Category: Miami Stories

It will be fifty years this November since we took the Pan American flight that would separate us from the life of the privileged in Cuba to that of political refugees.

They served us tiny ham-and-cheese sandwiches with the iconic blue PanAm logo that tasted to us of the future – America.

We moved in with my aunt and uncle and their children into a three-bedroom house on the corner of 82 Avenue and 17 Street, a neighborhood known as Westchester. The community was predominantly Jewish with a handful of Cuban professionals, actors and writers. Walking distance was Everglades Elementary, a lovely school, but not if you didn’t speak the language.

I knew a few words in English – the colors, numbers and so on – but not enough to survive the third grade. I was made to feel alien, which I was. I looked forward to my afternoons in the warmth of the kitchen of Mrs. Meyers’s house, down the street. She would give me a quarter after school for babysitting and she allowed me to lick the cake batter off of her beaters. She was so nice to me and I acted as if I enjoyed her batter, but I didn’t because I was suffering from anorexia nervosa and couldn’t keep anything down.

No one really knew how bad things were for me at Everglades until my mother was informed that because of my problem with the language, I was being held back in second grade. Thank God that practice has since been abolished.

I also cherish the memories of the holiday traditions that were established early by my parents in an effort to bring normalcy to our lives. We would all pack into the Ford Falcon and head to Jordan Marsh department store downtown (where the OMNI eventually would be built) to see the beautiful animated Christmas displays and head upstairs to the toy department where we would get our traditional picture with Santa.

The holiday tradition would culminate with the New Year’s Eve parade down Flagler. Sometime around noon we would set up the fold-out chairs in the parking lot across from Walgreens and, with sandwiches and hot cocoa, we would see the likes of Paul Anka, Bobby Darrin, the stars of TV shows such as “Flipper” and the terrific high school bands. Everything in the “Magic City” was bright and shiny.

Spring of 1964 would bring The Beatles to Miami Beach, the Mustang, and Coral Park High School to Westchester. “Wow, Mom, that’s where the big kids go,” I said, but all these things were in the future.

Spring also brought the celebration of Easter. Services at noon would be in Spanish at St. Brendan’s on 87th Avenue, with me in my two-piece pink outfit and straw hat from the Zayre department store, also on 87th. Lunch would follow at the Pizza drive-in on Bird and 87th followed by a jelly-bean-decorated coconut cake from Publix on Coral Way.

I did not go to Coral Park High after all. I graduated from Southwest High off of 87th Avenue and 47th Street in 1973, and by the time of my ten-year-reunion, both my parents had died of cancer at the age of 47, and I was divorcing. I had nothing to share.

The OMNI by then had replaced the magical windows of Jordan Marsh. As luck would have it, while getting certified in teaching, my internship landed me back at Everglades Elementary, in the exact second grade with the same teacher who had held me back as a seven year old because I did not understand the language.

I eventually did end up at Coral Park, but as a teacher and, amazingly, the little seven year old who had been held back was now honored by her peers and elected 1999 Teacher of the Year.

The “Magic City” will never recapture the luster of the sixties through the eyes of a seven year old. I miss the blimp on Watson Island, the train rides at McArthur Dairy on Mother’s Day, flying kites on Father’s Day at Robert King High, the colorful Christmas windows at Jordan March, and most of all neighbors like Mrs. Meyers.

I was not allowed to talk at six o’clock when the news came on. Dinner at the pull-down table in the breakfast room was a silent affair, but for the radio.

Edward R.Murrow was reporting: Hitler’s crossing this river, that river. Daddy fumed that he wanted to go “over there,” to help our country – but he was too young for WWI, too old for WWII and he and Mommy were saddled with 3 little girls and one on the way. Mommy would say, “Why am I bringing another life into this horrible, hopeless world?”

A recurring ghastly nightmare — me, 5 years old, swinging on the playground at North Beach Elementary – and suddenly Hitler was standing on a giant swing, arcing over the playground, with a uniformed German on each side in identical mustaches and on swings, each one scoo-o-o-oping up little children – me, one of them, disappearing into instant night.

During the day I would march alongside soldiers outside my house on Royal Palm Avenue and in Polo Park (where Nautilus Middle School now stands). The army was occupying Miami Beach hotels, with the streets as their training grounds. One of my first songs was, “Over there, send the word . . . that the Yanks are coming. . . .” Me wondering, who ARE the yanks, anyway?

There were blackouts every night and rationing; my parents were on Civil Air Patrol “birdwatching” from the Roney Plaza hotel tower for German subs off the coast.

In school, I remember wrapping bandages for the war effort and singing, “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder. . . .” There were daily drills and we had to duck under our desks.

Then, on Fox Movietone News, concentration-camp skeletons were being liberated. Then came the great day! I was nine years old, and my whole childhood of memory had been nothing but war. Now that childhood was almost gone – I danced around the radio with my sister singing, “The war is over, the war is over, the war is over!!!!”

On Sundays when I was little, my dad and I would take the tandem bike and ride from our home in North Miami to the beach. Most of the time, my legs were just along for the ride and rested lightly on the rotating pedals, allowing my dad to do the hardest pedaling. With the 19-mile round trip, I preferred to save my energy for galloping through the waves. I started tap dancing when I was four, and it was always more fun to shuffle and lindy through the waves. The flapping of my feet struck the water, and resonated with even more satisfying sound than the beat of metal taps on a wooden dance floor. It was always a celebration, dancing.

While my dad and his dad were football players at my age, I was never interested in sports. There was, and still is, something magical that happens when I step out onto a stage. The feeling is a strange cross between everlastingness and fleetingness. And somewhere in between the -ness, I have always remained caught. For me – much more than the acknowledgement that dance is a language and that dance is a representation of everyday experiences – dance is much like life: some days it feels like forever, and then there comes a day when there are no more days. In this way, dance is also a measure of time. And this love for dance has helped me through many difficult times, including the loss of my mom when I was 9.

One of the best memories I have of my mom is standing on the tops of her feet as she danced around the living room. I remember the feeling of shifting from one foot to the other, the continuity of her movements and my role as her abiding partner, neither controlling nor directing the dance but a part of it nonetheless. After she passed away, I would stand in the middle of the living room, close my eyes and try to recreate our waltz. It was never the same.

My mom started me in dancing. Once a week, we’d all get in the car together and drop her off at an adult tap class in North Miami. My dad and I would then continue on to Donavan’s Bar & Grill on Northwest 7th Avenue. Donavan’s had billiards and French fries, and we’d hang out there for the hour or so of her class. Eventually, I grew curious about my mom’s tap class and began to stay and watch. This led to being enrolled in dance class myself and it was strange at first – not the same as leaping through ocean waves or whirling into dizziness at home, but I soon caught on.

I am very close with my dad, and for a few years after my mom died, he too became closer with his. Around this time, my dad signed me up for a football summer camp. I tried football, but I prayed for rain every day we had practice. Most of the other boys at Bunche Park already understood football and played it in their own backyards, much how I practiced dance in mine. I remember doing sprints – that was the one thing for which I was passable. I could run without tripping on my own two feet. Aside from one kid I befriended with a perpetually runny nose, who could also burp on command, the entire experience was pointless. I have a faint memory of my dad bringing Grandpa Lou to one of the practices (when I had been unsuccessful with my rain invocation), and as terrible as I was, my grandpa seemed far more pleased with my mediocre football than my love for dance.

A few years later, my grandpa passed away. And for another year or so after that, his ashes and wristwatch waited on the mantle. After watching the movie Around the Bend with Christopher Walken and Michael Caine, my dad and I awoke from our moratorium. We walked outside and stood on the dock behind our house to cast his ashes into the dark lake, leading into a canal of brackish water that weaves through many of the neighborhoods in Biscayne Gardens. After minutes of silence, my dad turned to me and said, “Give us a little soft shoe, son.” So there I stood holding my grandfather’s ashes in a cardboard box and tapping out “Tea for Two.” I felt highly inappropriate doing this, believing this ceremony required a more solemn reflection.

After making sure all of Grandpa Lou was out of the box and into the lake, I noticed for the first time just how cathartic dancing is for me. The tapping out of the rhythms brought me back to my best memories of my mom, and suddenly this was not so much about solemnity as it was of celebration. Celebrating life that can be over as quickly as a dance. And it is in this precious fragility I now find my place as a dance artist and choreographer.

Much like my earliest experiences with dance, I am very interested in creating dance for non-traditional and unexpected locations. We have plenty throughout Miami – secret places we drive past everyday without ever knowing of them. I was recently awarded a Knight Arts Challenge grant for a project called Grass Stains that will help commission and mentor other artists interested in creating work that highlights Miami’s hidden spaces. As I continue to change as an artist, my early memories of growing up in North Miami inform my art making and remind me of those in-between moments, of everlastingness and fleetingness, the dances that have ended and those whose music hasn’t yet begun.

One of Jean McNamee’s first memories as a child in Hollywood was of her mother, Elise La Monaca, putting her and her brother in the family’s icebox.

Her father, Caesar La Monaca, calmly assured his wife that everything would be alright, but Elise was afraid the roof would come off the house or that the rising flood water would overtake them.

Caesar peered out of their East Hollywood home on Sept. 18, 1926. In the shadows of the stormy morning he saw images he would recount for the rest of his life: Large objects floated haphazardly through his neighborhood. Cars were being pushed by powerful winds and waves through the streets, as if being driven by frenetic children on a bumper car floor.

The Great Hurricane of 1926 killed many people on its path of destruction. What La Monaca couldn’t have realized that day was that the winds of that storm would change the direction of his career and his life. It would end up pushing him towards Miami, where he would become the city’s authentic “Music Man.”

La Monaca was born in 1886 to a shopkeeper father, Vito, in San Severo, near the heel of what is the Italian boot. His mother, Giovanna, raised six children.

He was born Cesare, which he Anglicized to Caesar in America. He followed his older brother, Giuseppe, who later changed his name to Joseph, into the Banda Bianca, an Italian community band in which new band members were apprentices, studying music theory as well as instrumental techniques until they were good enough to play with the group.

After Joseph earned a flute-playing job in Ellery’s Royal Italian Band, a touring group in the United States, he found a spot for Caesar as a horn player.

The La Monaca brothers immigrated and traveled America’s booming heartland, playing concerts, festivals, fairs and any event that would hire them.

As America entered World War I, La Monaca was drafted. His expertise in music was discovered and he was made the enlisted bandleader of the Camp Kearney band, in California, while serving in the 82nd Infantry Division. During those years he transitioned from musician to bandleader.

The war wound down before he was deployed and La Monaca moved back to the Northeast, where he worked on Broadway and in vaudeville. In New York, he met a beautiful young Italian immigrant, Elise D’Addona. She was 15 years his junior but Caesar proposed on their first date and they were soon married. The La Monacas soon had two children, Caesar Vito and Jean.

Joseph La Monaca moved to Philadelphia, where he began a prestigious career as flautist and composer with the Philadelphia Symphony.

Ceasar La Monaca brought his band to Florida in 1923. With six new houses starting construction daily, developer J.W. Young’s Hollywood was exploding with residents and they needed entertaining as much as the tourists in Young’s hotel. Young hired La Monaca full-time. By 1926, Hollywood had a bandshell, an outdoor stage at the casino, and countless other venues for live music. La Monaca even formed a marching band to participate in Hollywood’s first Fourth of July parade.

Soon after the Great Hurricane, Hollywood’s economy floundered and La Monaca had to look for work elsewhere. He joined the American Legion as musical director for Harvey W. Seeds American Legion Post #29 drum corps. The corps already held a national championship. La Monaca would lead them to three more national championships and countless state championships as well as international accolades over the following 25 years.

La Monaca soon won the job producing seasonal concerts at Miami’s Bayfront Park. His free concerts became a social staple, with thousands in attendance at almost every show. He attracted guest soloists like the famed Mana-Zucca and local John Basso. He introduced thousands of music fans to classical songs he arranged from memory. His bands also played popular songs and even some of his own compositions. La Monaca wrote several songs about Miami.

He was always teaching music and bringing good musicians together. He incorporated members of the 265th Coast Artillery band of the Florida National Guard band, where he was the bandmaster, and students from the University of Miami, into his shows.

During the Great Depression, La Monaca, through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), was able to get unemployed musicians to teach music to his drum corps.

It is impossible to count the thousands of young men and women La Monaca trained over the years. He and Miami Sheriff Thomas Kelly, a fellow Legionnaire, launched the Miami Boys Drum and Bugle Corps for younger boys. Even after they retired from the marching field, they helped guide the development of the Miami Vanguard and Legion of Brass drum corps. La Monaca taught Boy Scout drum corps in Miami and Hollywood. He organized the predecessor to the Greater Miami Youth Symphony.

Daughter Jean McNamee recollects one Orange Bowl parade in which her father marched the route five times. As soon as he would get to the finish line, a police escort would take him back to join another of his marching bands or drum corps.

From 1926 to his death in 1980, La Monaca’s bands were everywhere in Miami: His band opened the horse track at Tropical Park in 1931 and played there and at Hialeah race track regularly. In 1933 his band was at Bayfront Park during the attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin Roosevelt.

During World War II, La Monaca was too old to serve. He was forced to retire from the military. He joined the all-volunteer Florida State Guard and helped the sales of war bonds.

He worked tirelessly in the industry that brought him joy and success. He was a musician, composer and a respected conductor. La Monaca, an Italian immigrant whose life began under adverse conditions, arranged his way to the American dream as Miami’s Music Man.

In 1953, my father realized his dream of many years when we moved from Allentown, Pa., to South Florida.

I can remember stepping off the train at the old Florida East Coast Railway station in downtown Miami in the middle of August. When the blast of heat hit me, all I could think about was how I missed my hometown, my friends and my dog that I had to leave behind. When I entered Ada Merritt Junior High School, it looked like a cardboard school compared to the sturdy brick school I attended back home. It was a difficult adjustment, but before long I made new friends and became acclimated to the heat and mosquitoes.

We lived on Southwest Sixth Avenue and my brother Jim and I would take frequent walks to explore our new environment. We often walked by the two-story frame homes from the late 1800s that lined Brickell Avenue. Close by was Miss Harris’ School, a private school for girls. My only regret is that I never took photos of these historic homes.

One day, my brother and I bicycled across the Rickenbacker Causeway to the end of Key Biscayne to explore the old Crandon estate. There was very little left, but it was exciting to view the remains of this home, as well as Key Biscayne. We could hardly walk for a few days after that long bike trip. Another time we tried to “enter” Vizcaya via the bay side, but didn’t get far past the thickets.

Our family moved to Coconut Grove a few years after coming to Miami. Our home was on a street that ended at the bay. There was a large empty lot that extended from behind our home to the bay. This land has since been developed. Back in the ‘50s, we had large land crabs crawling all over our back yard and we could get a clear view of the bay from our house. I used to enjoy sitting on the seawall at the end of our street watching the boats go by. From the seawall, I could see Fair Isle (now Grove Isle) before it was developed.

When we were teenagers, we used to speed down “thrill hill,” as Darwin Street in Coconut Grove was then nicknamed due to its elevation. It wasn’t much of an elevation but compared to the rest of Miami, it was a hill. Being a short hill, we had to quickly brake at South Bayshore Drive. Just a few feet down the street was Jensen’s Restaurant, which later became Monty Trainer’s.

Coconut Grove was a sleepy, artsy town in the ‘50s. A highlight of my teen years was going to see Elvis Presley at the Olympia (now Gusman) Theater in downtown Miami. The theater was filled with screaming teens and, I am embarrassed to admit, I was one of them.

After graduating from Miami High, I entered the University of Miami. The campus was different from the way it looks today. Everyone congregated at the “Slop Shop,” along the patio by the lake. Girls were forbidden to wear Bermuda shorts to class and many wore them under their trench coats. There was always a party going on at one of the frat houses that lined the campus, and the lion in front of PKA frat house was constantly getting attacked with paint. On Friday afternoons, the place to go was the Campus Canteen, which is now Taco Rico on U.S. 1. One afternoon, Coral Gables police officers pulled up to the Canteen with a bus to haul away all the students who were caught drinking under the age of 21.

Miracle Mile and Lincoln Road were THE places to shop before Dadeland was built, with many wonderful stores to choose from, like Judy Leslie’s and Stow on the Wold. Popular restaurants included Chippy’s and Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlor. Also, Tyler’s Restaurant on Ponce de Leon Boulevard, where the chicken with honey was always a hit. A few blocks down on Coral Way was Dean’s Waffle Shop where we would go for a late-night snack after a movie. At Dean’s you always saw someone you knew. The Holsum Bakery coffee shop was another popular spot to stop for coffee and glorious French doughnuts.

In the ‘70s, the favorite sport among teens, including our oldest daughter (unknown to me), was to sneak into the abandoned VA hospital – now the Biltmore – and climb up to the tower. This was a challenging and scary prospect as there were no lights in the building and the abandoned operating tables and gurneys added to the eerie atmosphere. I learned of these exploits years later when my daughter knew she would be free from punishment.

My husband and I have been residents of Coral Gables for 45 years. We remain ever grateful for the privilege of living and raising our children in this beautiful city. Our daughters now live in New York but loved growing up here and spent much of their youth playing tennis and swimming at the Coral Gables Country Club. They have fond memories of J. Paul Riddle, an aviation pioneer and founder of Embry Riddle Aereonautical University, who was a mentor and tennis coach to my older daughter and so many of the youngsters who frequented the tennis courts.

As a docent at Merrick House, I have learned much about our city’s history and the debt we owe to its founder and creator, George Merrick. It is always a good feeling to drive through the arches and come home to this beautiful tree city. There is nowhere in South Florida I would rather live.

My father met and married my mother in 1929 and I arrived in 1930. Her mother came to Miami from Cleveland, OH, in 1923 to begin a new life. She opened a tropical fruit stand on the front porch of her coral rock house at Northeast 26th Street and Second Avenue.

The fruit was purchased early in the morning at the farmer’s market on Northwest 12th Avenue and 20th Street, and the market is still there. She then became a real estate broker and, after many years of buying and selling real estate, she purchased a small hotel on Miami Beach. She became a civic leader and was presented with a gold key to the city by the mayor.

When I was seven years old, I watched the store as I ate my nickel ice cream cone and observed the trolley cars go by on Second Avenue. On the weekends, my family and I took the trolley car that ran down the middle of the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach. We went swimming in the ocean and built sand castles. Though the trolley is long gone, now there is talk of bringing it back to run once again. As the saying goes, “Everything old is new again.”

I attended Beach High, where many of the students were from families that were either very rich or very poor. However, at school, everyone played and worked together and we had a great time. Latin music was the rage and many of the boys had Cubavera jackets and suede shoes.

The Lindy Hop was a popular dance, and Beach High’s big patio was the place where we had wonderful dance parties. Sports were a big part of high school life. I played tennis and won the Beach High tennis trophy. I was initiated into the B club and joined a fraternity with Irwin Saywitz, who became an owner of Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant.

After graduating, I attended the University of Florida, studying architecture with Kenny Treister, who later built the Mayfair Center in Coconut Grove. We were members of the ZBT fraternity and one day made a bold decision to write to Frank Lloyd Wright and ask him to design a fraternity house for us. He did — it was brilliant.

Unfortunately, the fraternity could not afford to build it. Wright came to Gainesville for two exciting days to present the plans and to meet and lecture with all the young aspiring architects and the faculty. That was the highlight event of the school year.

After graduating, I entered the Navy Officer’s Candidate School. This was the time of the Korean conflict and all boys over 18 had to serve. After serving three and a half years, I was honorably discharged as an LTJR (junior lieutenant). During this period I was on an aircraft carrier stationed in the Mediterranean. My next tour of duty was as an aid to the commander-in-chief of the fifth fleet in Norfolk, VA, where I greeted all of his visitors.

After my discharge, I returned to my home in Miami, where I began my career as an architect with Bob Bleemer, a high school friend. We opened a very small office on 40th Street in the Design District and were successful. It was a time of construction and growth in Miami and we were a part of it.

We borrowed money and built an office building in the neighborhood and eventually employed 35 designers and architects. We became well known and designed more than 40 condominium interiors in Miami, plus many projects around the country and in South America. Miami grew and we grew with it.

After 20 years, I partnered with Pepe Calderin and we became Levine Calderin & Associates. We won numerous awards.

I received a lifetime achievement award from the American Institute of Architects, and then finally retired to spend time as president of the American Foundation for the Arts, which I founded. In the 1980s, we created an exhibition space in the Design District on 40th Street and Second Avenue. This was a period when Miami only had a few galleries and a small museum of art, and The American Foundation of the Arts played a major role in Miami’s developing cultural life.

We helped bring numerous artists to Miami for exhibitions and lectures, among them Christo who draped the islands of Biscayne Bay in pink and pop artist Alex Katz. We also gave many local artists their first show and produced beautiful catalogs for each exhibition.

During the creation of the museum, I learned about the artist Purvis Young, who lived in Overtown. The Miami Herald ran a big story with a color picture of “Goodbread Alley” where Purvis lived. The article said that many of the wooden homes and fences in the neighborhood were to be demolished, including paintings that were nailed to the houses.

The next day, I went to “Goodbread Alley,” met Purvis and purchased 80 of his paintings. Purvis’ work is now in many museums and private collections throughout America.

The city has grown and today has many outstanding cultural institutions. It is a vibrant, cultured, and fabulous place to live. It was wonderful to be a part of the growth of the Magic City.

They call Miami “the Magic City,” which is fitting, because it’s always able to reinvent itself.
I was born in Hialeah Hospital in 1981. History is full of eras, but this specific moment was the beginning of change, an almost traceable line of demarcation.

My mother fled Cuba in 1969 when she was 19 with her sister and my grandmother; my grandfather, a political prisoner, joined them five years later. She met my father after he arrived here in 1979, after 20 years as a political prisoner in Cuba.

I belonged to two worlds. I was an American, but at the same time, I was Cuban. I didn’t quite fit either group. In many ways, my story is the story of the city in which I was born: Hialeah is part of South Florida; yet, it feels totally different from Tallahassee, or Tampa, or Titusville, and worlds away from “the South.”

Hialeah, like South Florida, isn’t just one place, it is many simultaneously. As such, every major street carries at least three names. Red Road is Northwest 57th Avenue, West Fourth Avenue, or la cuatro.

In 1981, South Florida was just barely recovering from a riot and an influx of Cubans that arrived on the Mariel boatlift – events that shaped public discourse, policy, and dinner table conversation for years.

My parents’ first home was in a community called Lago Grande. It was so new that there was nothing nearby and it seemed like it was in the middle of a forest.

My grandparents lived in East Hialeah, back when there were no Spanish-speaking neighbors. To visit, we passed the Holsum Bread factory and the smell of bread filled the car. We passed Hialeah Racetrack, filled with photographers taking their iconic pictures of Quinceñeras in their poofy white gowns, among the pink flamingos and peacocks. There was a viandero who drove by and sold yucca and chorizo, as well as an ice cream truck whose Pink Panther ice cream bars with gumball eyes always tasted better than those at the store.

Vendors walked up and down 49th Street selling fresh churros – coated in fine granulated sugar that always managed to make a mess, making them contraband inside my father’s car – and little white paper cones of roasted peanuts.

There was a Jumbo Supermarket, where Cuban bread disappeared as soon as it was out of the oven, a Latin American restaurant – where I first saw ham hanging from the ceiling – and a new McDonald’s where I met Ronald McDonald and had my face painted.

Ocean Drive wasn’t as popular as it is today, but the beach was always full of visitors. I bounced over waves – wearing pink floaties and building sand castles on beaches – wearing Coppertone sunblock, because that’s what the little girl on the billboard used. We parked at Penrod’s, today’s Nikki Beach. And one of the major rites of passage into teenhood was taking a leap off the South Beach pier.

Everyone loved the Dolphins, Don Shula and Dan Marino. Everyone remembered their perfect season. All this started to change in the 1990s.

When I was 5, we moved, and our family now included my new little brother. I enrolled in a new school, Ben Sheppard Elementary. In third grade, the family moved to Miami Lakes. This was the edge, the newest part of town – again, right next to the “forest.” Everything south of Northwest 149th Street was filled with dense trees. As kids, we rode our bikes into “the forest” and half believed we’d find monsters, wild animals, and maybe even Tarzan. Those were the trees eventually plowed down for new homes and for Barbara Goleman Senior High.

In the 1990s, Art Deco became cool and South Beach was the place to see and be seen. The University of Miami Hurricanes became champions in football for the fourth time, we got a basketball team, and there was a struggle to protect decency: Sheriff Navarro banned a 2 Live Crew record, and Palm Beach banned female street hot dog vendors wearing thong bikinis.

Like today, there were plenty of political scandals; somehow, hundreds of dead people voted in a mayoral race. There was a flood of immigrants – thousands of Cubans braved the sea on rafts, tires, and just about anything that would float, prompting President Clinton to enact the Wet Foot / Dry Foot policy.

Hurricane Andrew arrived on what was supposed to be my first day at Miami Lakes Middle School. Other than downed trees, we were fine. But other parts of South Florida weren’t as lucky. School was delayed almost two weeks and many kids were displaced, left homeless by the storm.

Eventually there was a building boom and Miami’s skyline changed. . At that time, my mother was a vice president at Capital Bank and excited to move into a modern building in the “new” downtown, and even more so when it appeared in the movie “Bad Boys.” But after 5 p.m., downtown died. Stores and businesses closed for the night.

I attended Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High before the FCAT, when kids carried beepers, not cellphones. Football was big. Everyone attended the game versus Hialeah High, our biggest rival. The coveted T Trophy always resided at HML.

After graduation, I attended UM and completed a double major in journalism and English. My husband and I, high school sweethearts, married and moved to Miami Lakes. I teach at Miami Lakes Educational Center and he is a CPA with a small firm in Hialeah.

We stayed close to home. But home keeps changing. The Miami of my childhood doesn’t exist anymore, but neither does the Miami of 10 or even 5 years ago.

But some things remain unchanged. You can find anything that you need in Hialeah and all the streets there still have three names, although la doce, Ludlam Road, 67th Avenue is now also Flamingo Road, but that’s a whole other story.

I reached to pull the yellow lever that would release our glider’s tether to the noisy silver crop duster that was towing us to 3,000 feet over Homestead at the edge of Florida’s Everglades.

This lever — and the towrope that connected us to the plane — was our only link to the powered flight. If I tugged the lever toward me, we’d be on our own in the ether, no engine, just a narrow white cylinder with wings relying on elusive warm updrafts to keep us aloft. My new boyfriend, sitting behind me and piloting the glider we had rented for an hour, had instructed me to release us from the crop duster — but I hesitated.

The origins of my fear of flying are a mystery to me.

I’d suffered life-long psychological paralysis surrounding air travel. Maybe this fear was the result of an association between flying and becoming motion sick at 7 years old as an unaccompanied minor on a flight from Miami to New York. Perhaps the dread was the due to being tossed around in a seaplane in a terrifying lightening-rife storm halfway to the Bahamas from Miami. Maybe a clue to my irrational fear could be found in the panic attack and vomiting episode just after take-off from Miami International Airport after drinking too many dirty vodka martinis in the airport bar in an effort to quell my terror of jetting to Philadelphia.

I didn’t fly anymore. Period.

Over the years, I’d ridden almost every rail Amtrak travels. I’d taken the Queen Mary 2 to Europe and back over the North Atlantic, avoiding air travel and eating a lot of shipboard scones. I turned down free vacations to places in corners of the globe where it would have been impossible to travel expediently by land or sea. Amtrak doesn’t go to Malta.

The irony of my fear is that I’m an exotic-bird enthusiast, expert, and rescuer. I’ve written more than 30 books and hundreds of magazine articles on the care and training of parrots, canaries, finches, and doves. I’ve been a fan of birds since I was a little girl when my grandfather taught me how to charm pigeons to eat from my hands in the coop he built in the backyard of our South Miami home. Birds are the only animals with feathers, structures so strong they can lift a wearer many times her weight into the air for flight across oceans.

But I wasn’t a bird.

I found comfort in the terra firma. So how was I gliding over palm tree nurseries and sawgrass prairies at the edge of the swampy Miami wilderness in an engineless aircraft, being asked to pull a lever that would set the glider free? I hovered my hand over the T-shaped bar with its chipped canary-colored paint and thought about the risks of becoming unanchored and set adrift. What if the sky couldn’t sustain us? We were, after all, heavier than air, and unable to flap like birds.

My paramour is an officer in the Coast Guard based at the Opa-locka air station whose job is to fly helicopters over the South Florida seascape to spot Cuban migrants, save people from sinking boats, and pluck heart-attack victims and pregnant ladies in labor from the decks of cruise ships. He earned a medal for rescuing people from rooftops after Hurricane Katrina, an honor for which he is too humble. He teaches people to fly small planes and gliders and has a 4-seater plane of his own. There could be no one better with whom to share the sky.

I wanted to pull the yellow lever. I have a vague understanding of how wings work, but for the most part, keeping a 10,000-pound hunk of metal airborne seems like magic to me. What if I pulled the lever and we plummeted like a pelican into the sea?

The yellow lever was warm as I grasped it and eased it toward me. With a clunk the glider lost purchase on the towline and we separated from the noisy tow plane, leaving us alone with the only sound of the air whooshing over the clear plastic hood above our heads. Below us, houses with blue backyard pools gave way to tomato fields, which yielded to vast swaths of wetlands.

No hyperventilating into the vomit bag he had brought for me. No crying or hiding my face in sweaty palms. No whispered foxhole prayers that if I made it back to the ground alive I’d never eat bacon again.

“Let’s fly with the birds,” my boyfriend said, turning the glider sharply toward the hazy blue Atlantic.

He knew my weakness. He had told me that a great way to find updrafts—the fuel a glider uses to stay airborne — was to follow turkey buzzards as they swirled beneath the clouds, rotating inside an invisible funnel of wind. We flew toward three buzzards, their black wings outstretched, feathers gleaming in the sun. I forgot about being half a mile above the earth, instead focused on how close the birds allowed us to them, the communion we shared up there in the firmament. I forgot about gravity. I forgot that I was afraid.

Maybe my fear of flying isn’t about plunging to the ground at maximum velocity in an exploding tube filled with fire, as I had once believed. Maybe I just hadn’t met anyone until that moment that made flying fun, someone with whom I wouldn’t mind being set adrift. Experiencing flight with him had become, in a single gesture, with the pull of a yellow lever, more important than my anxiety.