T he woman was standing on the corner of Duval and Caroline streets about 20 feet away from where I had just deposited my last fare, a besotted man from Brooklyn who thought he was trying out for the role of Tony Soprano.

One more ''bada-bing, bada-boom'' and the guy might have found himself sleeping with the fishes. After this character poured himself out of my taxi, the woman approached and asked if I was free.

And the angels sang . . .

Her voice was like a symphony, offering equal parts of the ecstasy that is the harp's song, the pathos of weeping violins, the staccato heartbeat of the timpani, the vibrant, life-affirming clash of cymbals.

Every word she said was poetry. It was Browning, Gibran, Dickinson flowing like nectar across her tongue.

She moved like a goddess. Her eyes were as blue as a mountaintop sky and sparkled like a pure bright star. She made the universe seem small.

I fell in love. Again.

Key West can do it to you. It can blend soft gossamer breezes and the tang of salted sea air, toss them with the steamy floral scents of night-blooming jasmine, then stir in the circus of Duval Street and its quirky characters and magically turn the mixture into love.

A BAD HABIT

Before you get the wrong impression, here's the gospel. It's a habit I have, falling in love. I am casually stricken like this at least a dozen times a year. Not quite the bane of my existence, but rather the cross that I bear (if that's the appropriate expression for a Jewish serial romantic). I infatuate easily. And I'm harmless. I am also grateful for the fact that my wife thinks it's a hoot.

Mae, the woman who stole my heart, asked me to drive her to Winn-Dixie; it came out ''Fly me to the moon.'' Obviously my imagination has a tendency to take wing.

She had never been to the Southernmost City before. ''I had to see what Key West has to offer.'' She added, ``It's a pretty neat little town.''

Brahms' Lullaby, I thought.

She was exuberant. ``Topless dancing, tattoo parlors, music everywhere. This is a very sexy town. The only thing I haven't found is gambling.''

Gershwin! Cole Porter!

I explained that the gambling boat that had operated out of Key West still sits in 18 inches of water in the mangroves a dozen miles north of town, where it was deposited by the storm surge that followed last year's Hurricane Wilma.

''Imagine that,'' she said.

Some John Lennon thrown in for good luck.

Mae and her husband had taken this vacation as a birthday gift to each other. She was elected to pick out the cake for their evening's celebration.

``Our birthdays are only a week apart so we celebrate both of them somewhere in between, but never on either exact date.''

Mae asked me to guess her age. This is always a delicate situation.

''Ageless,'' was my response, a wishy-washy, on the fence, safety-zone answer to this potentially explosive question.

She loved it, then told me that her husband was two years younger than she was. ''I snatched the cradle,'' she giggled.

A cherub laughed.

Her husband was 88 years old; Mae was celebrating her 90th birthday.

The nonagenarian looked decades younger and none the less beautiful, which I told her.

She patted my cheek, and despite my gray hair told me what a ''good boy'' I was.

I nodded, trying to wipe the silly schoolboy grin off my face.

Mae returned my smile. I melted like a pat of butter on a toasted English muffin.

HEAD OVER HEELS

When I got home and told my wife about the events of the day and how I had fallen head over heels for Mae, she laughed and responded with a ''good for you'' attitude. Her voice soft as velvet, her eyes intelligent and joyful, her beauty endless.

``I hear music and there's no one there . . . .''

There I go. I've fallen in love again.

Toby has lived on the streets for most of his adult life, other than for a short stint in the Army, when he served in Vietnam, and a couple of failed attempts at holding down a ``real job, living square.''
''No one wants to hire a drunk,'' he told me. ``I went home once, a long time ago. My father had Alzheimer's but was labeled senile. I couldn't take it. I hit the bottle hard and never stopped. Been in and out of hospitals and probably the local lockup in over 40 states. Usually for vagrancy. I guess I'm a lost cause.''
According to Toby, his service record was a good one that almost ended badly. His first year in Vietnam, he was in the thick of it, served with valor, saw a lot of blood and guts, held the hand of a couple of good friends while they died.
He had been wounded and later returned to the front lines, where he assaulted an officer.
''Big mistake,'' Toby admitted. ``I still feel bad about that. The day after I hit him, he got killed.''
I met Toby on a sparkling Key West morning near the chickee huts that border the one-block-long county-owned Higgs Beach, where a large number of homeless people congregate each day.
This beach and its environs are a microcosm of Key West, a diorama, explicit in its portrayal of the southernmost city.
It offers a sometimes acute, sad, joyful, eclectic, heartening and disheartening jambalaya of parallel universes aware of each other's existence yet totally self-centered in relation to each other.
From the beach you can see people playing volleyball, sunbathers slathered and shining, joggers, bikers and lovers holding hands.
By noon, the restaurant at the edge of the beach is serving cool drinks and colorful appetizers.
Fifty feet away is the ghost of the now-defunct mobile soup kitchen that at one time set up on Sunday mornings to serve nourishment for the body and a word of encouragement for the soul.
But Monroe County put a stop to that practice two years ago.
People stroll through the adjacent Civil War-era fort, ogling the best that the local garden club, now located there, has to offer. There is yoga on the beach, the White Street Pier for fishing or sightseeing.
The chickee huts are, for much of the day, a refuge for the homeless and their quest for relief from the unrelenting Key West sun. Several men, looking like discarded rags, curl fetus-like in the shade of a palm tree.
Toby told me about going home and visiting his hospitalized father in the weeks before he had died.
``I visited him every day. And each day he would sit staring into space with a puzzled look on his face. Never said a word. One day he snapped out of it. And he told me that his mind was spinning out of control, his life's story swirling around faster and faster like test tubes at the end of a centrifuge. And the faster his life sped by, the more confused he got. It became a blur of colors and sounds.''
Toby paused. A dog barked, a child shrieked and a seagull cried.
``My father told me that he couldn't sort it out and that it hurt trying to. He went to sleep and died the next day.''
Toby pointed to the dogs.
``That's the life. See that couple with the gray puppy? I come back, I wanna come back as their dog. Nice people. I can tell by looking at them. Those dogs over there all got a better life than me.''
Toby's sadness was palpable. And he shook his head and took a long swig from a bottle.
His father died trying to remember. Toby probably will die trying to forget.

It never works, minding my own business.
Every few weeks I am reminded that I attract esoteric situations like bees to honey or a compass' arrow to due north. I am like the Venus' flytrap of other people's affairs. I am trying to learn to keep my mouth shut, but sometimes stuff just happens.
I am sitting at my favorite people-watching perch, Rick's on Duval Street. I am digging deeply into a basket of salted peanuts, sharing them with a squadron of mourning doves, the empty shells littering the floor around the seating area that fronts the street.
There is a couple seated next to me along the rail. They are in the middle of a heated argument. The woman is verbally shredding the man because of what she refers to as his ''insensitivity to our relationship,'' and he is equally adamant about her ``lack of consideration.''
They're shouting loud enough to cause the driver of a passing Conch Tour Train to announce over his loud speaker as they pass, ''Whoa, Nellie. What have we got going on over there?'' The train's passengers offer a few good laughs and then, with a ding-ding-ding, the train continues up the street.
The couple does not miss a beat, the acrid banter batted back and forth like a tennis ball in play.
Their sex life enters into the conversation, which carries way too much information. I know that it's only a matter of time before my expertise, the advice of a total stranger, is brought into play.
My Venus' flytrap is stirring.
The woman is the first to seek my wisdom. ''Whaddya think of this guy?'' she asks, poking her thumb over her shoulder.
''Mind your own business,'' the man cautions me, pointing a finger in my direction.
''Don't tell him what to do,'' she responds. Now she's pointing at him.
''You're defending a guy you don't even know,'' he says.
''He's nicer than you are,'' she counters.
YIELD TO TEMPTATION
The couple has several more exchanges. Their fingers slash like dueling foils, dotting the I's and crossing the T's, driving home their exclamation points.
I have not said a word.
They both look at me. The woman says, ``Well?''
Well? Well, it's not my fault, I think. It's akin to putting chocolate in front of a chocoholic.
I babble a minced portion of platitudes and adages that cumulatively make little sense and offer, ``Love is a many-splendored thing, as long as the heart is pure and you don't forget the flowers.''
They look at me, finish their beers and leave without a thank you, spewing a trail of expletives at each other, and me, in their wake.
The crowd on Duval Street is thin, the late afternoon heat and humidity packing a one-two combination that has sent people in search of air conditioning and swimming pools.
HIGH HORSE ON HEELS
A man walks by, looks at the recently vacated stools next to me and asks, ``Anyone sitting here?''
I point toward the seats, ``Not any more.''
He nods, pulls up one of the stools and waves to the bearded Hemingway look-alike who is tending bar and signals for a beer.
The man is tall, his blond hair cut short in a Marine buzz-cut style, and he's wearing a tropical-print shirt, khaki pants and spike-heeled designer shoes studded with rhinestones. I take a long appraising look at his footwear, thinking they are Manolo Blahniks or Prada, and try hard not to comment. Instead, I keep my mouth shut and shake my head.
But my Venus' flytrap is awake and opening its maw.
The man gets an instant attitude, probably thinking that I am making a silent wisecrack about a guy wearing high-heeled shoes.
''What's the problem?'' he demands, sounding nasty.
''Rhinestones. Before sunset?'' I say, arching my brow.
He looks down at his shoes and scrunches his face into a near scowl, but he does not disagree with me. He, too, finishes his beer and leaves.
What's the use? I'll never learn. The Venus' flytrap is always hungry.