Yesterday evening, walking down Lincoln Road, I found a small group gathered in front of a menorah. A young woman held a long pole with a flame at the end; the smell of burning oil mingled with the scent of fried potatoes, as a covered tray of latkes sat behind a table. Many of the men wore yarmulkes.
At six, three visitors from Israel were handed the pole to light two candles. I took a photo with my smartphone, and then posted in on Instagram, double-checking to see that I spelled Chanukah correctly.
It is worth remembering not only George H.W. Bush but – in this time of hostility toward immigrants – his call for a “kinder, gentler” America.
My piece on returning to one of my favorite cities and finding it overrun with tourists: https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-your-secret-spot-lisbon-becomes-overrun-with-tourists?ref=scroll
One of the joys of living in the United States is that sometimes you don’t have to leave town to travel.
Saturday evening we drove to the Broward County Convention Center for the celebration of Diwali. We ate dosas and sweets while admiring the county’s most colorfully dressed residents. Then, at the other end of the hall, we took seats in front of the stage, where groups of dancers added movement to the riot of colors. They looked like high school students (who else has that much energy?) and they mixed the traditional with the contemporary, sometimes in the same routine. A few groups added a social message, and I admired the way they applied ethnic customs to modern-day problems. I wondered how many future valedictorians we were watching.
Sunday evening we drove to the neighborhood on the other side of the river where, every weekend, a Brazilian couple cooks a dinner for 60 in their backyard. Normally you have to reserve a year in advance, but this dinner was a fundraiser – for the new Dr. Sistrunk Scholarship at Broward College – and we had made our reservations a few months ago. Over a dozen picnic tables were scattered about the yard. Children swayed in swings; occasionally a strong adult would climb the high rope and ring the bell at the top. Chickens strutted between the tables, a bit like at Blue Heaven in Key West. Brazilian music played softly in the background. Occasionally a little train would come buy, carrying more children and driven by the owner, while his wife added the final foods to the open-air kitchen. There were pots of several kinds of meat, including sausage, a salad with manioc flour dusting the top, a potato salad sprinkled with potato sticks, stewed okra, boiled corn on the cob, collard greens, beans and rice, sautéed fish, and cheese bread – all in huge quantities. When darkness fell, a crescent moon appeared between the fronds of a palm.
If you're so fed up with Florida, then move here and help turn this borderline state blue.
Yesterday morning I woke up and read condemnations of Florida on social media. (Note to half of the rest of the country: Half of us here are as disappointed as you are.) Then at noon I watched the press conference from the White House. You can’t label it a presidential press conference, as there was nothing presidential about it; it was more like non-body-contact wrestling. Even people who thought CNN’s Jim Acosta was out of line in lecturing Trump – normally in press conferences members of the press ask questions – must have found the performance of the man at the lectern distasteful. It was not just his rudeness, his pettiness, his disdain for the people seated in front him, but his incessantly self-congratulatory tone. People who won on Tuesday did so because they embraced him and those who lost lost because they didn’t. Asked what he’s doing to heal the divide in the country he went on and on about his economic successes (without mentioning, of course, that he’s the beneficiary of his predecessor in the White House). And I wondered if, when you have a president who is not presidential – who is in fact the opposite of presidential: small, mean, unfocused, self-centered – does this filter down and create law enforcement officers who are not law-abiding and respected CEOs who shortchange their customers?