology as a way around philosophic issues about the very nature of objectivity.

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