My In-Between Day – June 16, 1983 (A Tempus Fugit Gig)

Afternoon, Monday, June 16, 2025, Miami, Florida

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

42 summers ago…

June 16 fell on a Thursday in Anno Domini 1983. I don’t, of course, remember what the weather was like that day, although I recall that earlier that week, on Monday, South Florida experienced the usual wet season pattern: sunny and hot in the morning, cloudy, hot, and muggy by noon, and blustery and stormy for much of the afternoon hours.

On the day before my high school commencement, I woke up sometime after seven in the morning. I don’t recall many details from that mid-June day, except for walking Gumbo, a basset hound that one of our neighbors in East Wind Lake Village had given us a few days earlier. Gumbo was calm and agreed to be leashed and walked despite the South Florida heat.

Aside from that, I don’t remember much, probably because my mother was dating Joe B, a retired pilot with a serious drinking problem, an unpredictable temper, and an authoritarian streak a mile wide. We didn’t get along, Joe and I, and he made my life miserable until he vamoosed in the summer of 1985, so I think I’ve suppressed my memories of those days to preserve my sanity.

Although my memories of the day before my high school graduation are hazy, I vividly recall the mixed emotions I felt—not just about the ceremony at Miami-Dade Community College’s South Campus, but about my future as well. The years between the fall of 1979—when Joe B. entered my life through his connection with Mom via her friend Olga, his latest ex-wife—and the spring of 1985 are not ones I remember with unfiltered joy. It wasn’t all bad; life is never wholly joyful or miserable. There were moments of happiness, interwoven with experiences that left lasting scars. Yet, most of my fondest memories from my junior and senior high school years stem from events outside the home—like performing with South Miami High’s choral groups—or from the stretches of time when Joe B. was in Sebring, four hours away from our house in the Doral/Sweetwater area.

Perhaps selective memory serves me well, because I can’t recall whether Joe B. was in Miami during that week, 42 summers ago. He owned a house in Sebring—a small town best known for the 24 Hours at Sebring race—and spent increasing amounts of time there, largely because, as a Czech American, he harbored a deep-seated hatred for Cubans. (He passed away in a California nursing home in 2000, but if Trump’s MAGA movement had existed in the Eighties, Joe B. would have worn that red cap proudly.) Unfortunately, he also rented the townhouse next to us so he could be close to his ailing mother, Frances, who was in her late eighties and too sick to move to Highlands County unless she entered a nursing home. To his credit, he refused to do that, instead hiring a full-time nurse to care for her. Still, when he came to see Mom—and exercise his well-worn habit of bossing me around—he stayed next door, a presence I could never fully escape.

I suspect he was in Miami for my commencement, perhaps even attempting to “play nice” as he sometimes did—by abstaining from vodka from morning till night. On the rare occasions when I try to reconstruct my final days as a high school senior, especially Graduation, I catch fleeting glimpses of him in my mind’s eye, clad in his usual blue or white guayabera—a sartorial irony, given his disdain for Hispanics in general and Cubans in particular—playing the role of the affable father figure. But, as I mentioned earlier, selective memory and the passage of time have blurred the details. And maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing.

What I do remember, vividly, is the weight of anxiety and depression. I wasn’t heading out of state for college—my only taste of studying abroad would come half a decade later, in the fall of 1988, when I joined the International College of Seville’s Semester in Spain program, then co-sponsored by the College Consortium for International Studies (CCIS). At the time, even attending Miami-Dade Community College or Florida International University seemed out of reach. Mom hadn’t set aside money for my education, and my attempts to secure part-time work had all ended in rejection. Worse still, no one in South Miami High’s guidance department had discussed my post-graduation plans or walked me through the process of applying to Miami-Dade, let alone seeking scholarships or Pell Grants.

To be fair, my own inertia played a role. Consumed by anxiety and depression, I hadn’t been proactive in seeking advice from my teachers or counselors. That failure, I know, wasn’t just theirs—it was mine too.

Let’s be honest—part of me couldn’t wait to be done with high school, especially the chickenshit aspects: the dress code, the cliques, the petty rivalries, the gossip, and the constant tug-of-war between adolescent rebellion and the pressure to conform. But despite all that, I knew I would miss South Miami High—not because the campus was particularly beautiful or because I was Mr. Popular (especially not with the girls).

South Miami wasn’t ugly, but it embodied that 1970s Institutional aesthetic—enclosed, air-conditioned, practical. Yet Cobra Country held an undeniable pull for me, not just because I liked 99% of my teachers and tolerated about 60% of my classes, or because I had made plenty of good memories and friendships. More than anything, school was my safe place.

And so, here I am, 42 summers later, turning this day over in my mind—not to unearth some grand revelation, but simply because it lingers. Some days, memory surfaces with clarity; others, it wades through the fog, revealing only fragments. Today is one of those days—a quiet reflection on the limbo between endings and beginnings, between certainty and uncertainty, between what was and what came after.

I don’t have a sweeping conclusion to offer, no profound insight about adolescence or nostalgia. This isn’t about making a larger point—it’s just something that’s weighed on me today. And maybe that’s enough.