The fury of Andrew revisited. . .

Twenty years ago come Thursday, a Category 5 chainsaw called Hurricane Andrew cut a swath of ruin like no storm before it.
The Miami Herald, Sunday, August 19th.

You had to be there to truly understand it.

August 23rd, 1982 was a Sunday. When word came that Andrew was coming our way, the island on Biscayne Bay where I live was evacuated. At mid-day,I packed a few things into a duffle, stuffed my two cats, Pasha & Sasha, into one carry cage, and drove inland, south, to my daughter Andrea's home in Kendall. A really bad move. Who knew.

I'd been living in Miami since 1957 and the arrival of "hurricanes" was considered a good reason to party. So fear didn't enter into our consciousness as reports about Andrew started to flood the TV and radio news.

At Andrea's house we were two women, mother and daughter, and a 14 year old boy, my grandson Adam, plus 5. . I said 5. . .cats, my two and Andrea's three. As night fell and the wind and rain were definitely getting worse by the minute, we were faced with the fact that the entire back of Andrea's home consisted of floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors and no shutters (In those days I had no shutters on my waterfront condo, nor did any of my neighbors. Today they are mandatory.)

Suddenly aware of our vulnerability, we frantically searched for something to protect us from the possibility of broken glass. The only thing we could come up with was a series of 6' high cardboard posters with lifesize portraits of Adam in various sports outfits. . left over decorations from his recent bar mitzvah celebration. Hastily attached to the glass doors with tape, they would intermittantly be lit by lightning throughout the long night as we huddled together in the darkness on the hall floor.

We turned out to be one of the lucky ones on Andrea's block. She kept her roof on because her front door opened out and didn't blow in like so many others. For nine weeks after Andrew there was no electricity in her area as FPL struggled with downed trees and broken lines. Looting was rampant and Andrea was gratified to find many of her neighbors sitting on their front steps with a shotgun across their laps and signs that read "You loot. We shoot." And they weren't kidding.

My island survived Andrew with lots of damage but in better shape than Andrea's area. Our electricity came back in a little more than a week and my apartment welcomed a steady stream of friends who were still without and were dying for a hot shower. Hurricanes can really make you shift your priorities.

I don't find hurricanes funny any more. No one who lived through Andrew does. It may have happened 20 years ago, but in some ways it seems like yesterday. Reading about it on the front page of the Herald today brought it all back.
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Photo caption: Andrew approaches South Florida in full intensity.

A look back. . .

The Huffington Post reported the other day that Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, who invited millions of women to join the sexual revolution, has died. She was 90 years old.

Long before "Sex And The City" hit TV, there was Brown's "Sex and the Single Girl," her grab-bag book of advice, opinion, and anecdote on why being single shouldn't mean being sexless. It made a celebrity of the 40-year-old advertising copywriter in 1962.

Wow! That was 50 years ago and I bet today's generation of young single women have never even heard her name. What a difference a mere half a century can make.

While I was no longer a single girl in 1962. .I remarried in 1957 after several years of fun and games. . . attitudes about working women were already changing. The Feminist Movement was in full swing and Women's Lib was the watchword of the day with Betty Friedan's book, "The Feminine Mystique", a must read and Gloria Steinem the woman we looked up to.. Sounds antiquated today but I clearly remember my brother-in-law asking my then husband "why he allowed Joan to work". To his credit, my husband's response was that "allowing" had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Helen Gurley Brown's book was considered shocking in its day by many, but this was a time when AIDS and HIV were still unheard of, and to paraphrase FDR, the only thing a single girl had to fear was the fear of getting pregnant. And contraception generally took care of that problem. The times they were a-changing, that's for sure.

Today's generation of young women doesn't feel it necessary to marry and have children right out of school like mine did. They also don't feel compelled to "do it all". . be Super Mom, Successful Businesswoman, Wonderful Wife, like we did. (Not always so successfully in the last category.) When they do marry, they have husbands who share the load, helping with the house and the kids. Unheard of in the 50's and 60's. I can attest to that.

Reading about Helen Gurley Brown's passing made me reflect a little. Just as my Mother's generation paved the way for women to have the right to vote, my generation paved the way for a more equal workplace for women. And oh yes. . the radical idea that sex was lots of fun!
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Photo caption: HGB & Cosmo

Watching the Olympics and reminiscing. . .

I'm loving the Olympics, especially my favorite, Track & Field. Once upon a time I was a long distance runner. So I was amused to hear on TV last night that Ryan Lochte admits to "peeing in the pool" before his races and insists that most swimmers do the same. Which leads me to today's blog topic: "Bathroom Stories of Long Distance Runners".

I assure you, every runner has one, whether they are training for the Olympics or just out for a multi-mile early morning run. Finding a pit stop is a major part of long distance running.

We had one friend who ran in the New York Marathon on an unusually cold morning and while racing through the streets of Harlem was forced to make a detour into a restaurant's Men's Room, only to find he was suffering from Jerry Seinfeld's friend George's "deadly shrinkage" problem. Not good when you are in a hurry.

My own favorite story took place during a Half Marathon Race in Key West. The race route circled around the outer edges of the island with very few buildings and no handy portolets to be seen. At about 10 miles into the race, Nature's call was becoming very insistent and I was desperate to find some place to stop and go.

Ahead I spied a dense clump of sea grape trees on the side of the open road. Without breaking stride, I dashed in to take care of business only to find a very startled homeless person lying on the ground next to where I was squatting.

Too late. He smiled. I smiled. Needless to say, I was laughing when I rejoined the race. Memories are made of that.
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