In 2050, Miami will be under water. Write about the migration of the south Floridians. Half hour. From 712 More Things to Write About, The San Francisco Writer’s Grotto.
They migrated north, against their will. In hundreds of thousands, old people and their yip-yip dogs, gangs of Cubans, and more Spanish families. They came to town with their screaming harsh language and their too bassy cars, thumping in the night.
Miami flooded.
At first, they moved to higher ground, displacing the rich people who got the hint and move do more landlocked locales, like Arizona. then they came north. Here in Naples, they took over in a year, changing the park where you could walk and play with your kids in the humid summer air. Now there was graffiti everywhere, symbols and signs and fat letters; torn and broken fences; Sonatas on the grass, their sound system s worth more than the rusted hulks they sat in.
Not only was the city underwater, but so were housing prices in this area. Once one Cuban family moved in, the rest of them came like cockroaches and the housing market went down like the Titanic. In two years, the house was worth half of what it had been.
Dad died struggling with that, leaving Mom who turned int a needy, whining creature of bad romance novels. Last year, Peter found her in the throes of an Alzheimer’s attack, and the family met – without me, of course – to decide the course of action. Of course, it fell to the one who couldn’t make it to the meeting. I was busy doing rehab.
Everyone else had a job. Look, Sarah doesn’t have a job – have her go and move in. I resisted for as long as I could. I was in and out of rehab, both for surgeries and my opioid addiction. When they heard the house next door had turned into a crack house, Peter gave me the good old fashioned Irish Catholic guilt trip. I packed up my stuff from New York and moved there.
I had too many back surgeries, so I don’t know how good I could have been to my mother. I can’t lift mom when she falls. I sometimes I can’t even lift a full saucepan. There’s a lot of things I can’t do, as I had to retire from wrestling at the tender age of 38.
I didn’t have the money to hire a CNA or home-visiting nurse; and even if I did, mom would never let them in. So my sisters and brothers forced me into it.
I took a taxi from the airport to the house that I hadn’t been to since my father died a year and a half ago. The front lawn was clipped short, crabgrass growing instead of soft green pelt. The front door was behind a screen door held on by one hinge. I had to lift it to open it.
The neighborhood was deceptively quiet. The house next door had a dilapidated For Sale sign in front on the shin-high grass lawn. The sign hung by a few links, one side of the chain gone. The house on the other side didn’t have a For Sale sign, but its lawn was overgrown with the grass all the way up to my ankles.
