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.”
The main feature of my bronchitis is a persistent cough that really only abates when I'm eating or sleeping. This is extremely frustrating, though it does give a little extra pleasure to two of my favorite activities.
It’s probably a sign of the current uneventfulness of my life, but I find myself eagerly looking forward to Charles’s coronation on May 6. I have little interest in the royal family, and am mystified by Americans who are fascinated by them, but I am a traditionalist and an Anglophile – and I love liturgical music. In last week’s Spectator, John Rutter wrote that there will be “no fewer than 12 new commissioned pieces, plenty of traditional favourites, and a wealth of expert performers to give their all.” He added, “We will also have a handpicked orchestra and an ace team of military musicians, with the wonderful Westminster Abbey and Chapel Road choirs at the heart of it.”
An Episcopalian's idea of heaven.
I went to Urgent Care yesterday morning and learned that I have bronchitis. The beauty of Urgent Care as opposed to my primary care physician is not just that someone there will see me on Sunday but that someone there will see me when I’m sick.