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If I simply stuck out my thumb on the street, no telling who might pick me up. To Seventy-ninth Street, sir?' That way I also had a chance to case the person behind the wheel. There was a technique to hitchhiking, which made me feel enormously street-smart: Whenever possible, I hitched at traffic lights, where I could walk out to stopped cars and tap on the window and say, 'Going Up or down depending on at which beach you were meeting your friends. Skipping from ride to ride until, in no more than three different vehicles, you'd traveled from my house on 103rd Street in Miami Shores south to 79th Street, then east across the causeway to Miami Beach, and then That too was part of the giddy appeal of Miami in the fifties-the notion that you could skim safely across this vast surface like a stone, day or night,

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I watched sunburned kids dig moats around castles, while women with umber skin stood ankle-deep in the surf, wearing swimsuits and furs.Р”В«efore I could drive, I hitchhiked everywhere.

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I watched blue-veined jellyfish wash ashore, puffed up and full of promise, only to deflate and litter the sand like last night'sР”В¬ondoms. On the grainy beach I watched musclemen wipe oil on the backs of girls on bright blankets. On Sunday afternoons, especially in the early days, I stood outside open-air Miami Beach 'pavilions' and watched sun-blond girls in bikinis dance with swarthy men wearing pastel pants and tattoos. I've always thought of mangoes as sex plucked from a tree. Ripe and dripping with juice that they're almost disturbing in their sensuality. I also discovered mangoes, a fruit so sweet and I ate, for the very first time, the followingР”Р‡oods: bagels, lox, cream cheese, avocados, Reuben sandwiches, submarine sandwiches, kosher dills, pastrami, Swiss cheese, lobster, stone crab, black beans, Key lime pie. In Miami, I encountered Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Chinese, Filipinos, Romanians, Greeks-even New Yorkers. In my mind's eye, the lemons outside myР”В«edroom window looked gold, like the stars in a Van Gogh night. Thick lush lawns sprouted thin trees heavy with fruit. Houses took on tints I'd seldom seen outside the Sunday comics. Red and purple flowers tumbled out of window boxes. Mississippi had been all pine-tree green and Pearl River brown. Which may be why I remember Miami so well. It was a time when it still was possible to focus. I would hang out at what was only the second Burger King in the nation. In the years still to come, my friends and We had one black rotary phone on a party line.

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Our family had owned a TV set for less than three years. On any external scale of this consumer-madР”В¬entury, it's astonishing to consider just how young we were then. Not just for me, but for the country itself. It felt like summer to me then, and in memory it does so still. That was thirty-nine years ago, on a January day in 1958. The whites, blinding sun streaks amid the color, turned out to be roads-the very roads I soon would learn to drive on. From the sky, the city looked like a pastel paradise in a heat shimmer of dancing whites. Finally we made a rushing shadow over miles of red-tiled, green-palmed, blue-pooled postage stamps. As the plane banked and began its approach, we cruised low over Miami Beach, and soon we were a silver sliver The first time I saw Miami was from the air, staring out the window of a TWA prop airliner as the pilot circled wide over the blue Atlantic.