By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
A vacation at the beach is not always, well, a vacation at the beach.
In March 2023, I attended a continuing legal education (CLE) employment law conference. I can confirm, tongue in cheek, that I always choose to attend CLE based on the substance of the materials presented, not the meeting venue.
Thus, the fact that my recent conference was in Miami Beach, Florida, in the middle of an endless Utah winter, was purely coincidental.
I’d never been to South Beach before. At first blush, it lived up to its reputation. Warm sand. Blue water. Golden sunshine. Swaying palms. The fact that it was forty degrees warmer than my Salt Lake City home did not hurt either.
When my clients call me about HR law issues, I often remind them that all the problems of the world come into the workplace along with their employees. Poverty, violence, domestic strife, substance abuse, angst, health concerns…none of them wait patiently at the office doors while employees do the job.
As a result, I should not have been surprised when the problems of the world also joined me at the idyllic setting of my recent employment law conference.
It was Spring Break, so it was noisy, twenty-four seven. I’m no prude, but it was a bit jarring to see that the college kids who joined us in South Florida wore little more than a smile. I know about the smiles because I expended a lot of disciplined energy looking people on the sidewalk right in the eyes rather than at other places.
Despite its party atmosphere, South Beach also exudes a lingering sadness.
We walked on Ocean Drive past Casa Casuarina, a lovely century-old Mediterranean Revival mansion, only to recall that designer Gianni Versace was gunned down on its lovely marble steps twenty-five years ago. His unhinged assassin, Andrew Cunanan, died on the same beach—a mile or two north—taking his life to end the frantic manhunt that followed Versace’s murder.
Cultural icons like Princess Diana and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy joined the mourners at Versace’s funeral in Milan’s cathedral. Both were dead too, a few months later, after tragic accidents.
Back in South Beach, a few steps away from the Versace mansion along Ocean Drive, we also found the Carlyle, a marvelous art deco condominium building, and the setting for the 1996 film The Birdcage. The movie was hilarious and heartwarming.
Yet, life and death moments leave behind an imprint on the physical world. The ghost of Robin Williams and the story of his sad 2014 suicide cast a pall over the South Beach building where he and co-star Nathan Lane did their great comedic work.
Just around the corner from Ocean Drive, the address for some of the most expensive and opulent real estate in the United States, homeless persons wander and sleep on the sidewalks. This is not an indictment of Florida—the same scene plays out in every major American city, just not with the backdrop of the rest of us frolicking by the sea.
There also were two fatal shootings on South Beach while we were there. Both occurred in the wee hours of the morning, just a few blocks from our hotel.
Reacting to the news reports, a local Uber driver said we were fine and safe during the day, but warned us not to stay out past 10 p.m. The City of Miami Beach responded to the violence by imposing a midnight curfew.
My wife Vicki and I toyed with the idea of immediately returning to the airport and catching the next flight back to Utah (which, by the way, has its own problems). Instead, we tried to find some balance.
We sought out the beauty that also resided in our temporary southeastern home away from home. It’s there.
After a short train ride north, we had lunch with my old friend, Howard Hall dorm-mate, and fellow Notre Dame alum Bob Christian and his wife Elaine. During our college senior year, Bob and I bonded by waging a ferocious best-of-one-hundred series of foosball games.
Bob won the final game, on graduation day, to knot up the series at fifty wins each. We liked that ending so much that we never played a tiebreaker.
Bob is a great guy, but he lives so far away that I’ve only seen him three times in the past forty years. As we swapped stories about careers, adult children, retirement, and growing old, I remembered that good friendships pick up right where they left off despite the distance imposed by time or miles.
From our train window on our ride home, we admired all the pink flowering bougainvillea bushes. We do not see this lovely tropical plant in Utah because it cannot tolerate temperatures below forty degrees. This probably is a good thing, because I really cannot pronounce “bougainvillea” anyway.
The next day, we attended Sunday morning Mass at the Gesù Church, the oldest Catholic Church in Miami. The Gesù (“Holy Name of Jesus”) Catholic Church was founded in 1896, near the spot at the mouth of the Miami River where Jesuit missionaries arrived in 1567. They accompanied Spanish explorer Don Pedro Menendez de Avila, the founder of the first successful European settlement in St. Augustine, Florida.
After the first day of the conference, and with other lawyers from my law firm, we walked/toured through a much later settlement—Miami’s Little Havana. We enjoyed Cuban coffee (café cubano or cafecito), ethnic food, a cigar-making lesson, guava-filled pastries (pastelitos de guayaba), and fascinating tales about the history of this unique immigrant neighborhood.
It seemed wrong to travel all the way to Florida (over 4,000 miles round trip from Salt Lake City) and not dip a toe in the Atlantic ocean. On our last full day in Miami, I covered most of my pale Irish white body with sunscreen and walked down to the beach.
Because I was seeking out the positive, in order to bring some equilibrium to the trip, I ignored news reports about a massive seaweed blob heading to South Florida and jumped right into the ocean water. The temperature seemed cold at first, but actually hovered around seventy degrees, and with swimmer persistence, was quite comfortable after a while.
Vicki found her own individual equilibrium at the same venue, by taking a wonderful morning yoga class on the beach. I’d have joined her, but I had my conference to attend and downward dog makes me dizzy. I am grateful, however, that she joined me during my week in South Florida.
Wherever you are, life is an unending effort to find balance. It helps to have someone there to steady you.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
