54 Hours in Miami

without a smartphone

WRITTEN ON DAY 1

Otw to the airport

I’ve been saying (half joking, half not) for months now that “God has been telling me to go to Miami. I was at a pretty intimate music salon last weekend and I met this wonderful woman who told me, completely unprompted that she split her time between New York and Miami and that she was looking for someone to rent her place for a few remaining days in Miami. So alas, I took the days and booked a flight and called my father to tell him that I had a place in Florida for a couple of days if he wanted to come hang out—an offer he’d given to me a month or two back when he was in Orlando for a conference.

Something clicked in my brain this year about travel. About youth. About the fact that the world is really big and to move throughout it physically with care and curiosity is one of the purest forms of human entertainment and humanness. A lot clicked in my brain this year. During meditation. During cold plunging. During these disgustingly long runs without music. My “Cormac McCarthy On the Road” Runs I’d cal them, among other things.

Stepping away from the little device that we keep trying to have do all the thinking for us made me think, for the first time, that figuring things out is one of the great human pleasures. And that figuring things out without a smartphone is holy.

So my iPhone is on my desk. I am in a yellow cab. I called an uber and left my phone up there. As I got downstairs, he cancelled on me because he called and I didn’t pick up.

“I was coming down,” I said, “Can you undo it?”

And like God had written it perfectly, an empty cab pulled up right in front of me.

“What are you charging to JFK?” I asked the driver, “He just cancelled on me.”

And now I’m in the back with an agreed upon amount on one of the four screens in the car (five including my laptop), and I’m heading to the airport with no smartphone. We forget that the world should be navigable for us in our rawest form. Without a little black energy box in our hands.

“Imagine being an old person in today’s world,” I said to a really handsome guy who bought me a single ride metro card because I only had cash and the machine wasn’t working. I offered him my number.

“I have a girlfriend,” he said, smiling.

“I knew it,” I said laughing, good natured.

Life is about taking chances.

Leave your phone at home. Only when you are willing to be surprised and to be put in positions where you have to guess, can you truly be fulfilled.

Your life beings when you take the first step out of your comfort zone.

I arrived at the airport at 5:51 for a 7 am flight.

I got turned away from one Delta entrance because I have a credit card, but apparently not the right one.

I moved past all of the self-serve kiosks as one man told a small family “I’m still using this one, I’m still actively using this one.”

“I need to check-in,” I told a Delta employee, “but I don’t have a flip phone.”

She chuckled but she wasn’t surprised.

“Go to lane two.”

I did and repeated my line.

“You just need your confirmation number,” she said.

“I don’t have email on this,” I said.

She raised the stanchion like a bouncer. I waited in line, humming and bopping around like a child, reliving the jazz show I was at last night and imagining what it would be like to perform myself. I gave her my ID. She gave me a sheet of paper. I went through security and walked to my gate. I checked the departure board exactly once.

I arrived at the gate, right as boarding began.

In an age of so much connectivity, so much connection and updating and efficiency and estimating, sometimes it is nice to just have a sheet of paper that tells you to be at gate B43 by 6:45 am at the latest.

I called my dad when I landed to get the address of the place we’re staying since I’d forgotten to write it down. I followed the signs that said “Taxi” since I couldn’t call an uber and tried to hail a couple of passing ones that were not vacant. There was a little phone that I picked up. I couldn’t hear the voice at first and the man said “one second.” Then he came back. I told him the address. He asked how many people. One.

“I’m sending a cab.”

“I just wait here?”

“Yes.”

The whole thing sort of felt magical. You just had to talk to somebody instead of looking at a screen and fighting a surcharge.

The driver was curt, but efficient. He put the address in his maps and I thought of a conversation I had with an uber driver when I was cutting it close in DC from a Hot Literati event last year. About memory. How drivers used to just know the city based on their memory of a place. Human memory is infinite. Erickson said that. I think empathy and kindness and love and things like that are infinite too. I think we just have to be willing to take the time and talk to more people.

Now I am going to look around at the trees and chat. That is what life is about.

I am in Miami.

WRITTEN ON DAY 2

The cab driver was from Haiti and spoke French, giving me an opportunity to practice my broken French. It’s beautiful to see how much people appreciate you putting in an effort to understand them, their culture, their language.

Yesterday my father and I went to the beach and had white claws, lying there for hours. I went in the ocean and took off my D&G glasses to go all the way under. As a kid, I used to watch these vlogs from people in LA, thinking they were the absolute coolest. I would watch these videos about beachy waves and salt spray and smoothie bowls. I let the sun dry my hair to lighten it after the ocean—something my hairstylist tells me to do.

On a rec from a barista at Cafe Umbria, we had dinner at La Sandwicherie (I a salad and my Dad a sandwich). We went to a local grocery store and bought a giant Papaya.

Then we had drinks and shrimp at Oliver’s Bistro as we discussed my writing and some memories for the memoir I’m working on.

DAY 3

Day three, we started at the pool. I took some calls and did ballet barre in the water (easier to make sure you’re using the right muscles) as Dad sunbathed. I had a wrap from Mr. Baguette, wrote and took more calls.

My father and I walked to the FedEx, got a little lost and ended up at this market area where this woman I’m obsessed with named Sandra sold me a pair of boots. She said a bunch of people tried them on and that I was the first person who they fit.

“A Cinderella moment,” my father said.

I started vintage shopping with my dad. It’s something we always liked doing together.

We got a little bit lost, ended up at some juice place, and then I went north for a meeting at Sezanne Cubano. Delicious.

In Sum

I now know that we were in Miami Beach not Miami proper, but it was still what I expected out of Miami. Slower pace. Beautiful people. And excuse to just sit in the sun for a little bit, which I definitely needed.