The plane set down on the Miami International Airport tarmac. Brakes grabbed below my feet, tamping down our speed. White bulbs winked along the asphalt as the plane hurled forward. But there were no taxiway lights for the sharp turn my life was about to take....
I’m a thirteen-year-old roller rink rat in Miami, Florida, careening around the oval with all the coolness a Catholic school seventh grader could scrape up. I was fast and zit-free, and it was going to be a good day. I whizzed past Steven, a spindly, freckled...
I stood in a slice of sun and dust motes coming through a gap in the storage barn while Dad rooted through our pre-boat life. Dad barked at me to help him look for the box labeled “memorabilia.” He hunted the April, 1953 Athletic Journal that contained a four-page...
The sun sank into Southeast Florida in the balmy butt-crack of winter. I’d just turned fourteen and this was my eighth move—a VW van, a sailboat, and six houses. I glanced out the picture window of our cement block cracker box at R.J. and the neighbor kids riding...
Miami must sound more romantic from Ohio than it does when your skin is actually sizzling in Johnson’s Baby Oil under the South Florida sun. I glanced at my cousin Di who re-upped for a second stint on the Annie Lee this summer. She laid tanning on the fore cabin...
I lay on the bowsprit, my favorite haunt at sea, willing phosphorescence to appear in the navy blue waters of the Atlantic. Mom’s words rolled around in my head, Do you think I should divorce your dad? Our family could use a little luminescence. Wind danced around me...
