A Letter to a Friend on Florida

 I was born in Miami, grew up just a toss away… in Plantation. I spent weekends in the Upper Keys and Homestead w my Grandparents who split their time between the two. This was when Homestead was a continuous stream of UPick vegetable stands with fields of sweet corn, tomatoes and green beans. The Upper Keys was water, bait shops, mangroves and a Dairy Queen that was the reward for being good and was on the main highway, in the middle of a swamp with a single streetlight to mark the entrance. 

Plantation was the last hooray, the beginning of the Everglades. I spent long summer days on a horse ranch in Davie, which had endless orange groves, the perfect place for a young teenage girl to ride bareback.  I shoveled stalls for hours to get the chance to ride.  The ranch was sliced in two when University Drive was built, and then slowly dissolved into shopping malls and stucco apartments. 

Just as I became a teenager, the Broward Mall opened. I worked at Lane Bryant.  Even though I was a size 0; I sold clothes to obese women and transvestites who loved the larger sizes — the trans requested me by name. I also worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken which made me suddenly want to go to college because staying clearly was a bad career choice. And Dairy Queen that came with a manager who was never there; he left teenage kids with a store to run and a stack of Hustler  and Cheri magazines to thumb through when times were quiet. The location on US1 attracted prostitutes who rang the buzzer looking for a cup of water after they had been dropped off. These were not beautiful prostitutes, but the kind that would efficiently get the job done without overthinking it. I remember one of them had no front teeth which made her impossible to understand.  

My high school was the place for kids who didn’t speak English in Broward County … Colombians who came from families with suspiciously unlimited incones, Cubans who came from families that owned everything in South Florida, and Haitians who were so poor and uneducated you wondered how they would ever survive. We also had black kids who were wicked fast on my track team and Jewish kids who showed up to run only because it helped on college applications. 

South Florida in the 80s was a crazy place to be. The dance clubs, the booze, the drugs …I am thankful to have survived. My memories are fuzzy.  A whirl of mini skirts, fake IDs, afternoons on the beach trying to tan ( which was quite hilarious), lady’s night at every bar… and oddly running, the thing that saved me.  I was never the star runner but I was fast enough to be the team captain, to earn a scholarship and to open a door to leaving South Florida. 

And running evolved into cycling. Last year, I put down 5,000 miles on a bike, mainly on steep gravel roads. 

I no longer have family that lives in South Florida, my dad died a few years ago. His celebration of life was a bizarre event; I came to realize he was not the loner I thought he was, but rather a wild partier who was the center of his tennis club. 

Which tells you the apple never falls from the tree.