The demonstrations in support of Cuba that blocked the Palmetto Expressway this week were indicative of a deficiency in urban planning. As a letter writer to the Herald noted years ago – discussing the phenomenon of protests at Versailles, the Cuban restaurant where these most recent ones originated – Miami lacks a public square. This seems strange for such an Hispanic city – think Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, Mexico City’s Zócalo – and is explained by the fact that it was founded by Anglos.
After our dinner with the Serbian waiter we walked down the street to Ann’s Florist and Coffee Bar. I was thirsty for a beer, beer having recently joined pastis as one of the few alcohols that didn’t burn my healing throat. Walking past the counter of pastries I spotted some delicious pieces of blueberry cobbler.
We got a seat outside on the terrace. The waiter, kneeling to address us at eye level, went through the long list of beers, which included craft beers as well as national brands.
“I’ll have the blueberry cobbler,” I told him.
“Would you like that on draft or in a bottle?” he asked.
Driving Federal Highway at 7:30 on a Sunday morning is a joy – not only is there little traffic but the lights seem to be synchronized – especially when listening to Camille Saint Saens’ “Requiem Mass” on Sirius XM (yes, on the radio, because if I’d supplied the music myself I would not have had the pleasure of happenstance). I was on my way to Croissan’Time to pick up a pain au chocolat for the French Open at 9.
“Do you want a big one or a small one?” the saleswoman asked me. I had forgotten they came in two sizes. “Two small ones,” I told her, thinking the chocolate-to-bread ratio would be more in my favor. Then I asked her where she was from.
“Romania,” she said. I asked her where. She mentioned a town I’d never heard of. “It’s small,” she said. I rattled off the places I’d been in her country and she said, “It’s near Suceava.” I told her I’d loved the painted monasteries and I think made her a little homesick.
On the drive home I stopped at Bob’s News to pick up the Wall Street Journal. Why not read it online? Well, in front of me at the counter stood a woman with two large dogs.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “What are they?”
“Chesapeake Bay Retrievers,” she said. “This one’s seven months old – he’s never been in a store before – and this one’s a champion.”
“He should be at Westminster,” I said.
“I wish,” she said. “His mother won there in 2016.”
I drove home with my paper and pastries for the men’s final.
No one reads an anthology more critically, I once wrote, than the writer left out of it. Another critical reader is a travel writer reading a piece about his own town.
A friend recently sent me a book, a collection of essays by a bright young writer. The first, I noted with interest, is set in Ft. Lauderdale and appeared in one of The Best American Travel Writing anthologies (one of the few editions I don’t own).
The essay is not really about Ft. Lauderdale – it’s more about the author’s existential angst while vacationing here – but there are a number of references to the city, many of them wrong. It is continually referred to as “tropical” – a mistake many travel writers make, especially those from lands without palm trees, but one that an MFA-wielding intellectual should be above.
Staying on the beach, he more than once makes his way to “the boardwalk” (we call it a sidewalk). Watching TV, he catches a commercial for “Swedish Cruise Lines” (Norwegian readers will not be happy). Later he writes of “this cloudless swath of South Florida,” a place that, as every resident knows, hosts an almost daily riot of cloud formations. Not to mention that earlier, crossing the state line from Georgia, he finds himself in “a corridor of sugarcane and everglades,” as if Florida’s border was around Lake Okeechobee.
Clearly they don’t teach reporting in MFA programs.
Heading back from the air show yesterday on Las Olas we saw a couple on bicycles, and in Blue Angels T-shirts, weaving fearlessly through the traffic.
Sunday’s Sun-Sentinel carried a front-page story about condo owners along the New River complaining about the noise from the outside bar of the restaurant Salt7. This would not have been a problem with Swick Plaza – the Mexican-style plaza I recommended (though not with that name) for that space when I was the travel editor of the paper. My vision, instead of a high-rise condo, was for a park on that site with chess tables, food stalls, fountains, and a bandstand, where every evening and lunchtime ethnic bands would perform, giving the tourists to the east and the residents to the west a daily taste of world music. The performances would not run late into the night, and the music – cumbia, klezmer, bossa nova – would be pleasant to the ears of even accidental listeners.
That didn’t happen of course. The city got yet another condo, the Icon, with an outdoor bar blasting characterless music. The bar has a lovely setting on the river, and I suspect it would be popular if it played no music. But then it would run the risk of patrons discovering, in the rare quiet, that they have nothing really interesting to say to one another.