Note:  I wrote this for my wife on a special anniversary. She liked this piece and asked me to please put it on my blog:

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We are standing on the dock at Mallory Square in Key West, Florida. It’s late afternoon, and we’ve come to watch Key West’s premier free attraction – the sunset. Over the years, we’ve visited Key West many times, but this time we are in town to celebrate our 30^th wedding anniversary. It’s late January, and a rare cold front has descended upon the Florida Keys. With temperatures dipping into the high 30s (almost an emergency situation in that locale), we are forced to leave the shorts and flip flops in our suitcase and don long pants, sweatshirts, and even gloves for our trek up to Mallory Square.

“This isn’t the Key West trip I was planning on,” I growl as we trudge past the phalanx of gift shops, bars and restaurants that flank Duval Street. “We should have stayed home and come down another time.”

My wife ignores me, more concerned with the business at hand. “I don’t think it’s going to be a good sunset,” she says, “I’m really disappointed.” I look west, up the street, and see that the sky is overcast.

“Maybe we should just bag it then,” I say.  I notice a café across the street where the patrons are sitting at outdoor tables under heat lamps. They’re eating, drinking, and having fun, and they are obviously much warmer than we are.

“No,” she says, “it may clear off. We still have half an hour until sunset.”

The wind kicks up as we pass the old Customs House, and by the time we make our way through the throng of tourists and street performers to the seawall, my face is frozen and I feel more like we’re on a hike in the Maine woods than on a short vacation in the United States’ southernmost city.

In spite of the cold, the dock is crowded, and people of all ages are milling about trying to stay warm, some with drinks in one hand and digital cameras in the other.  Two teenagers sit on the dock making out, oblivious to the crowd gathering behind them. A middle aged couple to our right speaks in French, and although I have little understanding of the language, their conversation appears to have something to do with the sunset, or lack thereof. We talk to another couple who are down for the week from New Jersey, and the conversation alternates between dismay over the cold snap, and whether or not the sun will break through the cloud bank long enough to allow us all a picture.

“We saw the green flash once,” a lady says to me. She refers to the almost mythical flash of green light that supposedly occurs at the point in time just before the sun dips below the horizon. “But that was up in Naples,” she says, “I’ve never seen it down here.”

My wife seems concerned as sunset approaches, but determined to get a picture if the clouds cooperate. “I think it may be breaking away,” she finally says. I focus on the western sky and notice that a hole appears to be forming in the clouds.

“Yes, you’re right,” says the lady who saw the green flash in Naples. “I think it’s going to break through after all.”

Me, I’m still not certain. The two teenagers stop what they’ve been doing and point digital cameras at arm’s length toward the western sky. The French couple speaks in a low but excited tone in the language I don’t understand. Everyone watches the sky for the big break. Then it comes.

The clouds part swiftly and the first unfiltered rays of the late day sun streak across the water. Muted gasps of delight erupt among the mixed crowd of sunset revelers on the Mallory Square dock. A few seconds after that, the sun breaks through and it hangs suspended for a moment, like a rich orange globe sizzling in the South Florida winter sky. Cameras click as everyone takes advantage of the moment. A young couple asks my wife to take a picture of them with the sunset in the background. When she’s through they ask if we want our picture taken too, and they take a picture of us there. After they take the shot and we’ve thanked them, and they have gone away, my wife reviews their work in the tiny camera view finder.

“Perfect,” she says to me. I squint at the tiny image and see the two of us, huddled together in our sweatshirts, trying to stay warm, with the setting sun hanging just above my left shoulder. I think of how the both of us are now preserved in perfect jpeg format for time eternal. For a moment I forget the cold and I think of the past 30 years that we’d spent together. I think of how many sunset pictures we have at home in our photo albums. I recall pictures she’d waited patiently to take on the Pacific Coast Highway, and in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I remember of the incredible shot she’d taken on Florida’s Anna Maria Island when an old biplane passed in front of the setting sun and she’d captured it perfectly.

“Don’t you think we have enough sunset pictures,” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Not enough.”

“Then you’ll never get tired of taking them?”

She laughs at me, “of course not, they’re all different.”

Then she says, “come on, let’s go somewhere and warm up.”

We walk back toward the old Customs House and stop for a moment on the corner to listen to a street singer. He strums a guitar with frozen fingers and sings a Jimmy Buffett song off key.  He looks colder than I am, so I put two dollars in his tip jar and we head out for Captain Tony’s.

Later that night, on our way back downtown, I spot the French couple. They are drinking white wine at the café with the heat lamps. They don’t recognize me, but I know who they are. I think about Mallory Square and how we’d gathered to watch an event that has occurred every night for the past few billion years. I see us all there, the French couple, the New Jersey couple, the make out kids and the green flash lady. All of us pulled in for that moment. Together we’d experienced the end of a day that will never occur again. It’s unique.

She sits on the edge of the bed and asks me what I want to do tomorrow — our last day in Key West. I tell her I don’t care as long as we go to Mallory Square for sunset.

Like a pearl at the end of the chain,

Not a nasty lady, but a sleepy refuge for the believers,

Tempting the willing with a feeble sense of time,

Sodden revelers awash in sensory devoid pleasure,

Some for the first time – for others just more of every time,

Living for the day, the last day, any day, soaked in party clothes,

Shelter from last year’s treasure lost, and locked,

In memories soon to be swept from view in a green flash,

Of briefest measure, green light from the last day,

In a flash over Sunset Island, like sunsets of glorious days past,

Sometimes seen, sometimes appreciated and remembered,

Other times best watched through an upside down glass,

An old timer, very pickled – at a polished bar had a vision,

He saw Papa, once – walking quickly up Duval –  too quickly,

Up past Sloppy Joe’s – he pays attention to no one,

Long night, hat pulled low, heading home to Whitehead Street,

Before day totters in on a Seabreeze, living for the last one,

Seeking one more before the rum soaked night pecks away at you,

Stop to see the Duval trannies, in high heel shoes, clothes too tight,

Watch them blow overblown kisses to strangers waiting for the end,

For that last day, at twelve it begins anew,

For the pleasure of those who come to trumpet, see it in,

Some dangerous consequences down here at the end,

Socked away and forgotten.

Yesterday, I got a call from Rita. I hadn’t heard from her since before The Election. The last I knew, she and husband J.L. were finalizing their plans to move up to Yellowknife, in the Canadian Northwest, in the event of a Romney victory. She called me from the Thief River Falls, Minnesota location of one of America’s largest discount Super Stores.

“I didn’t think they’d even have a ____-Mart in Thief River Falls,” I said. Then I thought for a moment as I remembered a conversation I’d had with her a year or two before.

“And speaking of which,” I went on, “why are you shopping there? Didn’t you tell me once that you were boycotting them because of their deplorable disregard for their workers? You know, low pay, no benefits for part timers, charges of racial and gender discrimination, and the big time issues you had with them about their foreign product sourcing, to say nothing of the way their cut rate pricing often undermines small local businesses and ravages communities.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “That was then.”

“So?”

“So we were living in Hialeah when I told you that. This is Minnesota and it’s getting cold. J.L and I need long-johns and parkas and mittens. And since we don’t have any money we need all the doorbuster deals we can find. This is the only place we can afford to shop.”

“I see,” I said, “sacrificing principals for material goods? Putting it on the backs of the workers? Do you know,” I told her, “that each one of those stores employs an average of 200 workers, and in terms of unpaid benefits costs the American taxpayer over four hundred thousand dollars per store, and…”

“Oh stuff it, Trop,” she said, suddenly sounding irritated. “I still care about the workers, but it’s going down to nine degrees tonight. That’s a nine without a zero after it for you Floridians – as in NINE FRIGGIN’ DEGREES, Trop.”

“That’s cold all right.”

“You have NO idea. So I don’t need you preaching to me about the American Worker, while you’re poolside at the Intercontinental with a Mai-tai in hand, tapping out your blog, or whatever else you write to make a living.”

“You know I’m not at the Intercontinental.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said, “but you may as well be. You’re not here in Minnesota, and it is friggin’ cold, and I’m pregnant, and Jeffry Louis hasn’t worked in…so long I can’t remember, and the Scion needs tires and Jesus I’m exhausted.”

“I can loan you a few bucks,” I said. “It couldn’t be too much for a set of tires for the Scion.”

Long silence…

“Westhammer, aisle 3.” I head the voice clearly. Then it came again: “Rita…off the cell,ok.”

“Who’s with you Rita,” I asked.

“It’s Jamie, I gotta go.”

“Jamie?”

“My manager.”

“Oh no, you didn’t.”

“It’s just until after the holidays, Trop. I gotta go…”

On the news this morning, I was reminded of the fact that today is Cyber Monday. A news reporter, live from one of the Phoenix, Arizona distribution centers of well-known Amazon.com, was reporting from a massive warehouse. Behind her ran an endless conveyor, zigzagging through the massive warehouse in which an army of workers toiled to keep a seemingly endless stream of various shaped boxes and parcels on course, rolling down the endless conveyer.

The conveyor ends, presumably, at some equally cavernous room in which the endless packages are fork-lifted onto an endless fleet of tractor-trailer trucks and step vans and eventually into the bellies of endless turbo-props and 757s and 767s and two dozen or so other types of short hop to long-haul aircraft. If we could see a bit past landing, we would find an endless number of welcome consumers, from Kalamazoo to Amsterdam, all receiving packages exactly as they ordered them from the comfort of their home/office/coffee shop.

Note the intentional over-use of the word ‘endless’ in the preceding paragraphs.

Some of you who know me are saying right now:

“I know where this is going. Poor old Trop, bless his heart. He’s probably pining for the days when kids got electric train sets and hand knitted sweaters for Christmas. Wonder what he’s getting his wife this year – a bolt of gingham cloth and a pearl hatpin?”

To this I say, nothing could be further from the truth. I have been a loyal customer of the aforementioned online distributor for many years. I embrace online buying for three basic reasons. First, it saves me time – time that I can use to make money; second, the products are often cheaper thus saving me money; third, I don’t have to drive anywhere which saves me more money. So you can see that I am far from being a baret-wearing, latte-sipping, pseudo-intellectual, Ivy League-educated, limousine-liberal, anti-capitalist. Far from it!!!

What I don’t like, however, are marketing ploys and thus my discomfort with ‘Cyber Monday’ (I have the same issue with ‘Black Friday’, but since it’s gone by I won’t bother to talk about it).

Cyber Monday was started back in 2005 by the U.S. National Retail Association to drive traffic to their website Shop.org. It didn’t catch on right away. By 2009, things changed. In that year 52.7% of the money spent on Cyber Monday came from employees making online purchases from their workplace. In a 2010 study conducted by Purdue University, an estimated 1 billion dollars was lost in worker productivity due to internet bargain-surfing workers. By 2010 Cyber Monday had officially won the title of the biggest online sales day of the year with a whopping $1.02 billion in sales. 2011 sales increased that figure by 22%. I won’t venture a guess as to what this year’s sales will amount to but I am thinking ‘record breaker’.

So I love online buying, but I am more than a little bit resentful of Cyber Monday. But, I am never one to force my beliefs on the masses. The rest of you can have at it…pound away on those keyboards…enter those credit card numbers with glee and await the arrival of your books and CDs and electric coffee makers and cocktail shakers and Thomas Kinkade holiday collectables. I shall not bear any ill will toward you, o’ Cyber Monday enthusiasts. But for me, my keyboard shall remain idle – until tomorrow.

Yesterday, we drove over to Lynn University in Boca Raton, the site of tonight’s third, and thankfully final, presidential debate. By 2pm on Sunday, the University was abuzz with activity, and obviously under full security lockdown. Although we wanted to grab a couple of pictures from the main entrance on Military Trail, it was obvious that security was turning us gawkers away. We turned around and headed for the side entrance on Potomac where we found several people milling around the big debate sign, taking pictures. We grabbed a couple of shots too…a few with our faces in them (you guys who know us saw us on Facebook, but I will just post the generic sign here). We needed pictures you know, just because this is an historical event that is happening in our backyard.

So, being an Obama supporter, I came away a bit depressed. Here’s why:

If signage is any indicator of who is going to get the BIG JOB, then Obama had better start working on his notes for his first post-presidential speaker’s tour, because Romney/Ryan have him out-done, hands down. Everywhere you look you see Romney signs – some big and some small…everywhere. Signs Signs Signs. Obama, well not so much.

There are a few Obama signs of course, here and there, but if I might offer a suggestion, get some bigger lettering on those signs Obama (or if you aren’t ordering them yourself, tell your sign-ordering-guy that you have to compete with the Romney/Ryan signs).

The second item of note was a giant Caterpillar tractor, which was loaded on a flatbed semi truck. The Caterpillar tractor was beautifully painted, with Romney/Ryan on the giant blade. Now I did not see who sponsored this big rig. But the message was clear – a Romney/Ryan administration would help spur the construction industry. Ok, if you don’t smell something wrong here, then you haven’t been following the career of Mr. Romney too closely.

Then his blimp crashed. Yes, the Romney blimp. The Romney blimp was designed to bear the biggest Romney/Ryan sign of all – to fly it high over the vulnerable and coveted voters of South Florida. But there was too much wind for it I guess –wind that was blowing hard from the ocean side of the state, pushing the giant expensive Romney/Ryan blimp too far to the west. We saw it coming in over our house in Deerfield at about 900 feet, and I mentioned to my wife that it seemed to be drifting west – toward the Everglades.

Later we heard they made an emergency landing. Thankfully, nobody was injured. But I wonder if it could be an omen – maybe a sign of things to come. Maybe the man with maximum signage will go down in a (soft) emergency landing on Election Day.