Appearances

In South Beach, at the Epicure, I had another lesson about snap judgements. A fastidious woman caught my eye, and I watched her closely. Well groomed, dressed in shades of brown with touches of gold, she first rubbed her hands with sanitizing gel, and wiped the table, on which she spread a clean napkin. How will she be able to eat anything? I wondered. I need not have wondered. Her daughter arrived with a bag from the Epicure deli, and pulled out two huge, thick, rare roast beef sandwiches. The fastidious woman dug in, bit hard, and devoured the dressing-moistened meat, the bread, the tomatoes. All! She and her daughter ate silently, avidly, yet neatly. Not a crumb on the sanitized table. I'm a bit of a crank about not eating red meat--and this meat was red--but please allow me: what could be more unclean than dead flesh? You see how creepy I can get. Yet I'm glad the woman could eat. I had visions of her wiping and wiping, never able to get things clean enough.

I've been away from blogging too long. Many things have kept me away: months of physical therapy, a lingering bout of illness, a departure for South Beach, and writing what I think are risky poems. Right now I'm listening to Callas sing: Casta Diva, che inargenti/ queste sacre antiche piante . . . (Pure Goddess, who silvers/ these sacred ancient plants.) No voice like hers! Callas the Goddess. How did she get that sound out while standing so still?

How are you? What are you listening to. Tell me, wont' you?

Playful South Beach

There are times when the passing scene is playful and language delightful: the two C's in Corn on the Cob, "Friendly John," "Bob's Barricades"--I didn't get a shot of those. Tell me what surprised and delighted you today.

Lawn jockey holding a lamp, cinder blocks, white impatiens, white curlicues: we humans are able and determined to create arrangements.

Seven small, post-like plaster lions stationed on this fence, two more life-size lions near the door.

South Point Park is sculpted, the carved/molded hill a backdrop for shadows in the late afternoon.

The lighthouse-lifeguard station appears through the planted 'wild' area.

Figures on the slant. I didn't tilt my camera. People gather here at sunset.

These three on the hill did not look up at the towering condo.

The Habana is miles from Cuba. Workers have filled the cracks in the facade so the crazed surface appears startling white. (Mostly I've seen crazed surfaces on glazed plates, miniature lines compared to these.) I hope they keep those bold colors. Buildings shift and settle on land that was once a mangrove swamp.

Super Bowl: the Saints

The spirit of New Orleans has come to South Beach. It is carnival on Ocean Drive, which, as the police say, was closed to all vehicular traffic.

Manning of the Colts is reduced to a kneeling position.

There was dancing and shots of "Who dat!"

The man in the gold helmet said, "To think we've lived to see this." It's the Saints first superbowl. He kissed my hand.

The math adds up. Maybe the planets are aligned for the Saints' victory.

Tropical tops, boots for the Arctic.

Cheers!

Football is a dangerous sport but if it takes football to get us all together, I'm for it.

I'll be cheering for the Saints tonight and wearing black and gold. Early this morning I dreamed of girls filing into a church to pray for the Saints.

Miami Sky

It's not often the moon shows through a clotting up mackerel sky. This one's a beauty, full, silver.

Meridian Avenue is quiet tonight. We've finished a dinner of beans and rice. The door to the little balcony is wide open; from time to time a voice floats up from the street, indistinct.

I'm savoring the quiet after sitting next to a wild child on the flight down. A little mite, maybe two and a half or three years old, with her mother. At one point I heard the mother pray to Jesus in Portuguese. She was a saint of patience. The little girl would shriek, tireless, squirming, flailing, in charge. Three and a half hours! Until she slept, after her mother had nursed her, for the last five minutes of the flight. I can still see her pretty, charming face, heart-shaped, with dark eyes. She never smiled. I drank lots of water; even today I'm drinking glass after glass.

Leaving South Beach

Tomorrow we go back to Massachusetts.  I'll miss the lush courtyards of South Beach--fringed palms and balconies. When I think of Boston, I think of cobblestones and brick--a cooler charm. With a little luck, I 'll keep some of the slower rhythm of our Flamingo Park neighborhood, where the playgrounds are filled with children, people actually stroll, and at twilight sit in the park, reading. 

Twilight: South Beach

At seven-thirty last night, the horizon faded; the pale blue sky merged with blue water.  In the far north, when the horizon disappeared, and Inuit kayakers could not tell the difference between sea and sky, they would often come down with kayak sickness, a gentle term.  Kayak sickness meant losing one's mind.  No danger of losing the horizon here in South Beach.  Just fix your eyes on the people in the distance; in this case, a model and a fashion assistant waiting for the photographer to load up his camera.  If you embiggen the picture below, you will see that the assistant is holding up a reflecting disc to shine more light on the model, as if she needed it--not with that torch of a wig.

I walked with my feet in the warm water and treated myself to a sand-pedicure.  When I came off the beach, Cuban music drifted out of the restaurant called "Havana."  My feet were sanded smooth.  I put on my shoes and walked home.   

South Beach: Near & Far

Across the street is the pale yellow and pink Flamingo Plaza, where polo players used to stay in the 1920s, when nearby Flamingo Park was a polo field.  The dark green in the foreground: kamali trees, which are said to have originated in Hawaii.  Wild tropical storms for the last few days, plenty of sunshine in between storms.

On the balcony below, my neighbor's chair is empty, but hillbilly music rolls out from his open doorway. Soon he'll come out with his book and coffee. He'll be wearing shorts; when he goes out at night, he wears black, a cowboy hat and a rhinestone bolero.  From time to time he cooks pasta and sausages for us.

I've been in most of the morning while the corroded broken down stove that gives off shocks is taken out.  Being in here in South Beach is not like being in at home in Massachusetts.  There's so much light; there's the little balcony; there's my neighbor's music--Hank Williams' voice broken up by the wind, a ship on the horizon, nothing between this shore and the coast of Africa.       

       

South Beach Scene

I went out right after breakfast.  The little sandwich shop that faces the alley parallel to Washington Avenue was filling up.  There's nothing suburban about South Beach.  Short sleeves and no sleeves; tattoos on display.  Mango smoothies on the menu.  The smell of Cuban coffee.   

Demonstrating workers outside a pub on Washington Avenue.  I asked whether I could take a photograph.  No problem.  They had been marching smartly; when I raised my camera, they straightened up even more.  I'm sticking with the union.

South Beach: Not All Glamor

The elevators in our modest condo broke down at least once a week.  Finally the Board decided to replace them.  We were assessed for the cost.  After months the first of the two new elevators was up and running.  It gleamed, ascended and descended without a hitch.  The day after it began operating someone took a screwdriver and pried out the buttons in the control panel.  He was caught on the security video entering the elevator, caught mooning at the camera, his pants dropped to his knees.  First he mooned; then he did damage.  The security camera had not yet been installed inside the elevator; since he was not filmed in the act of vandalism, the police said he could not be charged.  The film caught the person who entered the elevator before him.  That person said there was no damage; the person who used the elevator after the perpetrator reported the damage.  The vandal owns a unit in the building.  It's his home.  Why did he do it?  My neighbor H. blamed it on AIDS and was sure AIDS had affected his mind.  I don't believe it.  He did it out of spite.  Why he was spiteful doesn't matter.  He is like those characters in Dostoevsky who vibrate, quivering with impossible irritation, a sense of having been wronged as they do wrong, hating, confessing--wasn't his mooning a confession?  Here I am, he said, and you can stick the new elevator, the elevator you and I paid for.  He's the anti-hero of the condo.  I have more sympathy for the elderly woman notorious for feeding pigeons from her balcony, who comes down to get her mail late at night.  She never wears shoes; her peds are stuck to her feet and are marked with tide lines, as if she's dipped her feet into dirty water.  Most of the elderly pick up their mail soon after it arrives, using the occasion to gather in the lobby, which was remodeled with hard-edge chic: mirrors, everything in white and gray.  They sit and talk; they soften the austere design.   

South Beach Story

I went to the tailor and shoe-repair shop near Espanola Way to have a pair of  trousers shortened and waited while a couple negotiated the price of repairing snake-skin boots.  The shop is run by Cubans working at their sewing machines under a canopy of dozens of feathered dream-catchers, those items usually found in tacky tourist shops.  These dream-catchers are not for sale.    The couple agreed on a price and moved toward the door.  I was about to step up to the counter when a man pushed ahead of me.  "I'm next," I said.  He gave way.  "I bet you're an entertainer," he said, perhaps on the evidence of my loud voice.  "I am, too," he said, and jumped on to platform where the seamstress usually pinned up hems.  He was spectacularly handsome, in his thirties, I guessed; just at that tipping point before the signs of aging become apparent.  In command of the platform, he began to sing in a perfectly pitched baritone:

My heart is sad and lonely

For you I cry

For you, dear only

I tell you I mean it

I'm all for you

Body and Soul . . .

He went on until the end of the song.  The women at the sewing machines looked up from their work; the machines stopped.  The proprietor, an attractive middle-aged woman, who, in the many times I had done business with her, had never smiled but leveled a glance at me that said: You may be happy now but you'll soon be miserable, now appeared thoughtful; her mouth softened; her hands were still.  The man sang as he stepped down from the platform.  I told him to go ahead of me, which he did with a bow.  He needed buttons sewn on his jacket.  In two minutes he was done and out the door.   The women went back to their work.  The proprietor gave me a price for shortening my trousers and for the first time looked into my eyes.  Her eyes were the color of caramel.  She seemed to be dreaming.