Home, sweet home.

Christmas Eve I meet up with Charles and his pretty girlfriend Cassy. We eat bread, hummus and salad at their new home, drink wine and talk. Charles leaps in the pool. Their roommates' little girl is crazy excited about her presents. She's being cleverly distracted as her brightly wrapped gifts are shuttled from their various hiding spots to their rightful home beneath the evergreen.

Charlie, Cassy and I ride bikes into Key West. We peddle along the wide, paved bicycle path that leads from our quiet neighborhood out in Stock Island to the loud, bright, plastic heart of the Florida Keys. It thumps and pumps a heavy radio-single bass that ushers shoulder-to-shoulder pedestrian traffic in endless pub crawls down narrow streets. Hawkers call out specials and lead blank faced, aloha shirt and shorts wearing tourists into crowded bars, novelty shops and cabarets. Like so many blood vessels shuffling through the veins, meat and organs of a tired town.

Charlie and Cassy split a dozen oysters at a bar managed by a friend of ours. I talk to Mike, a regular patron, about nothing in particular. He's a true Conch, a Key West local for who knows how long. His skin is tan and thin like his body, and his white hair comes out in tufts from under his cap. A sort of retired Popeye that doddles around town on a squeaky bicycle wearing a thrift store sports jacket over fishing t-shirts. He invented the wheel, he says, makes a penny in royalties on every wheel ever produced. We count wheels for a little while on bicycles, hand trucks and baby strollers. It's a get rich slow scheme, he says. We all drink two fingers of merlot dolloped into the bases of huge, classy wine glasses. And then we shove off.

Cassy has to work in the morning so her and Charles take off early. I meet up with Jeremy around ten and head to his house so he can wind down a bit after work. There his roommate's girlfriend, Dorota, cooks us some Polish Christmas dishes. Another roommate of theirs is out of town for the holidays. She left them some small presents under the tree. One is a Christmas album she recorded with a friend of hers, a young blond haired guy in the Coast Guard. We play the CD, then join Dorota and her boyfriend in performing a sort of traditional Christmas rite. This involves breaking unleavened wafers for each other, trading the morsels of bread, then hugging and wishing each other a merry Christmas. After all of this, Jeremy and I head to a chic, well polished little bar called The Porch to drink a Christmas beer.

Jeremy is six foot three with long arms and wide hands. He thinks out loud and he's talking to you, too, so that his cards are always on the table. We ride bikes to the other side of Key West talking about work and boat restoration, then lock the bicycles up on a metal rack and go into The Porch to split a tall, hoppy micro brew called Noel. From there we walk to a couple of other bars, talking to people and selecting a drink at each.

When it gets late I find myself inside a poorly lit bar speaking with a woman from Kansas City. The music is loud and the conversation is more nods and smiles than anything. Jeremy gives me the key to the bike lock and says he'll meet up with me later. After another twenty minutes or so of chatting idly, I decide against finding the bikes then walk back to Jeremy's house and lie down on his couch. I don't hear him come in.

In the morning Jeremy and I eat breakfast at a local diner. We talk about diving and the future. After breakfast we set out for 3D Boatyard on Stock Island on bicycles, weaving through a network of back roads and bumping along over tucked away bike paths. At the boatyard I show Jeremy the work I'm doing on my boat. We both call our families and wish them well for the holidays. Around lunchtime the sun is coming down white and heavy, so we decide to go swimming. We meet up with Charles, the woman from Kansas City and one of her friends at the beautiful white beach that surrounds Fort Zachary Taylor back in Key West. The beach is more crowded than I've ever seen it and the water is chilly but refreshing. Charles and I swim freestyle out to the perimeter of the marked swimming area and then back to shore. We're not racing but we are, too.

The Kansas City woman takes off to explore the rest of the beach with her friend. I have a mask in tow so Jeremy, Charles and I take turns wearing it to dive down into the water and have a look. The visibility is terrible but we're all happy to be swimming.

When a barrage of clouds come charging over the sky the wind turns cool and the water turns green-gray. Charles is trading texts anxiously with his girlfriend, and Jeremy is getting hungry. In a few minutes we're back on our bicycles, riding in a sort of "V" and talking about carnies. They're heavy drug users, economically depressed, uneducated. There's a carnival visiting Fort Zak.

All the rides break down into trailer-able hauls, though, Jeremy says. There aren't any bolts, either, just heavy gauge pins so that everything can be disassembled with hardly any tools. He's helped assemble a chair ride a few times, he says, and it gets real easy after you've done it some. It comes apart and goes right back together in no time flat. No kidding.

Jeremy's got to work tomorrow and Charles has to pick up his girlfriend from the store she works at. So we split up in Key West, Jeremy heading home and Charles and I riding back to Stock Island. Charles pedals fast, enjoying the speed and the quick, swerving motion of riding onto and off of the sidewalk. He rides out into traffic confidently, unwittingly putting his faith in motor vehicle operators' ability and willingness to avoid collision. I like riding with him.

When we get to Charles' street we bid farewell and toss a hand wave and a few sentences back and forth. I continue on to Shrimp Road, turning left into 3D Boatyard and pedaling past ten or twenty boats mounted on stilts. Evening is settling down in so many quiet, lifeless shades of gray. The dry docked boats leer at me silently with their hulking mass, their patchy paint and their hole ridden tarps hanging like cobwebs in an abandoned house. There are some hushed voices wafting between the boats. A dog trots over to a rusty dumpster and presses its nose into the ground there.

At Jordan's Ghost I lock my borrowed bike to one of my boat's stilts, then climb the ladder slowly, fishing in my pocket for the small, silver key. Home, sweet home.