Yesterday was Japanese Heritage Night at loanDepot Park – the Dodgers were in town – and I figured it would also be the Last Game of the 2025 Season With an Open Roof.
I headed down around 5 and found the roof closed. I hesitated before entering the parking garage. I hesitated again when the man behind the ticket window told me the cheapest ticket was $40. Because of the Dodgers, he told me. It costs a lot to see the rich. I complained to him about the price as well as the closed roof.
Inside, I found a sympathetic staffer standing at the top of the escalator.
“I agree with you,” he said. “I would love to see the roof open.”
“It’s because of the weather,” the young woman at the information desk told me.
“But it’s a beautiful evening,” I said. (There was a dark cloud hovering to the north.)
I wandered the concourse, which was unusually lively. Behind the left field stands a group banged on Japanese drums, supervised by a woman in a kimono.
After the third inning I walked outside to call Hania. No rain had fallen; there was a light breeze; it was a gorgeous South Florida evening.
Back inside, I walked with authority past the usher of Section 19 – it pays to wear a dress shirt to games – and found an empty aisle seat a few rows back from the premium section. Almost immediately, Shohei Ohtani came up to bat, and I enjoyed a straight view of his towering fly ball as it headed toward the right field stands.
Instead of a soft breeze, I felt cold blasts from air-conditioners on my back. I left after the seventh inning, the game tied at 4. I used to insist on staying till the final out, but not in a stadium with a closed roof.
Outside the parking garage, a young Black man played “What a Wonderful World” on his trumpet.
“In the old stadium,” I told him, as I placed a few dollars in his instrument case, “they used to play that song at the end of every game.”
"Really?” he said. “I didn’t know that.”
I shared the elevator with two young men who, naturally, heard my complaint about the closed roof.
“Was it closed?” the one man asked. “I didn’t even notice. I was so focused on the game.”
I found his obliviousness to his surroundings so astonishing that I didn’t ask him why, after being so absorbed in the game, he was leaving in the eighth inning.
Yesterday evening I was back on my bike after 10 days away. The young ducks in front of the house on SW 7th Avenue had grown since I last saw them, but the restaurant Sakana was still “Coming Soon.” People strolled or walked their dogs along the Riverwalk (south bank). I said “hello” as I rode past them, but very few acknowledged my greeting; most studiously ignored me. At one point I almost yelled: “You’ll have to excuse me – I just got back from the Midwest.”
Yesterday I drove to Miami Beach to attend the annual cruise conference known as Seatrade. When I was a travel editor, I went every year, because it reminded me of the world’s fairs of my childhood. There were simple booths instead of lavish pavilions, but industry and international culture were represented by people from around the globe, some of them in traditional dress (kimonos and kilts). It was always astonishing to see how much of the world has a connection to cruising.
This was my first visit in many years and, as always, I spent most of my time in the cultural section, roaming among the various countries, islands, cities, and ports – some of which took on more significance this year.
A woman from Greenland, who has been living in the States, said that when she goes jogging she puts a sign on her back that reads “Greenland is not for sale.” It gets, she said, only positive reactions. I asked what percentage of Greenlanders would like to be part of the U.S., and she said maybe five percent, explaining that some propaganda circulated that if that happened everybody would become a millionaire.
I ate lunch – teriyaki chicken, fried rice, egg roll – with a group from Norwegian Cruise Line who spoke Spanish among themselves. They were replaced by a woman who runs a luggage valet service for the Port of New Orleans. She was replaced - I eat very slowly - by a tall, bearded man from Puerto Vallarta who, when I asked him how he found the Spanish spoken in Miami, said that Spanish is not his first language. “Hebrew is,” he said. He was looking at Portugal as a possible place to move to.
In the afternoon, I spoke to a man from Barbados who told me that flying fish have become very expensive on the island. He said that young people seem to prefer soccer to cricket these days, even though there are more wealthy cricketers than soccer players in the Caribbean. He suggested I come visit.
I met a Spanish woman who said that, back home, she didn’t always tell people she worked in tourism. I asked her how she liked Miami.
“It’s dirty,” she said. “And the toilet in my bathroom is broken. It’s a $400 a night hotel."
The services are poor, she said, and the traffic is impossible. In her city in Spain, she can walk everywhere. I told her traffic was a bit better in Fort Lauderdale.
“Seatrade was there a few years ago,” she said. “I asked myself, ‘Where’s the culture?’ I could never live there.”
I told her there’s an art movie house downtown that I can walk to; that every November it hosts a film festival. She looked surprised.
“But what I love about America is the friendliness,” she said. “We don’t have that. One day I want to travel around the U.S.” I told her to visit the South and the Midwest.
I made my way to the Baltics. A man from Riga said he wasn’t worried about Putin because Latvia, unlike Ukraine, has a border with Russia that for long stretches is thickly forested. The Lithuanian woman over at the Klaipeda booth was not so sanguine, while the Poles from Gdansk sat at small tables in private conversation oblivious to, or just not interested in, visitors. Perhaps they sensed that I was going to tell them about my book. Proszę Pana, napisałem książkę o Polsce!
At Cruise Britain I took photos of a cardboard King Charles and then ran into Kieran – a friend from Ireland – and asked if he’d like to pose with the King. He politely declined.
I was on assignment this past weekend in Palm Beach (the reason for my absence here on Friday), and Saturday afternoon, strolling down one of the vias off of Worth Avenue, I came to a small jewelry shop where an English bulldog sat watchfully in front of the main case with an even sterner than usual don’t-mess-with-me expression. On the door was a sign: “NOTICE! We take security seriously.”
The Miami Open begins this week:
“They come every spring. In a city that values appearance, they are taller, leaner, fitter than the rest of us. They spend their days outdoors. They don’t (for the most part) waste their night clubbing. They show up on time.
“They make a mockery of our much-vaunted diversity.”
- from "The Subtropical Open," from the June 2024 issue of The Miami Native: https://www.miaminativemag.com/articles/the-subtropical-open
My friend Don first came to Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break sometime in the ’60s. Now, living in Boca, his annual tradition is to come to the Elbo Room for a nostalgic beer. I joined him on Friday, and we stood on the second-floor balcony overlooking the traffic and the battalions of young people gathered on the beach
The clientele at the Elbo Room skewed much older. After we finished our beers, we took a stroll up A1A. The bars along the strip were packed exclusively with young men and women, one of whom wore a string bikini with a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. I began to feel very much out of place. But it was an entirely self-generated feeling; no one looked at me as if I didn’t belong because no one looked at me. More than out of place, I was invisible.