Went to visit a friend yesterday who’s been having a tough time of it lately; his wife, suffering from Alzheimer’s, had to enter a memory care facility. He says he’ll wake up at 3 a.m and read a few pages of Seneca and that helps him immeasurably.
A good friend of mine at the Sun-Sentinel, who went on to write obituaries at the Washington Post, used to muse about writing a book on all the illustrious people who have died in Florida.
The latest and perhaps most surprising name to be added to that long list is that of Martin Amis, who died this past weekend in – get ready for it – Lake Worth. Neither the front page obituary in the New York Times, nor the AP obituary buried deep within the Sun-Sentinel, explained how the English author of The War Against Cliché ended up, like so many septuagenarians, in the Sunshine State.
We’re still eating breakfast on the balcony, which overlooks the parking lot where, for the last year and a half, a container has served as the office for the construction crew. The men gather in the morning, in their hats and long-sleeved shirts, drinking coffee and joking in Spanish, and then head off to their various labors. This morning, stepping outside, I felt a powerful urge to sing “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.”
Saturday afternoon we drove down to Miami. The plan was to stop in Coconut Grove and pick up my old glasses – which had been cleaned up by the shop where I had recently bought a similar pair (as a backup) – and then go to Little Havana for a Cuban dinner.
The streets of the Grove were crowded with people, its restaurants busy at 4 pm. Mother’s Day weekend. My glasses looked almost like new. I put them on and the world turned blurry. Taking them off, I saw that the lenses were full of scratches. The shop assistant took a look, and said that must have happened during the cleaning. She said they would replace them, at no charge, and have the glasses back in a week. So another week without my favorite glasses. This was especially disappointing as the new ones still hurt.
Outside, the streets of the Grove looked less festive. How can you clean glasses, I wondered, and ruin the lenses in the process? What if the new lenses are thicker? Or different? I am very protective of my glasses because they’re of a style I’ve worn since college – I still get compliments on them, usually from young women – and the company that made them went out of business. I was reluctant to leave them for cleaning (with good reason, as it turned out) and now I feared that the glasses I had had were now gone for good.
We made our way up 27th Avenue to Little Havana, and found a parking space behind the Tower Theater. This lot used to be reserved for people going to see a movie but the city of Miami decided to end the historic building’s role as a theater and turn it into a visitor information center. Walking to the front, we found it closed behind metal shutters.
At Old’s Havana, we were seated in the garden, at a table that stood no higher than my knee. I sat uncomfortably on a wooden bench. After about two minutes, we got up and exited through the side walkway.
At El Pub we were seated on the sidewalk terrace, at a wrought iron table – the kind where condensation from your glass drips onto your trousers. It took us an even shorter time to exit. Walking west, we came to another Cuban restaurant, with normal tables and attractive décor.
Hania’s daiquiri was watery, my vaca frita soggy. Even the black beans were a disappointment. We walked back to the car and drove to Brickell.
I pulled into the lot of the new food hall, Okeydokey, which had a complicated system for paying. Rather than stay and figure it out, I got back on 8th Street and parked a block from Brickell City Centre. We strolled around the mall a bit, and then walked down to Mary Brickell Village, where we ended our visit to Miami at Starbucks.
I pulled into my spot, got out of my car, and ran into a fellow resident of the building.
“Manatees,” the man said, looking at my license plate. “I’m a boater. We hate manatees.”
I was so taken aback by his statement that it was only in the elevator – l’esprit d’ascenseur – that I thought to say, “They’re not crazy about you either.”
In my youth I was never into bands, preferring instead the singer-songwriters: Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Ralph McTell, Gordon Lightfoot. I first heard “If You Could Read My Mind” in a friend’s dorm room my freshman year of college and shortly after I bought the album. It was filled with wonderful songs, but the two that stayed with me were “Approaching Lavender” and “Minstrel of the Dawn.”
“The minstrel of the dawn is gone
I hope he’ll call before too long.”