Elisa Turner     

I never wanted to move to Miami.  When I used to visit the city in the 1970s and early 1980s, I thought Miami was flat and flashy, offering only a shallow substitute for the street-smart glamour of Boston, New York or London.  These were the cities that had truly captivated someone like me, longing for far-flung adventures while she grew up in the small town of Shelbyville, Illinois. When people in Miami raved about the brazenly orange blooms of Poinciana trees, I groaned inside.  I saw visions of tulips and daffodils, missing the way their charming hues announced the long-awaited arrival of spring “up North.”  Yet, like the girlish and dreamy-eyed waitress in the popular 1980s TV sitcom “Cheers” who announced that she was leaving her job at the bar to find herself and perhaps become a writer, I had simply run out of things I was not good at when I moved to Miami with my husband in the scorching hot summer of 1984.

 

All the summers thereafter I discovered would be insufferably sticky scorchers in Miami, especially when I was pregnant.  When I would gripe about how weird I thought Christmas lights looked on palm trees, family and friends would roll their eyes. “There are no seasons here,” I complained. “Yes, there are. They are just more subtle,” people would say.  “Well, yes, there are two,” I would snap. “Hot and REALLY hot.”

But, after all this time, I have made my peace with Miami. My terrific husband of over 30 years and I raised two wonderful children who are now young adults. They grew up with the opportunity to spend every day of their young lives outside. They never experienced chilly “snow days” that kept them stuck in their home, away from friends from school. They learned Spanish in public elementary school in Miami. When learning how to drive, they never had to confront icy roads.

 

And professionally, I grew into a life I would never have thought possible back when I grumpily relocated here from New York.  Miami opened up countless adventures in a new world for me then.  It is still doing that.

The city has always been a place where people come to re-invent themselves, to start anew.  Somehow, without ever taking a course in journalism or art criticism, I became the last Miami Herald art critic when the Herald was the flagship newspaper of Knight Ridder, which sadly no longer exists.

Because I was never a full-time employee at the paper, I worked in my book-lined

study at home, so that I could handle the busy demands of raising children and running a household.  I started working especially hard for the paper in 1995 when Helen L. Kohen, the previous art critic, left.  I recall reading her good-bye column and going to a farewell dinner for her with newspaper colleagues.  My children were in grade school then.  But even after Helen left, I never had my own computer in the newsroom. It made sense for me to drive to museums, galleries, and art events from my home without going to the newspaper office.  I would often rush back to pick up my kids and cook dinner and then work late or early in the morning.

 

Through the wonders of telecommuting (and a reliable modem), I usually filed my stories on time. It was a hectic, harried, and enthralling life. I had always loved words and images, had studied so much literature and art history, so what could be a better career for a working mom?  And then there were the fabulous international assignments for the Herald:  the paper sent me once to the Havana Bienal in Cuba, twice to the Venice Biennale in Italy, once to Art Basel in Switzerland, and once to Haiti.

That trip to Cuba was my first overseas gig.  When I came back to write my story in Miami, I was astonished to see it printed with the dateline Havana under my byline.  It looked as if I had written it in Havana and filed it from there—how remarkable that newspapers could do something like this, I thought, which just shows what a journalistic neophyte I really was. Nevertheless, the experience was so thrilling that I wanted to do it again, and I dreamed up more angles to persuade the paper to let me travel again.

When my half-Cuban husband Eric Smith traveled with me to Havana while I covered the art scene there for the paper, we found time to visit some of his relatives who still live in Havana.  We brought them medicine from Miami in a carry-on suitcase.  It was a warm, friendly encounter even though we wrongly assumed Eric had never met his relative Elenita.  We spoke for about an hour in an apartment with modest décor recalling the 1950s.  Actually they did most of the talking, with Eric occasionally pausing to translate for me since I don’t speak Spanish.  Elenita, who was the first cousin of Eric’s late mom, remembered that she had first met Eric in Miami when she came to help her cousin take care of him soon after he was born.  At my urging, Eric asked Elenita why she still lived in Cuba though so much of her family had moved to Miami.  She sighed.  Then she said, “Some of us have to stay in Cuba.”

This is perhaps the brightest memory I have of those fabulous trips, and one I often recall as I see how the city today is frequently defined by its evolving relationship with Cuba.

In spite of those opportunities to travel, my professional relationship with the Herald ended with a thundering bang.

 

My family and I were nearly killed in a horrific car accident in 2004. Suffering a traumatic brain injury, I was plunged into the black nothingness of a coma. Afterwards I struggled through hours and days of therapy to learn once again how to eat and drink, to talk and walk. My fingers stumbled on the keyboard until I taught myself how to type again.

Cards, telegrams, and orchids from family, friends, co-workers, also from so many people in the art world, kept arriving at my various hospital rooms (there were about four) and home. It was an astonishing deluge of concern for a free-lance art critic who never thought she was good enough because she did not have a degree in journalism or art history and was not full-time at the Herald.

 

Still more shocking surprises:  journalism was changing dramatically, especially in Miami. In 2006 The Miami Herald was sold to The McClatchy Company and the venerable Knight Ridder newspaper chain was dissolved.  As a free-lancer I lost access to 21 years’ worth of work in the Herald archives. While I was still learning how to live with the post-traumatic stress disorder that accompanies a brain injury, the doors slammed shut on my life as art critic for The Miami Herald.  

 

The nasty truth piercing the heart of an exceptionally productive newspaper career is that no one from The Miami Herald has ever told me that I am no longer an art critic for that paper.  I still have my photo ID to gain entry to the Herald building at One Herald Plaza in Miami.  It reads INDEPENDENT FEATURES CONTRACTOR. This building will soon be demolished as its valuable bayfront land has been sold, and the Herald in May 2013 moved to its new location in Doral, a Miami suburb.  To me, all this is, at Aunt Velva from Fayette County, Illinois, might have said, as ugly as home-made sin.

 

In fact, my byline has not appeared in the paper since 2007. In 2008, I began the long process to recover my work from the Herald archives. In March 2009, my lawyer wrote to The Miami Herald publisher and executive editor to request that I have the opportunity to recover all my work.  By e-mail we were told to consult the archives website.  After searching the archives website, I was horrified to discover that my stories appeared online with my byline omitted.  I even had nightmares that I had imagined my life with the paper.  Did we really receive all those cards and orchids after our terrible car crash?

 

But finally in the summer of 2009, I got the go-ahead to visit the Herald library in the downtown Miami building I knew so well.   I had often dreamed about the day I would finally go back, almost the way I have occasionally dreamed about returning to the yellow brick building where I graduated from high school in 1970 in Shelbyville, Illinois.  At one time returning to either seemed equally impossible. In my dream about Shelbyville, I can hear the clatter of lockers slamming shut, feel how tense I was when I couldn’t get my combination locker to open.  The high school is very different now. Because of the school’s declining population, a kindergarten occupies the place where a huge study hall was packed during my freshman year.  I recall that when I was a senior and co-editor of The Snooper, the SHS newspaper, we would need to get an extra hefty stack of stapled mimeographed sheets of the paper to distribute to that study hall.  I still remember how the faintly sweet odor of the purple mimeograph ink clung to those “hot off the press” newspapers.  Now, I don’t think my high school even has a newspaper, and certainly not those mimeograph machines, smelly and noisy relics of the past.  In fact, I am sure that most students at Miami Dade College, where I now do one-on-one tutoring in remedial English, do not even know what a mimeograph machine is.

 

Would the Herald newsroom be very different when I finally went back?  How different could it be after just a few years?  I had heard rumors that it was no longer the place that it was, but it had always been such a bustling nerve center of Miami, I could not think it would be as utterly transformed as my high school now was.  I wanted to see if those riveting photos documenting Miami’s upstart and colorful past would still be displayed along a corridor in the newsroom connecting the Metro Department to the Sports Department.   Would there still be the oddly charming black and white photo of the little Miccosukee girl standing on an alligator? Maybe I would finally have time to check the date on that photo.  Would there be the famous shot of Cuban rafters bouncing inside flimsy inner tubes in the perilous Florida straits, their mouths open in anguished cries, their faces dripping with sweat and tears, their arms reaching out for help that might or might not arrive?  Would there still be the three TV monitors suspended from the ceiling, the colorful talking heads looming silently over the backs of print journalists ever mindful of how the 24-hour breaking news cycle was forever changing their business, diminishing their livelihood?  Would I find out if the glass-windowed conference room, with its picture post card view of Biscayne Bay and the MacArthur Causeway, was still called, as I foggily remembered, the Knight Conference Room?  Though I was never too sure of names for the various conference rooms, since I did not regularly work inside that building, I do remember briefly glimpsing that dazzling view of azure water as I sat at the head of the conference table in that room one day long ago.  How sunshine sparkled on the bay! But we were always too busy to pay much attention, deadlines ever present in our minds.  That day, I was outlining my plans for how the Herald could cover the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair in 2002.  

 

I never found the answer to those questions and a few others on the day I made my last walk through the Miami Herald newsroom.  I completely forgot to take a detour to that conference room with its spectacular view of Biscayne Bay. I was too focused on accomplishing my task at hand.  Still, I recall that I was astounded by what an eerie experience that day became.

 

As I take the short walk from the elevator at the 5^th floor through the newsroom to the library where I can access the computerized archive, I realize this walk is giving me the creeps.  Ceiling lights are dim or non-existent. Rows of desks are empty. Computer screens are black, rows and rows of them. They look like death warmed over. No phones are ringing.  I see hardly a soul.  A ghostly pall hangs over the place that had once brimmed with hectic activity.   I barely recognize the newsroom.  It actually makes my skin crawl. A knot in my stomach tightens.

 

I shove these feelings out of my mind. “Stay focused and calm,” I tell myself. “You have a mission.” Yes, I do. I own the copyright to all my work for the Herald for 21 years.  I am there, I remind myself, to get my goddamned stuff back. It is mine, and I want it.

Nevertheless, the place feels like a morgue. Death hangs in the air. As usual, the air conditioner is uncomfortably high. An unseasonable chill mingles with the gloom and silence.  At last I reach the library.  The woman I am there to meet smiles and shows me a desk where I can work.  I am not sure what year I began writing although I know I stopped in 2007.  We determine that my first story is in 1986.  I start the process of downloading it all on my 5 gigabyte flashdrive.

 

That day I bring two flashdrives with me.  I do all the downloading twice on two separate flashdrives, just to make sure that nothing is lost, that I will never lose access to this part of my life again.

 

Seeing all the titles with my byline intact, year after year, is comforting.  It’s also startling to see them flash by so quickly, as I click on them each to be downloaded on my flashdrives.  They flicker past on one computer “page” after another.  It is almost like seeing my life pass before my eyes.  I am reminded of people and events that I wrote about so long ago that I had forgotten about them until this moment.  There is no time to read, to pick and choose.  Now that I am there, I want it all. Everything.  All my “data,” as Ana, my personal   computer techie, who has carefully prepped me for this moment, calls it.  I am determined not to be distracted by nostalgia.  The whole process takes, I think, about two hours.  Or maybe less.

After I complete my task, I suppose I should feel elated.  But I don’t.  I feel quietly relieved but also drained and flat, almost a kind of gray to match the color of the gray cloud cover hanging over Miami that hot and humid summer day.  I have since learned that this gray feeling is common to those who are experiencing acute forms of grief. Still, I walk back to the newsroom and summon the energy to chat briefly with two dear friends, Kathy and Margaria, who are working in the cold, lonely Features Department.  I notice that the two window offices in that department are closed and dark.  The offices look as if no one has used them in some time.  That is where the editors who ran the Features Department, including my last editor who called me “too artcentric,” used to sit.  I make my way quickly to the elevator.  I can’t wait to leave this gloomy place.  Inside the elevator, I push the button for the ground floor.  When the elevator opens, I head for the doors to leave the building.  I don’t even pause to glance at the spot where in 2005 a profoundly angry politician blew out his brains.  As I step outside and breathe in the hot, muggy air, I don’t look back.

 

Then I walk to my car.  Soon I am leaving the almost empty Miami Herald parking lot.  I drive home.  I am exhausted.  As I drive, negotiating the traffic on I-95 slicing over downtown and heading toward U.S. 1 or “Dixie Highway,” as locals call it, I cast an occasional quick look over at my purse placed on the passenger seat.  Inside, I know, are those two 5 gigabyte flashdrives with all my “data.”  They are nestled next to my photo ID. 

 

Clusters of obscenities that can’t be printed in a family newspaper crowd my head.