A Day In a Life in Key West — William Williamson

In 1982, Key West, the southernmost city in the continental United States was feeling the winds of change. The Mariel Boatlift from the year before when thousands of Cubans sailed into port after Fidel Castro allowed them to leave Cuba was still impacting their lives. The recent opening of the new Seven Mile Bridge was surely going to bring more tourists and traffic to an island that publicly announced in April they were seceding from the United States calling itself the sovereign nation, Conch Republic because of a blockade on the mainland searching for illegal refugees and drug smugglers. But the most ominous news would come from the Center for Disease Control announcing the sudden, mysterious cases of infectious respiratory illness's affecting the Gay community, was a disease that they were calling AIDS.

Henry Roberts and his grandmother, Nana, are in Key West to bury her oldest sister, Lela, in the Key West Cemetery. Afterwards, they visit Nana's younger sister, May, on Stock Island, who was too ill to attend the funeral or Lela's wake that they are going to next. Watching Nana care for her dying sister, Henry is feeling the winds of change in himself, as well. He is coming to the realization that he does not want to make a living from the sea like the generations of Conch men before him. He is aspiring to be a writer, searching for inspiration and stories from the people around him who have called the Keys their home for their entire lives.