It seemed that almost everyone in Florida started out somewhere else. Mimi and I ended up in Florida after my first project at IBM was cancelled and I flew down for an interview in the middle of January. I fell in love with Florida’s green, tropical lushness.
After my transfer was approved, we began house hunting west of the Florida Turnpike, where houses were cheaper and the streets had numbers instead of names. When a trial run from IBM to a potential house took 40 minutes, we decided to stretch the budget a little and get something closer, in Boca Raton proper.
Boca was mostly an upscale town, but our development was one of the less expensive ones. I remember watching a Rolls-Royce wander through the neighborhood, obviously lost, with the passenger looking anxious about the modest houses and scruffy homeowners doing their own yard work.
Mimi loved helping other people and got involved with the library’s adult-literacy program. Her first student was a truck driver – one day his truck broke down in an unfamiliar area and he couldn’t read the street signs to tell his employer where he was. Another student was a woman originally from Itta Bena, Mississippi. She learned to read, then how to read a map, then how to read a map of her home state. One day she had a breakthrough, saying “You know, you could use this map to take a trip!”. The volunteers received fancy award plaques from the Sun-Sentinel and had their pictures in the paper. Mimi was proud of her award.
Beyond her literacy work, Mimi got a paying part-time job as a medical-records clerk at the hospital in Delray Beach. Her hours were from 9 to 3. She enjoyed working with a group of other women, and knowing she was making a contribution. The other women soon discovered that Mimi knew a lot about a lot of subjects, and would come to her with questions beyond those about proper spelling or writing style. Her manager had her ghost-writing herreports to upper management and they were happy. Mimi really loved that job.
For a while we socialized with our next-door neighbors, seemingly nice people from Canada who turned out to be stingy tippers of waitstaff and low-grade grifters. We saw the light when the wife scammed us on tickets to their daughter’s dance recital. We made better friendships with people we knew from IBM and the library.
We were in Florida for Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm that leveled entire towns 50 miles south of us, but left Boca relatively intact. The Friday before landfall was predicted, my buddies at work laughed when I left early to tape my windows and bring the potted plants inside. They weren’t laughing on Monday when they saw how terribly the storm had damaged the state. We were lucky, and lost only some patio screens, but during the highest winds we hid in the dark between a sofa back and a wall, with a flashlight and a hatchet in case we had to chop our way out. We promised each other that next time we’d get in the car and head north at the first warning.
Even before the hurricane, Mimi wasn’t happy about being in Florida. She missed her family up north, especially her sister, for whom she’d been more like a mother than a sister growing up. One day we had visitors, and when they casually asked “How long have you been here?” we answered simultaneously – I said “About a year and a half”, but Mimi said “18 months”. When I heard her say it that way, I knew we weren’t going to be spending the rest of our lives in Florida.
It turned out that staying in Florida forever wasn’t an option. IBM had a company-wide downsizing of personnel, and offered buyouts to employees like me who would be of retirement age by a certain date. They offered to credit me with an additional seven years of service, giving me the 15 years required for a decent pension. I signed up and never looked back.
I couldn’t find a job in Florida that paid anywhere near what IBM had been paying, so we packed up and started working our way back north, first stop Atlanta. In Atlanta I worked for the software company KnowledgeWare, and we learned how to live happily in a high-rise apartment building, one that happened to overlook Stone Mountain.
