When I moved to Miami, I rented an apartment near the Kendall area. But when I found my new job, I had to move. The offices of Viewdata Corporation of America were in Miami Beach, and I could not easily commute there from where I was living. The traffic in those years was already bad!

So, I started looking for an apartment near the new job. I saw many that I could rent but the one I fell in love with was in Belle Isle. It was a one-bedroom apartment with a big living- dinning room that had two big windows, one on each corner overlooking a fabulous view of Biscayne Bay.

It was close to my work. It was old. The manager was a Cuban. He told me that a company from Spain were the owners of the entire complex. He apologized because they had not done too much maintenance for a while.

I did not care about the prestige of the place because what I had in mind, and did, was to buy an inflatable yellow boat with four seats. I was able to row it around the island in Biscayne Bay during the weekends. Many times, I had some friends to go with me. Once when the tide was high, I spent more than two hours rowing back to my apartment building. It was excellent exercise. It reminded me of my youth when I used to row a boat in the south of Chile. I still have a souvenir scar of those times. One day while rowing the boat on a river, a friend was fishing from a high hill on the board of the river. She threw the bait with a hook on it that caught my little finger in my right hand. For some minutes, before I just yanked out the hook from my hand, she was holding the boat against the river current just by my finger.

The place where I rented my apartment was originally built in 1931 as barracks to accommodate troops. Later these barracks were renovated and converted to a complex named “Belle Isle Key.” In the 1980’s they were considered low-income housing, consisting of 120 apartment units.

Living there proved to be interesting. One time when I was at home with a cold, the smell of marijuana was strong. I realized that something strange was going on when, that night, a noisy motorized boat came by the apartment building and docked. The occupants started loading boxes that one of my neighbors brought over. When I told my boss what I had seen and asked if I should notify the police, she told me to be quiet if I wanted to keep living there.

Another time when I was on top of a ladder and organizing my extremely high cabinets in the kitchen, I fell and hurt myself quite badly. One of my neighbors and his wife came to my back door and helped me to my bed. He and his wife became my guardian angels. I decided to thank them for their kindness and give them an air compressor that I had bought while living in Texas and I did not need anymore. They invited me into their apartment, and I saw that in their kitchen and living room they had high-shear blenders and some other machines that obviously were used to make a white cannabis powder. The smell was quite strong.

Over the years, Belle Isle Key underwent various changes, and by 2018, the complex was demolished to make way for a new development called Bella Isla, a luxury place today.

In 1983, I invited my parents to visit. They stayed in my bedroom, and I slept on my sofa bed in my living room. Of course, my father was not happy with that situation. He insisted on searching for a more convenient apartment for them to come to visit.

By that time, we did not yet know that father would be ordered by his doctors to move to Miami because of his health. Anyway, following his will, we started looking for another apartment in Miami Beach. Mother, Father, and I drove around during the weekends, and we discovered several buildings in Bal Harbor, Surfside, and North Beach which had available apartments. South Beach at that time was under renovation.

I called some of them and made appointments to visit during the weekends. One of the first buildings we went was in Bal Harbor, a quite expensive area in Florida.

Since my father had been ordered by his doctors in Chile not to be exposed to the sun, he wore a dark grey Fedora hat that was more appropriate for the weather in Chile than Miami. Also, my father had been told by my mother that it was fine for him to let his beard grow in the way he liked it. I also loved to see him with his salt and pepper beard. He looked distinguished.

When we arrived at the building, we noticed that the man in charge of showing us apartments was wearing a Kippah or Yarmulke. After he showed us some two- and three-bedroom apartments he addressed my father and said, “Rabbi, I want to show you the “shtiebel” we have in the building.” We followed him and he showed us a beautiful small prayer room on the third floor. My father was pleased and thanked him, and we left with all kinds of booklets and floorplans.

From then on, we decided to call my father “rabbi.” Mother and I convinced him that it was to his benefit to continue wearing his hat and maintain his beard in Miami Beach.

Three years passed and I moved to a new job in Miami. Sorrowfully, I had to move from Belle Isle and rent an apartment in the Fontainebleau area in Miami. This also was the time that I had serious surgery, and my parents came to take care of me. We then talked about the need for them to move to Miami because of my father’s heart condition. It was urgent, they said, to buy a place for the three of us.

Even when I was convalescing, I started looking for apartments in the area where my parents wanted to move. We found several places we wanted to see, and my father, Fedora, beard, and all, again triggered the same reaction on many of the buildings we visited. We were very well received as soon as they saw my father, the “Rabbi.” We not only were shown the apartments we wanted to see but the “shtiebel” they had in those buildings.

Finally, we found a condominium just around Fontainebleau, in front a golf club, near the place where I had been renting an apartment. However, we continued going to Miami Beach to see elegant and expensive apartments just for the fun of it. I think my father, under his apparent seriousness, had the same sense of humor of my grandfather. He thoroughly enjoyed being the “rabbi.”