It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but a good amount of it actually is
This print hangs in my office at home, in a gilded frame, reminding me that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but a good amount of it actually is. There was a rainbow in Melrose a few days before Christmas, and when I pull off to the side of the road to take a picture, a man walking by excitedly asks me, ‘Rainbow!?’ ‘Yes!’ I tell him, ‘Merry Christmas!’ Sun is shining. We have so much to be grateful for.
‘Hello madam, would you like an ice cold Corona?’ a man walking around toting a cooler asks me.
‘No thank you, but thank you though!’ I respond.
‘It’s OK, have a nice day,’ he answers.
‘You, too!’
I would, in fact, like an ice cold Corona, and I’m not worried about buying an overpriced light beer on the beach, but I’m alone an unsure of beach etiquette, so I resolve to grab a beer or a cocktail on my way off the beach later. And add Beer, if you want to my beach packing list.
Florida really is the Sunshine State, and Miami really does bring the heat. And the techno. I should be less surprised by these things, having been fairly forewarned, but still, it’s a pleasant surprise. Those, along with the fact that the people I have encountered are very friendly and chatty (‘Even if we’re not nice,’ one of them added cryptically), and the libertarian-leaning bend makes me feel surprisingly more at home than the virtue-signaling liberal atmosphere of Massachusetts.
Today is the warmest day yet that I’ve been here—a time of unseasonable warmth, even for Miami—and thus a perfect beach day. I had some logistics to work out to get to the beach. And briefly considered taking the path of less resistance and not coming at all, but when in Rome.
‘OK, I have two more questions,’ I tell Alex at the front desk, after exchanging complements on each other’s earrings. He has a tall, thin frame and curly dark hair that hangs in his face, partially obscuring his glasses. ‘Is it all right to take a pool towel to the beach?’
‘Yes, that would be all right.’
‘And where I’m from, you can leave your things on the beach. Is that OK here or…’
‘No, it’s Miami Beach, so you can’t leave your things on the beach…’ Alex starts, pointing out very politely that I’m not from around here, but heavily implying, It’s Miami Beach…do you know where you are?
‘But if I’m alone and want to swim?’
‘Yes, then you can leave your things, and just keep an eye on them.’
Comforted that I will be able to swim in the sea, I head to the pool to grab a beach towel, and remind myself that I do much more difficult things every day then go to the beach.
On the bridge over, a man runs by wearing a ‘Stonks’ black tank top (with the stereotypical orange lettering) and giant over-ear headphones, a cigarette hanging limply and miraculously out of the corner of his open mouth. Miami Beach is going to be fun.
I step out of the car and take a desire path across to the sidewalk. I stop to take a picture of it that I’ll never post to r/desirepath, but have to pause to let a delivery driver by. (‘Have a nice day!’ he tells me as he passes.) Much desired paths.
I am amazed in a touristy way at the beach infrastructure here. There are bathrooms, showers. It makes sense, and it’s not like similar beach houses don’t exist back home, but this is better (like the beach here as well, I suppose). I am impatient to get to the water, though, so instead of walking along the strip, I head to the beach.
‘I like your smile! You’re real cute!’ a tall Black man tells me as we pass each other. It feels nice not to feel fear or apprehension from him, as can often happen back home with the entirely justified icy skepticism of non-white people in Boston. Plus people in Boston just don’t greet each other as often in general.
‘I like yours!’ I tell him, and I do.
‘You should check out the party over there! Where the music is, can’t miss it. Tell them Sashi sent you.’
‘Sashi?’
‘Yes. See you there!’
Not even on the beach yet and invited to party. I resolve to find the party, but somehow do end up missing it. I walk along the beach, south, in SoFi (South of 5th) where I have been led to believe locals are more likely to gather than farther north. There are chairs and cabanas for rent, which I know, and which I confirm after sitting in an empty one briefly. I am very polite and unassuming to the man who comes over to ask if I am staying at that particular hotel, and decide to keep making my way instead of renting a chair and an umbrella for the few hours I plan to be here.
When a spot feels right, just past the 4th Street lifeguard tower, I lay my towel down next to another woman who is lying on the beach reading. I strip off my clothes and walk towards the sea, wading out into water that is colder than I expect, waiting for waves that never come because they are smaller than I expect. Eventually I inhale and dive under. The water is more turquoise here than the deep blue back home, and saltier. I can feel it sticking in my hair. I wring my hair out and return to my towel, my effects still just as I’d left them.
After managing some mischief at work (#WorkFromAnywhere), I resolve to take a break from my phone for a bit. A honeybee appears, struggling across the seashelly sand, and I try to help them take wing and fly. The bee doesn’t fly, however, and I am preoccupied seeing whether it will drink some water off my Kindle cover or snack on the inside of a raisin when a young man sweeps by with a metal detector.
Two women stop him, repeating themselves, saying their brother or son or so-and-so used to do this. I eavesdrop on their conversation, so amused by the ease with which people strike up a conversation here. He is searching for someone’s ring, lost yesterday, and he’s only 5 minutes into looking. He wishes the trucks that comb the sand each night, turning it over and removing larger litter, were better at preserving small objects. He is somewhere eon the spectrum, a bit awkward with a clipped tone, hyper-focused on his task and friendly.
‘You should really look out for that,’ he says, ‘Look out,’ he gestures with his metal detector at my license, which I had been using to gently direct the bee. I look up at him as he tells me, ‘The wind is vicious.’
‘Thank you, I will,’ I say, tucking it away as he turns back to his sand sweeping.
When it starts to get dark I reluctantly pack up. I can’t really complain (as I did earlier this week to my colleague and dear friend Peter, excusing myself in a meeting to stand up and shut the shades, telling him that I was still getting used to the sun in this house, and it comes across my desk sharply mid-afternoon. ‘I will excuse you complaining about the sun,’ he told me from dreary New York, and of course he did, as I laughed and apologised), it being so sunny and warm down here, but I had wished to stay in the sun’s warm rays longer. I got to the beach a little later than I’d expected, and the sun started being obscured a little earlier than I’d liked, but it was still an hour later than the time I usually call it a beach day back home. What a blessing to be able to do this in January.
I kill time before a cocktail bar I want to try opens by walking down to the southern tip of this barrier island, to South pointe Park Pier. There is a rainbow around the setting sun. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but a good amount of it actually is.
On the walk back to the public restroom I look out for bikes and scooters, smile and people, greet them good evening. A man rides past me decked out in Miami gear, smiling, and I smile back. As I approach the public restroom he shows up at my side. ‘See you again,’ he greets me, in a weird mix of a southern drawl and a British accent. After my initial stiffening at having a stranger show up (it’s always a little bit threatening to approach a woman who is alone!) I relax and get to chatting. He lives in Amsterdam, and has done for 10 years—which still doesn’t explain the accent—but he’s from New York originally, has family in Atlanta now, and is taking courses in London—which does, more or less. He cannot get over the fact that i have visited Belgium, of all places. He is an artist, an entertainer, a singer, a producer. He is planning to move back to the States soon, and visiting Miami for the first time with his brother. They just got into town today, and he had to see the beach, so he hopped on a bike and did so.
He asks for my Instagram and I tell him I don’t have one.
‘I’m so glad to hear you say you don’t!’ a woman slipping into sandals after rinding her feet interjects. ‘It’s so refreshing.’
Not having an Instagram stymies communication, but sets a nice bar or boundary for giving out my contact info, numbers seemingly being harder to ask for than Instagram handles.
Kel asks what I’m up to later, and I tell him, ‘I’m going to this cocktail bar past 4th. Maybe I’ll see you there.’ He asks me to type the name of the place into his phone, and I do.
‘I’m going to go change and head over there now. Happy hour ends at eight, and I’ll be leaving before then.’ He checks the time and says he’ll try to make it by 7, 7:30, in a way that lets me know he will be late. We late people understand each other.
I stay until just past 8, but he never shows. The cocktails at Pretty Swell are, well…pretty swell, and at first it’s just me and one other person on the patio. It’s Jin’s first time here too. He’s drinking mojitos, and I keep happily happening into the house cocktails that are $10 during happy hour. As it gets darker I stretch my legs out across the bench I’m occupying and pull out my Kindle to read.
‘You look comfortable!’ Jin says, and ‘That’s because I am!’ I answer.
We get to chatting. Jin and his wife moved down here last March from New York. So many people are moving down here from New York, New Jersey. Jin says it used to be that people moved to Miami when they couldn’t ‘make it in a city like New York or Boston or LA, so they come to sort of a third tier city like Miami.’ But it’s changing, he explains, and has been for the past 10 or 15 years. I can see this in the city too, new to it though I am. I can tell by the backgrounds of the people I have talked to in Coconut Grove and Miami Beach. Some aren’t from here at all, others are but were educated elsewhere and have moved back. Jin gives me a handful of foodie recs in SoFi and Coconut Grove, poo-poos the Michelin rec my colleague Diana had offered. Jin doesn’t mean to sound snobby, but he is. We share some East Coast laughs before he has to head to a business dinner. We congratulate ourselves on our excellent choice of cocktail bars.
The next day I sit at Bazaar Project, my favourite local café. I’d stopped here my first day when a coffee shop I wanted to visit, Café Vidita, was temporarily closed. I’d had an $18 glass of wine and a $20 burrata salad, and no regrets. The salad came with Ruffles potato chips, which were served in a champagne coupe. I ordered a rosé Prosecco, which was also served in a champagne coupe. The owner had come to sit al fresco at the table across from me. Something of a celebrity in either the Miami design community, Coconut Grove, or both, people kept stopping her, some for pictures. She was dressed well—better than me, I am ashamed to admit, although in my defence I was in travel clothes—all in black, with bold gold jewellery. She is Turkish. As I left I had nodded at her and told her she had a lovely place. ‘Please come again,’ she had told me, folding her hands in a prayer position. ‘I will!’ I had assured her.
Returning, and taking the table she had sat at, I ask for a cortado, which is not on the menu, but which I am granted. (Thank you, Liberty Hotel and Smith family, I am that fancy.) I also order the granola bowl with Turkish yoghurt, and a glass of Italian pinot grigio. My server is either Spanish or Italian, and I order in broken and hesitant Spanish. She returns to clarify which size cortado I would like, preferring two cups for example. ‘For me, it’s piccolo,’ she says. Italian. Moi aussi, I almost answer, French where Italian or Spanish should be, and eventually just nod and say, ‘For me too.’ Tambien. Anche. Damnit.
She brings me my cortado, accompanied by an almond biscotto, which I am delighted to accept. I ask whether there’s WiFi and she nods, taking my iPad and searching through the networks. ‘Bazaar Staff,’ she says, offering the staff WiFi network. Adorable. I shall not take advantage of this privilege.
She returns with my wine and in her smoky voice says, ‘This, I like. For me, it’s perfect,’ and it really is. The rosé Prosecco may have gone better with the yoghurt bowl, but this is something I can test another day.
Today, I am finishing brunch with enough time to get to my pedicure, and contemplating what the full moon tonight will bring. Here’s to la dolce vita. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but my, sun is shining, and there are rainbows the sky.