Remembering

The old man saw me and shuffled across the Temple's carpeted floor.

He had something to give me. He had been carrying it since he was a young man.

"I have a story," he said, his voice low, from the back of his throat. "Do you want to know it?"

He stood close to me. I could smell his age, the mothballs on his old wool sport coat.

He came up to my shoulder, but in his youth, he was probably taller than I am. The weight of time -- and perhaps the other burden he carried -- had taken its toll.

I responded to him: "Always."

There was hardly a pause before the man, closing in on 90, began to recall a living hell.

They were getting rid of the bodies. So many had perished in the work camp, the grave pits were beginning to overflow. They ordered the man to begin dragging corpses from one mound of human remains to another.

As the old man spoke, his body began to involuntarily tremble. Under his drooping eyelids, his dark, far-away eyes were wide. Behind them was horror.

"And then I moved a body from the pile," the man said. "It was my mother. She was my mother."

Tears filled his eyes, and he was silent.

I put my hand on his shoulder. The weight of my arm seemed to cause his entire body to sway.

"Sir, I'll never forget your story," I said.

He squeezed his eyes shut in a long blink. He looked down, then shuffled off.

I took his gift of sorrow. And even though I will share it, I will have it always.

***

I spent Wednesday afternoon with survivors of the holocaust. I held their hands. I looked into their eyes. I listened to their voices. I won't see the world quite the same again.

You can read the story I wrote about the gathering of survivors here.

Don't be shy

After two months of posting, The Daily Muse is beginning to build a steady audience.

About 12 unique visitors per day spend enough time on the site to have actually read something. That's about 12 more than I expected.

Considering the only advertising this blog has is my Facebook profile and word of mouth, that number makes me very happy.

The Daily Muse has been a tremendous creative outlet for me, and a tool in my exploration of different ways to express scenes and happenings in and around my life. The fact that a dozen people per day on average take an interest is really encouraging.

But I want more. Not necessarily more readers -- but feedback. What do you think about the stories? Are they interesting? What kind of thoughts do they stir in you? Do you have any ideas you'd like to relate?

Don't be shy. I'd love to know. Comment away, or just drop me an e-mail.

Human carrion

The pair of buzzards were swooping and circling in the foreground, orbiting the stench of some roadkill or dead fish on MacArthur Causeway over Biscayne Bay.

In the distance far behind the carrion birds, four buzzards of a different kind made a perfect chain of hoovering dots frozen in the sky high above the Miami Beach skyline. Instead of feathers and beaks, these vultures were all metal and blades -- and cameras, too.

Their prey was bloody, and perhaps dead -- but it was of the human kind. Their zoom lenses were trained on a grassy strip of park on South Beach, eager to devour any trace of the man who had been shot in the head no more than an hour before.

He had been taken away by ambulance before the news helicopters arrived, but the smell of midday murder had them in a frenzy. If the guy was indeed dead, this one could be national.

It's not every day one man shoots another in the open in broad daylight with dozens of cops and thousands of tourists around while surrounded by what some consider paradise.

As I sat in traffic crossing over to the beach to cover the sordid thing, I couldn't help but worry -- would I miss out on the buffet?

When I got there, the scene was covered with enough police tape to stretch down a football field if it were laid out straight. The do-not-cross barrier zig-zagged from palm tree to street sign down a half-block's worth of park, at the intersection of 10th Street and Ocean Drive -- the heart of South Beach.

This week is also the heart of spring break for hundreds of thousands of college students.

For them, with their bikini tops and board shorts, fruity drink in hand and Ray Bans over their eyes, the scene was almost another attraction.

The police tape was like a prostrate proscenium for every person walking down the crowded sidewalk under the springtime sun. As they walked, some gawked. Others stared. And many talked. The Miami Beach Police Crime Scene Unit vans pulled up on the grass fueled their banter -- this was just like the stuff they see on TV!

"Ooh, this is CSI. Where's Horatio!?," one tan-leather woman said as she passed.

"Man, this is baller -- I can't wait to tell the girls," a shirtless spring breaker, probably from Jersey or upstate New York, commented to a friend.

As I sat under a palm tree and entertained a trio of bikini-clad spring breakers curious about my job and "like, oh my god, this whole thing," I watched the (yes, for real) CSI team taking pictures and searching for shell casings with a metal detector.

Around that pocket of gritty investigation, the world carries on. Diners nibble at $20 entrees on sidewalk cafes. Babies squeal, sand in their diapers. Craftsmen sit at their makeshift tables, selling bracelets and on-the-spot sketches to families and ladies in big sun hats. Beautiful women walk down the boardwalk, and the beautiful men turn to survey the girls' beautiful bodies as they pass. Dogs bark and piss, traffic inches along.

A homeless man was shot, and nary a thing stops.

What it is and what I hope it will always be

Thirteen hours spent writing and reporting Friday. Airport sniffer-dog retirements, finishing touches on a 40-inch feature on crime hurting a new neighborhood.

Saturday, six were dead before sunrise. All from gunshots. You can never forget the bleary, red-crackled eyes of a mother who has just lost her son. Another pair was seared into my mind.

I also wrote about a fire in a church and a missing boy.

That night, just hours after being surrounded by and writing about sorrow, I put on a pressed Express shirt and met with a friend at The Fifth, a club on South Beach.

A fashion show was there that night. Models strutted and flash bulbs sparkled. The lights and lasers traced the plush couches and packed dance floor. As I found myself in the VIP area, with open bottles of Absolut and Gray Goose in front of me, I stared off into the sea of throbbing, sweat-glistening glitter. As the poppy dance track bass thrummed in my chest and deadened my eardrums, I fell into the diaphanous cloth of smile-jerking wonder.

Every person shares in a reality of unbelievable pain and unprecedented ecstasy. The way it's been divvied up is cruel and unequal; those in need of joy and justice are often denied, and hardship consumes those who have done nothing to provoke it. Somehow I've escaped that morass.

My lot is both vivid and generous.

When I realized later that night that my car had been towed (I parked over a line. Petty, but it's how some people make their living), I got a ride back to my apartment, found out where my SUV was and then did what I had to do: got on my Cannondale and rode from Northeast 33rd Street and Biscayne to Miami Beach.

As I flew past shuffling crack addicts and dozens of homeless curled up with their every possession on bus benches and in office doorways at 4:30 a.m., life to me became so clear and simple. My professional successes seem to be growing by the day. I'm in love with a beautiful woman. I have everything I will ever need to be happy for the rest of my life: my mind and my body.

And at that moment, my biggest problem was that -- wait, was there even a problem?

As I rode, my skin grew sticky in the humid, milky pre-dawn haze. My legs burned. And I was content.

In four hours, I would wake up to cover Calle Ocho -- the million-person block party that is known the world over for its rapturous energy and musical and gastronomical delights.

As I walked among the sweaty knots of hundreds of thousands of dancing and cheering revelers filling every street and sidewalk for 23 blocks, I smiled again. Life, and all its spears and caresses, is a supremely beautiful thing.

Twelve hours on Lincoln Road, pt. I

One of my ticket stubs from the Miami International Film Festival.

Day begins crossing Interstate 195. Biscayne Bay sparkles under the midday sun.

Little sailboats sway in the water. The multicolored tops of berthed cruise ships loom on the far side of the panorama, monuments to the rum-soaked nights over which they will soon preside.

I park in the 17th Street Parking Garage on Miami Beach. It's nearly full. I need to park on the top level.

The cars around me are all backed-in and gleaming. The majority are large Audi, Cadillac and Land Rover SUVs. A white-shirted man with a big shiny fake Rolex confirms: this is the valet floor.

"No, no, it's ok -- you can park," he says with an unplaceable European accent. I wonder if the valet service has an official deal with the garage, or the man just parks cars here, raises the rate a little, and banks on tips.

I race down the spiral staircase. It's just before 1 p.m. We're supposed to meet at the theater at 1 p.m. I like to be on time.

On the way down, an old tourist couple are perplexed by the sign in the garage that instructs people to keep their tickets, and pay on-foot at the pay stations before they leave. I tell them it's just to keep down traffic at the exit booths -- the attendants will take their money anytime.

I arrive at the movie theater and look at my cell phone: 1 p.m. exactly.

My friends have yet to arrive -- one is running late, the other, I have no idea -- I don't have his new phone number. But I know how to get it.

I walk down to the Apple store on Lincoln Road and dart to the first open computer I see. It's a large iMac just to the right of the main entrance. The screen is oh-my-god glossy. I log into Facebook, get the number, and wipe my information from the browser.

I'm in and out in less than two minutes. The experience is very clandestine.

I go outside and make the call. Both friends are running late.

I go into Starbucks. I order a Venti iced coffee, no sugar, lite ice ($2.79).

Then I meet one of my friends -- a reporter at the ole' Alligator visiting her family in Miami for Spring Break. We briefly catch up, then my other friend calls. He's waiting at the theater.

The walk there is a walk that is the quintessential early-afternoon Lincoln Road walk. Tiny dogs. Huge sunglasses. People looking. People preening. Glasses clinking. Wallets opening. Music thumping. Chatter rising.

We go inside the large Regal Cinema for tickets. We're here for the last day of the Miami International Film Festival. In the ticket line, the three of us -- young journalists on our days off -- talk about college papers, the industry, newspapers, journalism and everything related to all of the above.

We get tickets for the 4:15 p.m. showing of Captain Abu Raed and the 9 p.m. showing of Tree of Ghebet. It is 2:30 p.m. The day is just beginning.

To be continued...

Note: This post is an exercise in a truncated narrative style. The continuation posts will take on different narrative perspectives, tones, styles and techniques. I don't write a lot outside of journalistic pieces and stream-of-consciousness notes-to-self, so this is my batting practice.

Skid row

Depravity, destitution, despair.

To me, this is what a skid row is.

Today, I found that place. It's in a location that seems to be just as forgotten as the people who languish there.

In the short time I have lived in Miami, my job as a reporter has brought me to some of the poorest, hardscrabble neighborhoods in the city, time and again.

But even in the parts of town associated with crime and poverty, such as Little Haiti and Liberty City, I see a sort of vibrancy that is anathema to the usual description of a skid row. The streets in these places are alive, and the people who reside there carry on with a zeal and passion for life.

Getting by for some in these parts is tough, no doubt -- but at least, for most, there is still hope and joy in their lives. And the government is at least making a show effort to raise up and revitalize these places.

Skid row is not there.

My apartment is in a place described just a decade ago by the New Times as Miami's skid row. But since then, the upper east Biscayne corridor has undergone a brilliant gentrification.

I may hear gunshots, sirens and police helicopters at night sometimes, but I also wake up every morning in the shadow of luxury condos, boutique shops and a lifestyle center, complete with big-box outlets and a Target store with a Starbucks inside.

Skid row is not there, either.

Like I said, it's in a place where only the truly lost would go. It figures, that because I took a wrong turn today, I stumbled upon this mire of broken glass, cracked concrete and shattered lives.

[Note: At about 8:20 p.m., as I finished that last sentence, I thought to myself: "Am I about to exaggerate what I saw this afternoon?" Before I could continue, I had to know -- did I really find skid row? I got in my car and drove there. What I saw gave me chills.]

Tomado Way and Northwest First Court. From what I can tell, that is the geographic center of Miami's skid row. The vibe of vice throbs out from that ground zero for about two blocks in each direction.

Part of the gritty place is essentially subterranean, holed up in the cavern-like, artificially lit hollow of the nearby Interstate 395 underpass.

Under the midday Miami heat, the place looks like a tumor of third-world urban blight growing out from the towering freeway -- a hissing artery to civilization. During the day, the place is dead -- but even death has a sight and smell of its own.

Sprawled out in a gnarled patch of trash-strewn grass, a man lay shirtless, passed out. The area around him was littered with brown glass bottles and trash bags stuffed with his belongings.

Down a treeless, shadeless access road, a woman lay with her eyes shut, her legs splayed in the graying asphalt, her head and torso listlessly collapsed on the sidewalk. In the street near her, a man wearing a patchwork of coats and shorts and pants and hats stood next to a shopping basket overflowing with his treasure, which would easily be trash for you or me.

Maybe it was the heat combined with the layers of clothing, or maybe he was trying to rouse the passed-out woman -- but the man with the basket was barking something loudly toward the afternoon sky.

Men like him were all around. Another man with a trash bag was mumbling something to himself as he held his penis in his hands, urinating on a light post.

Under the eves of the squat, boxy cinderblock buildings that cover the area like fungus on a rotting log, more than a dozen hazy-eyed people sat on sagging boxes or upturned milk crates, waiting for the cool of evening to descend.

At about 8:30 Thursday night, my black SUV came bouncing over the rough pavement of Northwest 14th St./Tomado Way. I was driving south. As my array of headlights pierced the orange dim of the freeway underpass, a dozen heads on dark bodies swiveled toward me in unison.

My eyes grew wide. I could feel a shock of adrenaline hit my system. The synchrony of the denizens' gaze was haunting.

As I slowed at an intersection of Tomado and Northwest Second Avenue, a man on a bicycle in the road was leaning toward another man on the sidewalk. In front of me, a fold of bills was exchanged between them.

Ahead of me, haggard homeless people on wobbly-rimmed bicycles slowly wheeled along under the ghoulish glow of faint streetlights. Lining the sidewalks, three crack-skinny women stood on the curbs, scanning for johns and pigs.

My shiny Pathfinder stood out on this dingy street, where bicycle or rusting Oldsmobile seemed to be the ride of choice. My spine tingled as almost every eye in that corridor seemed to be trained on my headlights. Their expressions were a mix of frightened deer and eager moth. I could have been the cops -- or looking for drugs and sex.

I sped up and turned left at Northwest Third Avenue. The street is wide enough to contain four lanes of traffic, but there are no lines painted on the asphalt -- at least none that could be seen at this hour.

The scabby vista ahead was like a scene from a horror movie.

Dozens of dark shapes were milling on and around the road, silhouetted by lights from a nearby warehouse yard -- the kind of anonymous industrial park in every action film, the kind where deals go bad and corpses are found.

I actually muttered under my breath as my heart began to beat faster: "Zombies... my god, they're like zombies."

They moved slowly, seemingly indifferent to my vehicle trundling down the street. And as I passed, they stared.

I stared back. It was too dark. I couldn't see their eyes.

I drove out of there, my head shaking, my heart pounding and my mind racing.

I had found skid row.

Guns at dusk, beauty at dawn

Thursday afternoon in the newsroom.

Two men were murdered in a Chilli's parking lot.

I go to the apartment of one of the dead men, talk to his grieving best friend.

His neighbor, a tiny old woman with deep blue eyeshadow, said she didn't know the dead man at all, but still sheds a tear after I told her why I was there.

The murdered man was only a year older than I am.

Thursday night in the newsroom.

There is a shooting and riot-like fight at a local high school.

I've been on-call for 10 hours. I am told to go home, to begin my long weekend off.

I furiously pack, grabbing everything I need for the scavenger hunt I've planned for Audra in Lakeland and a weekend of quiet, nature and friends in Gainesville.

My phone rings. It's my editor. Dominick, a boy was shot in the head at the high school and we don't know how bad it is -- can you go to his house?

Yes, I can.

The house is in Opa-Locka, in a neighborhood where some people refuse to open their doors after dark.

I inform the woman who lives across the street from the boy of the shooting. She looks shocked and upset. She calls the boy's mother. She tells us the boy was only shot in the ear. Her son will live.

I call in my story and start driving. I-95 to the Turnpike to Highway 60 to Bartow Highway.

I make it to Lakeland in three and a half hours, even with a stop at Yee-Haw Junction for fuel, where I see my breath for the first time in months.

There is no segue between travel and my mission. After hours of continuous motion, my Pathfinder finally stops at Lake Hollingsworth. I run into the bushes, plant the clue, and drive to Lake Mirror Park, where I climb the spider web jungle gym and plant the clue at its summit.

I rush home, take a nibble of the seasoned rice my mom has left out for me, and then go to grab my bike. Its tires are flat. I will have to resort to the backup plan -- stowing away in my own car.

I FedExed Audra a clue and my spare car key a couple days earlier. I park in an empty parking lot near her house.

She gets in, finds the clues, with me texting hints from the back. When she's out at the final clue, I steal my own car.

I pick her up. We hit the road at 4:20 a.m.

Sunrise over Paynes Prairie, 120 miles away, is at 6:33 a.m.

We arrive as dawn is breaking, at 6:31 a.m.