I had a beer last night with my friend Javier, who grew up in Peru but has now lived here for nearly half his life. A few years ago, when he became a citizen, he told his mother that he was an American.
“What are you saying?” she scoffed. “You’re Peruvian.”
Then a few months ago the new pope was elected. “He’s Peruvian,” his mother announced.
Saturday evening we drove to Pastis in Wynwood for my birthday dinner. Originally we had planned to go to Joe’s Stone Crab, where we last dined in 1990, shortly after moving here, when my visiting parents were treating. But at the last minute I decided that eating at Joe’s outside of stone crab season would be like watching the Bruins at Fenway Park – a memorable experience, to be sure, but not the classic one.
At Pastis, we sat outside in the lovely front terrace. The bread was delicious – slathered with salted butter – and the music terrible.
“You’re 73,” Hania said. “Look around at the people here. They don’t want to listen to Edith Piaf.”
The French Open women’s and men’s finals both went the distance and featured comebacks: Coco Gauff winning in three sets after losing the first to Aryna Sabalenka and Carlos Alcaraz winning in five sets after losing the first two to Jannik Sinner (and saving three championship points in the fourth set, a monumental feat that then required him to break Sinner’s serve, which he promptly did). The men’s match, at five and a half hours, was the longest final at Roland Garros in the open era, and yet neither man took a “bathroom break,” a ploy commonly used – even by the saintly Federer – to try to right the ship and slow the opponent’s momentum.
Both finals were exciting to watch (and fun for me, since I was rooting for the eventual winners) but they were polar opposites when it came to quality. The women’s match was sloppy, with Sabalenka complaining during the match, and afterwards, about the windy conditions. (As if it was windy on only her side of the court.) While the men’s match was a marvel of precision and power, with brilliant shots followed by equally phenomenal responses, again and again, for FIVE AND A HALF HOURS! Fittingly, the women’s match ended on an unforced error, the men’s match with a winner.
We went to the NSU Art Museum yesterday because we had heard it’s free for residents on the first Thursday of every month. As I took out my wallet to show my driver’s license, I was told it was free for everyone, not just residents. This explained the bustle in the gift shop, the tables of kids drawing in the corridor. On the first floor, I took a picture of a man in a blue shirt with a silver design looking at a painting – actually, looking at his phone in front of a painting – of silver designs on a blue background.
Two months ago I sent a 4,000 word essay to a big magazine and yesterday I got a one-sentence email saying it isn't for them.
My friend Ardy and I were at lunch yesterday talking about all the things one accumulates over a long lifetime, and I mentioned that I have most if not all of the Sun-Sentinel Travel sections from the fall of 1989 to the end of 2007.
“What are you going to do with them?” Ardy asked.
“Give them to the Smithsonian,” I said.
It was a joke, of course, but they are artifacts: sections of ten, sometimes more, pages filled with ads and charts (those odious and instantly erroneous airfare ones) but also lengthy stories and beautiful photos of interesting places around the world. Those times when I am sent digging into one of my Travel section boxes I am astonished anew by the riches the paper provided weekly to its mostly unimpressed readers.