We drove down to Miami last night for dinner at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Built in 1925, the building is one of the oldest in Miami, though last night probably marked the first time in its history that people arriving at its front doors were greeted with cocktails.
Inside, a table stretched from the vestibule to the altar steps, where it then ran into both of the transepts, creating a beautiful, candlelit T. The bishop, sitting in about the middle of the nave, said grace.
I sat next to an elegant octogenarian from Coconut Grove. The man on the other side of her, also from the Grove, told of how, as a boy, he and his father would walk to the woods a few days before Christmas and cut down a pine tree to bring home to decorate.
The woman told of her early life in the Grove without electricity and running water. (I realized that she had been born about the same time the cathedral had been built.) It wasn't bad, she assured me. "We didn't need air-conditioning. There was always a breeze. Until they built the high-rises."
Her husband had been an Episcopal priest, and a local leader in the Civil Rights Movement. "He was from Overtown," she said. "I always kidded him that he was from the ghetto, while we were from the 'suburbs.'"
The choir, which had been serenading us between courses, sent us away with "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."
