Meet the Weirdo at the Wheel

Because we’re all on this journey together…

Here’s an introduction to the Miami that I remember & how a trip to the past can teach us a lot about the future.

There is a Turkish proverb that reads “No road is long with good company.” Sounds great, right? Here we are, you and I, riding along on this nostalgic journey in which I’ve promised to take you places and introduce you to random people – except you don’t know me. A total stranger at the wheel. You have all the right to be curious about me, this hopeless nostalgic, who obsesses about the past and frets about the future. You might even be eyeing me a bit suspiciously as you would any weirdo taking you for a ride.

But before you jump ship, remember one thing: there is a reason you decided to get in the car in the first place, and this is it…our first stop. I’ve brought you to the beach!

Some of you may look around and recognize that it is, indeed, Miami Beach. But I wouldn’t dare bring you to the Miami Beach pulsing with “untz untz” music and swarming with fist pumping, bum grinding, Fat Tuesday souvenir cup slurping crowds that navigate past leopard-clad waitresses shoving menus in their faces and bribing with half-price drinks under the guise that any time on South Beach is “happy hour.” A place with nightly parades of suicide door candy-colored cars that roar past galleries of men in blazers & top knot hairstyles and the women that gracefully glide among them in the acrobatic feat that is walking in stilettos – all just waiting for the bouncers’ nod of approval at the door of the ornate dance clubs that seem abandoned and almost invisible during the day.

The Miami I’ve brought you to is quite different. Perhaps, partly because I remember it that way.

French novelist Marcel Proust, who penned the masterpiece and ever-appropriate 20th Century novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), wrote “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

That might be true. For some, that’s the best part about the past. You can manipulate it. You can control what and how you recall it. In the past, you are in charge, while in the present & future you are merely a participant, waiting to see how all your efforts pan out.

I struggle to understand why, as we move forward, we have the tendency to look back. I do it often and it always brings me here, to this very beach.

Welcome to Miami.

It’s okay to unpack…we’ll be here for a while.

CHECK OUT THE NEXT POST IN OUR MIAMI SERIES : RUDY & THE ROSE-COLORED GLASSES.