Tempus Fugit: Recalling the Early Summer of 1975

Afternoon, Sunday, June 8, 2025, Miami, Florida

I was 12 in the summer of 1975. I can’t say I had a terrible childhood; I lived in a nice house in Westchester (an unincorporated neighborhood in the Greater Miami metro area) with my widowed mother; a house, needless to say, that had a more placid, stable feel one year after my older half-sister Vicky moved out. If I recall correctly, in early June of 1975, the 74-75 school year was winding down, summer break was only a week or two away, and after that…I’d attend regular classes full-time in Ms. Anne Brown’s fifth-grade class at Tropical Elementary.[1] It wasn’t the almost idyllic childhood I’d enjoyed in Bogota, Colombia, but I liked my down-to-earth one in South Florida more.   

Looking back on the summer of ’75, it’s funny how some memories stick with you, while others fade into the background, like a half-forgotten melody. I was twelve that year, teetering on the edge of childhood and whatever it was that came next. Wacky Packages stickers were my thing—those quirky, irreverent parodies of products that seemed to capture the oddball humor of the time. Books? Oh, I devoured them, often ones way beyond my years. Mom would drive me to the Concord branch library, and I’d leave with treasures like Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far or Clay Blair Jr.’s Silent Victory. They were heavy reads for a kid, but somehow, they held my attention.

Television was where the world seemed to unfold—SWAT, All in the Family, One Day at a Time (Valerie Bertinelli was cute, wasn’t she?), and Emergency! filled our living room in neon colors and familiar voices. And classical music began to sneak into my life, softly at first, like the opening strains of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or the lilting charm of Strauss’ “Blue Danube” waltz.

Movies were another story. I didn’t see many, and the ones I wanted to see—like Jaws—were deemed too intense by Mom. I remember being dropped off at the theater with just enough for a ticket, popcorn, a soda, and a pay phone call for Mom to pick me up when it was over. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was our routine, and it worked.

That summer, I met Mark Prieto. He was everything I wasn’t—bold, outgoing, and naturally funny, with an uncanny ability to mimic voices that would leave everyone in stitches. At first, I wasn’t sure about him. He had this big personality that felt like it might swallow me whole. But Mark had a way of winning people over, even me. I don’t know if it was the time he stuck up for me when one of the local kids got on my case, or the way he could turn even the worst day into a comedy act with his jokes and impressions. Whatever it was, Mark became my best friend that summer.

It was a friendship that didn’t come easy at first, but maybe that’s what made it so memorable. Somehow, his loud exuberance balanced out my quiet introspection, and together, we found a rhythm. It wasn’t perfect, but it was real. And years later, when I think back to those sunlit afternoons in Miami, that summer of ’75 doesn’t seem so far away after all.

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[1] I know, I know. At that age I should have been in fifth grade and getting ready to start sixth. I suspect part of the problem – for I see it as such – was that I’d lived in Colombia for such a long time (almost six years) before Mom and I moved back to Miami in ’72 that I’d forgotten whatever English I’d known as a toddler before 1966. I attended Coral Park Elementary School, my neighborhood school, at the start of the 1972-73 school year, but I had trouble coping with regular classes. So, in November of ’72 I was transferred to Tropical because it had a Special Ed department. So…either I was held back because I needed extra time to adapt to American school systems and learn English, or (as some folks claimed) if you were in the Exceptional Child Program (bureaucratese for “disabled student”), you couldn’t be promoted to junior high until you were 13 or 14. Either way, I was 12 and still in fifth grade. It didn’t bother me then, but it does now.