A Word From the Weiss

        “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” gushed fashion model Kelly LeBrock and other young lovelies in a late ’80s ad campaign for Pantene shampoo. Well, I may not be beautiful, but please don’t hate me for having spent a recent week somewhere that is.
        And never mind beautiful. Even better – balmy. I'm talking about Miami’s sundrenched South Beach.
        I’d made it a point to visit Florida each winter ever since my maternal grandparents moved down there when I was 12. Then for the past four years I didn’t go. Life got busy. Old friends down there moved away. And the snowfall wasn’t all that bad.
        But if there were ever a winter to revisit my past – along with mild and madcap Miami Beach – surely, this was the one. After too many days of temperatures in the single digits – nah, make that too many weeks – I woke up one morning and told my husband I’d had it. Then I booked flights and a hotel on Expedia. South Beach, here we came!
        Not without a hitch, however. Never mind being subjected at the airport to my first full-body TSA pat-down ever. Far worse an indignity was having Security confiscate the key lime Chobani yogurt I’d planned to eat on the plane for lunch to help get myself psyched for a trip to the tropics. After taking great pains to make sure I wasn’t carrying more than the 3 allotted ounces of shampoo, sunscreen, or any other liquid, I’d foolishly failed to consider the prospects for using fermented milk to blow up a plane.
        Virtually all such past trips had been family affairs ever since our kids were born. Yet both are now grown and were too busy with work to travel. Besides, that week happened to coincide with Valentine’s Day, which was also the anniversary of the fateful blind date on which my husband and I had first met. So, like it or not, we were going to be on our own.
        Well, not entirely on our own. Some friends have moved away, but others remain. Our old friend Rick, who'd served as best man at our wedding, still lives there with his wife and daughter.
        And although my grandparents are now regrettably long gone, there was someone else from way back when whom I felt deserved a visit.
          My late mother’s best friend from childhood, Nada, had written to me recently to report that her second husband had passed away last summer. As dispiriting as this was to hear, there was one bit of good news. This had motivated her to relocate after decades in faraway Sarasota to Boynton Beach, within a manageable drive of Miami.
        When I’d phoned her to express my condolences, we’d ended up babbling animatedly for well over an hour. It was the first time I’d spoke to her at great length since I was a child…or possibly ever. It was also the closest thing on earth I can hope for at this point to talking to my mother, whom I miss daily more than words can express.
        I had promised Nada in closing that if I were ever in Florida, I’d come to see her. This trip would be my chance.
        When booking the vacation, I’d discovered that hotel rates had risen astronomically since our last visit. Most decent places were now priced at upwards of $500 a night. Yeah, right. Reluctant to spend even half that much, I took a room at a newly renovated hotel still under construction. They assured us that no drilling would be done till after 11 a.m.
        It sounded like a deal.
        Even so, we still had some trepidation and asked our friend Rick to check it out for us. He didn’t have time to go in, but drove past and reported back that it looked like a construction zone.
        So it was a relief to arrive at the SBH South Beach Hotel and view it for ourselves. Indeed, the entryway in front was a work in progress. Maybe even a mess. Who cared? The rooms had just been refurbished in December and were modern, fresh, and bright.
        For a nominal added “resort fee” of $20 a day, we were entitled to breakfast for two  – including a choice of pancakes, a yogurt parfait, or scrambled eggs and home fries – at the stylish Charles Street Café right around the corner.
        That fee also gave us access to the rooftop pool at the Boulan, an adjoining luxury hotel. This proved to be a tranquil, elevated oasis overlooking the pristine towers of SoBe, presided over by a hip, graffiti-embellished mural of an Asian courtesan. The water was warm, the scene cool, the rooftop view of the Miami skyline spectacular.
        After battling the bitter cold and other elements for the better part of three months, it felt like we hadn’t died, but simply boarded a plane and gone to heaven.
        Each morning after breakfast, we drove to nearby Flamingo Park and played tennis. Although I’ve never been inclined to play competitively, we made it our special mission to keep the ball aloft for as many consecutive shots as possible. And by week’s end, we’d managed to reach a new world record (well, for us, anyway), 181.
        From there, we’d hasten daily to our unequivocal favorite place on earth for lunch, a funky little outdoor stand on 14th Street off Collins Avenue called La Sandwicherie.
        Its menu consists almost entirely of sandwiches, salads, and fresh-fruit smoothies, but all are made with only the freshest of ingredients, from light-as-air French baguettes to ethereal discs of mozzarella cheese and tiny, tangy pickles called cornichons.
        As with most great food, however, especially that of the French persuasion, the secret is in the sauce – in this case, their very own brand of Dijon mustard vinaigrette.
        We’d spend the rest of the day strolling the silky sands of a magnificent beach only a block from our hotel, or lying poolside, reading, swimming, and soaking up the sun.
        OK, do you hate me now?
        At night, we dined at various old haunts, including an Italian eatery in trendy Lincoln Road Mall called La Lupa di Roma, where we long ago befriended the owner, Flavio.
        Then there was the incredible meal we had at my husband’s favorite Cuban place, Puerta Sagua, a bustling family restaurant where we feasted on specialties like arroz con pollo with black beans and sweet fried plantains.
        It doesn’t get any better than that.
    Or does it?
        The temperate atmosphere put me in such good spirits that we began getting along better than we have in many a year. In fact, we had only one notable spat, and a rather trivial one at that.
        Perhaps my husband meant it as a compliment when he admired an old bikini he had convinced me to bring along against my better judgment. If only he’d had the sense to simply leer at me in it and then quit while he was ahead.
        But no.
        He has a peculiar way of voicing admiration that might best be termed  as giving an “underhanded compliment.”
        He went on to express how much he liked it… unlike the one-piece suit I’d been wearing the day before, which he didn’t care for on me at all… a thought punctuated by a very different look, more appropriate for reacting to a sack of raw sewage.
        Following this unfortunate exchange, I treated him to raw silence for several hours.
        But then sunshine got the better of me and I decided it wasn’t worth fighting about. So I broke down and said something I hoped would settle the subject once and for all.
        “Sorry to disappoint you,” I began, “but try to understand. When I put on a swimsuit at this stage in my life, I don’t expect to look sexy. I have no interest anymore in even trying to look sexy. The only way I aim to look can be summed up in three little words:
        “Not that fat.”
        Did he understand? Not that likely. Maybe not at all. But he laughed and we never spoke about it again.
        And so on Valentine’s Day, I woke up to find him standing in our room with a peace offering, a heart-shaped helium balloon he'd slipped out bright and early to buy.
        Then later that night, we dined al fresco at The Flame Café on a scenic pedestrian thoroughfare called Espanola Way, where we were treated to complimentary cocktails made from Prosecco, vodka, and strawberry puree and garnished with lychee nuts.
        Then we went to see crusty comedian Lewis Black spew diatribes in a show entitled “The Rant is Due” at the Jackie Gleason Theater. Sure, as Black himself openly acknowledged, his curmudgeonly brand of humor was a peculiar choice for Valentine’s Day. Then again, having seen him before, we knew this was something we would both enjoy and that would make us laugh our butts off.
        And what’s more romantic than that?
        OK, maybe it wasn’t all that romantic to hear him vent about his colonoscopy prep. But he did have a particularly hilarious political segment in which he cited statistics indicating that people find Congress less appealing than either lice or the Ebola virus, although most prefer it slightly to both gonorrhea and the Kardashians.
        But in many respects the show was also resoundingly Jewish. Typical was when he tackled the issue of gun control, attributing the fiery controversy in which this country is embroiled to the fact that some of us grew up in a gun culture, while others did not.
        He, for one, had not. “My parents are Jews,” he explained. “They do not hunt…
        "Except for buffets.”
        That’s how we spent our first few days, anyway. Then we finally went to see Nada.
        She and my mother, Bunnie, had met at age 10 and remained lifelong friends. So it was no surprise that when my mom had chosen to take a weekly writing course in the last years of her life, Nada managed to figure prominently in a substantial portion of her work.
        So, as a small surprise, I’d gone through the stacks of notebooks that my mother had left behind and photocopied a few stories that I thought would be of particular interest to her.
        One talked about the time when they were first friends that Nada’s father, a dentist, had chosen to surprise my mother on her 10th birthday by cleaning her teeth for free.
        This story also vividly depicted the backdrop for their friendship, highlighting the stark contrasts between their two families.
        “Dr. Ragovin was a Sephardic Jew,” it began. “His daughter, my dearest friend Nada, was not affiliated with any temple.” My mother’s own family, by contrast, had “observed Talmudic rules and Jewish holidays” as active members of Shomrei Emunah, the Orthodox synagogue two blocks away from their home in Boro Park, Brooklyn.
        But the differences did not stop there. “Dr. Ragovin had opened his dental office in the 1930’s, and although his family was subject to the worries of the Depression, his professional skill safeguarded them and permitted luxuries my family did not enjoy.”
        My mother’s father, meanwhile, struggled to eke out a living selling insurance, with such little success that my grandmother had been obliged to work too, first selling ladies hats and later serving as the office manager for the Liberty Syrup Company.
        As Nada’s best friend, however, my mother got to tag along with her to the theater and restaurants and to enjoy “other extravagances my family could not provide,” like “the fresh Ebinger’s pastries and home-baked cookies always available” at her house.
        "What was Ebinger’s?” asked my husband, when I read this story to him aloud. “Was it like Entenmann’s?”
        “Much better than Entenmann’s!” I replied, recalling their famous blackout cake.
        I thought Nada also might get a kick out of my mother’s romantic tale describing how when she was 17, she’d decided it was finally time to meet her special someone.
        As with most stories she wrote, this was written in the third person, and she called herself by her middle name, Ann. (My father, Stu, had no middle name. She referred to him as Joe.)
        “Ann’s grades were the best, but nobody was breaking down her door to take her to the senior prom,” she wrote. So she convinced her friend Nada to accompany her to the dance run by their school’s honor-student society, Arista, where Ann encountered Joe by the punch bowl and heard him begin to croon along to a Frank Sinatra record.
        “She watched the dance floor for what seemed like an eternity, nursing her punch cup and feeling a frozen smile overtake her. Then suddenly, Joe walked over to Ann. Was he really coming to her?”
        Unfortunately, we all know now how that ill-fated liaison eventually ended, in a prolonged and contentious divorce, although their marriage did last for nearly 30 years. And so eventually followed the tale that my mother wrote about what happened a few decades later when, after my parents split, she set out to re-enter the dating game.
        Coincidentally, perhaps, Nada’s own marriage also had recently unraveled, so she led the way, guiding my mother into singles groups such as Parents Without Partners and Single Professionals, through which Nada had met her own second husband Jim.
        Yet I decided against including yet another story set many years later, when my mother’s second husband Sid had already died and Nada called to announce that she and Jim were coming to visit. As welcome as this news was, it threw my mother into a frenzy of cleaning.
        She went on to describe what polar opposites she and Nada had always been. My mother was a disorganized packrat and invariably late for almost everything. I don’t just mean she ran on Jewish time. She was known to often arrive for a visit hours after the appointed time. Nada, by contrast, was a confirmed neatnik and obsessed with punctuality.
        Knowing that, we made sure to leave in plenty of time to get to her place by 1, the time at which I had promised to take her out to lunch.
        The trip would take an estimated hour and a quarter, according to Mapquest. So it was beyond unnerving to drive for nearly an hour, then realize that we’d made an unfathomable error. Nada lived north of South Beach, but we had been driving south. Instead of nearing her apartment at 12:30, we were now an hour and a half away!
        Thank G-d for cell phones. We called her quickly to confess the problem, and I could hear in her voice not anger or frustration, but fear that we might cancel the visit.
        Not a chance.
        Instead, we rerouted and continued at breakneck speed. The drive took nearly two and a half hours, but we arrived shortly before 2, and exiting the car I heard an unmistakable voice calling my name excitedly from a balcony overlooking the parking lot.
        Then I saw a familiar face, one I hadn’t laid eyes on since my wedding, 30 years ago. Though 86, she was clearly the woman I remembered, the one my mother had loved. Within seconds we had nearly melted together in a warm and much-overdue embrace.
        Now, this was truly what it was like to die and go to heaven.
        Oh, and by the way, needless to say, her apartment was immaculate.
        Over lunch in her retirement home’s clubhouse, we talked about her own two sons, who are both around my age and were once like cousins to me. She also told me stories about my grandparents and how my mother had once sworn her to secrecy, mortified that her own mother had taken a job because no one else she knew had a mother who worked. But mostly we reminisced about years gone by, and I got to pose questions that had long been on my mind, like how two people as different as my folks had ever gotten together.
        “Your mother set her cap for him from the moment they first met,” she replied. “My own mother used to joke about it." Never mind that my father -- no ordinary "Joe" -- had been incomparably shrewd when it came to business. "My mother would say that he didn’t stand a chance.”
        As for my mom’s second husband, it came as a relief to compare notes.
        I admitted that as happy as I’d been that she had found someone new later in life, I’d had my reservations about him. But I wasn't the only one. Every time we arrived at their house for a visit, she would commence screaming at him nonstop.
        I can still hear her often shrill and rather nasal voice ringing in my ears. “Sid!" she'd holler. "Siiiiiiiid!!!!”
        After suffering through my father’s relentless criticism for years, she had seemed to have no patience for her second spouse, browbeating him harshly almost without end. Yet once he had died, she inexplicably turned him into a saint. So bereft did she become that she took to driving around with his framed photograph perched on the passenger seat of her car, lamenting that she’d never meet as good a man ever again.
        At this, Nada could contain herself no longer. “I wish we’d had this conversation years ago,” she said, “because I used to tell Jim I thought I must be losing my mind!”
        My mother had also called her constantly to complain about Sid, often on the verge of divorcing him. But following his death, Nada too had listened incredulously as my mother sang his praises to the hilt, as though he were the Moshiach (Messiah).
        And I realized that as much as we really hadn’t talked for many a year – if ever – Nada and I had been inextricably linked all my life through the indefatigable bond that was my mother.
        It wasn’t merely in the stories she'd written. It was all the things she had told us both over time, and the stories that she'd told us about each other.
        I could only imagine what it would be like to get a visit, many years hence, from the daughter of one of my own closest friends. Although I don’t get to spend much time with these girls, I hear about everything significant that happens to them. They're all like daughters to me.
        After arriving an hour late, we ended up staying much longer than planned, as well. But of course I couldn’t leave before giving Nada those stories and reading one or two aloud.
        When I got to the part about Ebinger’s pastries, my husband, still mystified, asked again what they had been. “Were they like Entenmann’s?” he asked.
        “Much better than Entenmann’s!” Nada and I replied instantly in unison.
        She then grinned broadly to hear about the boundless generosity her family had shared.
        But when I finished the tale about the teeth cleaning, her eyes flooded with tears.
        My mother had concluded by observing, “I never enjoyed a dentist’s office as much before or after that time.”
        “I never knew my father did that – cleaned her teeth for her birthday,” Nada said. “But I’m not surprised. He was a wonderful man, and she was my very best friend.”
        The only heartbreaking part about the visit was that after we’d left, I wanted to call my mother at once and tell her every detail. How happy it would have made her to hear!  
        A week after we returned, we got a card in the mail from my mother’s best friend. “Just a note to let you know how much I appreciate your taking the time to come up and visit,” she wrote. “It was really so nice to reconnect again… Keep in touch.”
        Indeed.
        I fear it may not be easy to stay connected because Nada, despite having her wits totally intact – and then some – is a product of her own generation. That is, she’s a bit of a Luddite. She adamantly refuses to learn how to email, and although she has a cell phone, she doesn’t know how to text and doesn’t want to know.
        So when I got some good news last weekend, I struggled to think of who I could contact to kvell to about it. Just imagine – my son Aidan called to report he’d been accepted into a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, his very first choice of schools. He’d even been awarded a special fellowship, giving him not just free tuition, but a handsome stipend.
        Who else would be excited to hear about it, now that both of my parents were long gone? Sometimes when you’re a nice Jewish mom, you still need a nice Jewish mom.
        Then I thought of Nada.
        I can’t wait to tell her and also to see her again. For no matter how cold next winter may be, we’ve already made reservations to retrace the steps that warmed us up again. And that includes seeing my mother’s dear friend, who is now wonderfully mine as well.