Yesterday I rode the train to Miami and had lunch at Brickell City Centre with a young woman I’ll call Vivian who took my travel writing class a few years ago. It was her first visit to the Centre, though she knew it well, having interviewed the developer while it was under construction.
Vivian announced that she was moving to the Pacific Northwest to get her MFA. Another bright young person leaving the city. She told me stories about the Key West Literary Seminar back in January, when she had met George Saunders, Billy Collins, Teju Cole, whom she drove around the Keys. She is a very well-read young woman but I was still impressed by her ability to hang with the literati. “The average age at the seminar was about 70,” she explained. “And I was more agile than they were.”
We finished lunch at American Harvest and walked through the Centre. “We’re the little people who were in the architectural renderings,” Vivian announced as we approached an escalator. Then she pointed to a woman walking a terrier. “And there was a dog in the renderings!”
