I wanted to call this blog post Mom of Teen Finally Succumbs to Worry, but then I remembered my daughter is no longer a teen. Mom of Twenty Year Old just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Still, the point of this story is that as a mom I have always tried not to be a worrier. I’m just not the what if type. But sometimes, events stretch even my natural stores of chill. Saturday was one of those times.
I was sitting in La Guardia waiting for my flight to Miami. I was feeling a little concerned that I hadn’t had a text from my daughter saying she was boarding in San Francisco, or had landed in Miami and was shopping on Collins Avenue while she waited for me to join her. This was our plan. She was getting the red-eye Friday night and I was to meet her Saturday afternoon. What could possibly go wrong?
Putting out of my mind all thoughts of how her car could have gone off the road or her plane fallen out of the sky, I decided her phone must have run out of juice. I texted her a couple of photos of my airport experience. No response. Then I called her. Straight to voicemail. Finally I caved and texted shopping on Collins Avenue already? check in with me. Nothing.
Now I was finally worried. I got a coffee so I could be worried and jittery. I checked my phone every 0.8 seconds. Finally…a call!
Her: Mom?
Me: Where are you?
Her: In bed. Mom, wait, my flight’s not tonight???
Her flight was not that night. It was the previous night. She had not been on it. Suffice to say that for half a minute, at Gate C44 in La Guardia airport, I lost my cool. You got the day wrong? How could you get the day wrong? Then I shifted into my calm-in-a-shit-storm mode and within fifteen minutes we had her booked on another red-eye flying out that night. She’d be joining me a day later than planned. No big deal I finished my coffee, boarded my flight and settled back to enjoy a day alone on the Florida Keys.
Travel just fills me with delight. It makes me feel like a citizen of the world. The plane banked over glittering Manhattan and I said an affectionate farewell to Central Park, the Empire State and Lady Liberty, icons of my new home. Then we cruised for three hours down the East Coast of the US. It was a route I had never taken. Miami from the air looked every bit the wealthy playground I had imagined. Collins Avenue stretched gleaming along the beach front and the cruise ships lined up at the docks like tiny white toys.
Miami airport is pristine. The shopping is informed by Cape Canaveral and water sports. There was a long line for the rental cars and I was the only white person in it. As I drove my vehicle out of the parking garage, I was feeling like Intrepid World Traveler, able to navigate any system anywhere. Then I turned the corner towards the exit and my phone went dead. Oh no! Now I have no map, no Siri, I don’t know where I’m going…WHAT THE HELL??? A moment later, the dash screen lit up with google maps and the directions to my airbnb. The phone had just gone momentarily dark while connecting to bluetooth. Yessssss! Am intrepid world traveler again, handily overcoming all obstacles in my path!
A mile down the highway, I’m taking in the endless palm trees and the sunshine and the new greens and blues when splat! splat! splat! It’s 91 degrees and sunny, but it’s raining. Not only that but the raindrops are the size of dinner plates and I’m turning the wipers up to top speed and back down because one minute it’s raining hard and the next it’s not raining at all. Different. Meanwhile, cars are zooming past me on all sides. Floridians drive really fast, and they weave. A lot. I’m still a fairly polite Californian driver, but a year of trips into New York City from the Hudson Valley have taught me to handle aggressive driving. When you drive into NYC from Hudson, there’s a certain point around Yonkers where the road etiquette switches sharply from sedate upstate to insane city. It’s like a gear shift. Comes in handy when you find yourself heading south from Miami on a Saturday afternoon.
Once outside the suburbs the scenery changes fast: it’s flat and low and there are no trees, only what look like mangrove swamps. There’s a sense of the ocean on both sides though you can’t always see it. And everything slides subtly back into the 1950s: the buildings all pastels and rounded corners, the famed highway with its bridges and shabby turquoise wall dividing the lanes. I can feel Hemingway’s prose rising to describe the place. He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach.
After I check in to my airbnb, I wander down the gravel road to Snappers, a tiki bar and seafood restaurant on the water. Table for one. A Key Lime Colada and some fresh shrimp. I’m sitting five feet away from the ocean that stretches off east to the Bahamas and south to Cuba. Finding myself accidentally having dinner alone in the balmy air of Key Largo is just about the best way I could have imagined to recharge my depleted Covid hospice nurse self. There are no lions on the beach that I can see, but I’m okay with that.
Everyone has to miss a flight at least once in their lives, it’s a rite of passage to adulthood. And it taught me a valuable lesson: if you find yourself accidentally on holiday alone, always treat yourself to a Key Lime Colada. On second thoughts, make that two.
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