Dreaming Florida

I wrote this piece a couple of years ago on assignment for a short-lived magazine, Florida Personalities, for a section called “Dreaming Florida.” Unfortunately, the magazine folded before they could publish it. I’ve decided to publish it here.

My parents, Irwin and Eleanor Rosen, on their honeymoon in Miami Beach, December 1948.

By Robert Rosen

The way I remember it, the water was turquoise, the sand was gold, and, yeah, the memory plays tricks, but I saw the picture every day, every time I walked into my parents’ bedroom.

At least they look the way I remember them from when I was a kid. My father, Irwin, an athletic ex-GI home from the war, appears to be enjoying two weeks in paradise with his 21-year-old bride, my mother, Eleanor, who for the occasion of her wedding had painted her fingernails red. It was December 3, 1948, and they were on the Miami Beach Boardwalk, at 44^th Street—near what was then the Tatum Hotel and is now a high-rise condo adjacent to the Fontainebleau—when a roving photographer snapped this photo.

When the image first penetrated my consciousness some 50 years ago, I thought Miami was the most beautiful city in the world, a magical place where the ocean, unlike the bracing surf of Brighton Beach, was a soothing bath that required no “getting used to,” and the sun was so strong that, as my mother often told me, “you can only take it for 15 minutes at first—you have to be very careful.”

My God, how I wanted to go to Miami. But talk about impossible dreams. In 1957, around the time I grasped the concept of a state called Florida, traveling anywhere more exotic than Poughkeepsie seemed as fantastic as space flight. Miami may as well have been Oz, a Technicolor fantasyland, where, if I was lucky, I might get to someday in the distant future, but only briefly, and only to return to a black-and-white Brooklyn with one colorized photo as proof that I was there. Live in Florida? You’ve gotta be kidding. Real people, like my mother, my father, and me, didn’t live in Florida. We lived in Flatbush, on the third floor of a run-down walk-up, upstairs from a bus driver, whom I can still see sitting in his window, looking like Jackie Gleason and wearing his uniform, laughing as he watched his son brawling in the street below. That’s why I didn’t like The Honeymooners. It was too real.

That it took 18 more years for me to find my way to Florida wasn’t a question of deferred dreams; Europe and California started calling more loudly, and I listened. But the 24 hours I spent in Daytona Beach as a speechwriter for air force secretary John McLucas—he was delivering the commencement address for Embry-Riddle university—finally gave me the opportunity to take a dip in the balmy Atlantic and watch, from my hotel terrace the next morning, as sunrise turned the ocean a shade of blue that at least approximated turquoise.

I began traveling to Florida regularly within a year, usually to visit an old friend from Flatbush who was attending Nova Law School en route to becoming a Palm Beach prosecutor. Each semester he rented a cheap apartment in some little town I’d never heard of—like Davie—and, always happy to have my company, he’d let me crash on his couch for weeks at a time.

While he pursued his legal education, I spent my idyllic freelance days swimming laps in his pool, sauna bathing, and working on a competitive tan, being careful not to overdo it, just as my mother had advised. By the side of a pool in a town called Plantation, it occurred to me that I’d found the Promised Land—a place where even the poorest student could enjoy what in New York was unaffordable luxury.

And it was Florida economics that enticed my parents to retire to Greenacres, near Lake Worth, their condo at one time or another within miles (if not yards) of two uncles, one aunt, two cousins, and four friends, all originally from Brooklyn, some with their accents intact.

My father’s been gone a few years now, but my mother, now 84, is still a shrewd canasta player, a crossword puzzle demon, and a volunteer victims’ liaison in Palm Beach juvenile court. When I visit her, I find myself doing what I’ve always done in Florida—swimming laps in an enormous pool, though I do it now in the peaceful hour just before dawn, stopping only when the orange sun floats into view over the picture-postcard palms.

And some nights in my mother’s guest room, I lie awake dreaming of Brooklyn.