Saturday I needed a birthday card so I got in the car and did what I’ve done for the last 30 some years: I drove down Las Olas to Grand Central Stationery. To my surprise, it was closed, with no sign in the window.
“I think they’re going out of business,” a passerby said, pointing out the bare display window.
This morning I went online. There was no mention of closing on the store’s website, but in the store’s profile the words “Temporarily Closed” were highlighted in red.
The “Temporarily” is giving me hope, but not a lot. I am generally a fan of the downtown development; more people means more restaurants and cafes, and the high rises they live in give us more shade. But they also raise the rents, pushing out small businesses like specialty card shops. I fear that Las Olas will become like Atlantic Avenue in Delray, a street people come to only to eat.
My ode to the Miami Open - and the beauty of tennis - appears in the new issue of The Miami Native: https://www.miaminativemag.com/articles/the-subtropical-open
Yesterday evening I drove down to Miami Beach to attend the launch party for the second issue of a magazine I have an essay in. The crowd was predominantly young and female; most people I talked to grew up in Miami or Miami Beach. One young woman, a childhood friend of the editor, asked where I lived.
“Fort Lauderdale,” I said. “Have you ever been there?”
I learned about the death of Willie Mays last night while watching the Panthers game, and with the news a piece of my childhood died.
Willie Mays was my boyhood idol. He made me a lover of baseball (a game that I, a small nearsighted southpaw, was terrible at) and of the San Francisco Giants (an apostate in a family of Phillies fans). He made me, a small-town Jersey boy, pine for California. My dream, never realized, was to watch him play in the winsomely named Candlestick Park.
You can debate his merits as baseball’s GOAT – he excelled in every one of the five essentials: fielding, throwing, running the bases, hitting, and hitting for power – but his love for the game, and the enthusiasm with which he played it, had no equals. You could not NOT watch when he came to the plate, or got on base, or roamed centerfield in search of a fly ball. He played a boy’s game with a boyish joy, one that has all but vanished today.
Today, like many days lately, you can start your morning watching a summer game – tennis – in the afternoon switch to soccer (the first round of the Euro Cup), and then this evening watch ice hockey (the Stanley Cup playoffs, featuring, to continue the absurdity, the Florida Panthers). Here in Florida, we’re hoping for a quick end to the hockey season, a gap that will be filled by the Copa America, beginning Thursday. Of course, there’s also baseball – major league as well as college – and basketball (the WNBA). Wimbledon, to get back to tennis, begins July 1, to be followed later that month by the Summer Olympics. This could be the summer of not only record temperatures but also a record number of sporting events.
I watch the Tony Awards for the acceptance speeches: stage actors always come across as more poised and eloquent in front of a live audience than screen actors do. So I was surprised last night by how many of the winners read from prepared texts.