By Roger L Simon
So you wanted to move to South Florida?
May 2, 2026, (when I started writing this) was forecast as a potentially record day in Miami with temps in the 90s and the dreaded “real feel” somewhere up around Alpha Centauri. Right now, in supposedly cooler Miami Beach, it’s 86˚ with a real feel of 104˚—and headed higher.
And it’s barely May. Wait until July, ‘Enry ‘Iggins!
The last few weeks were the first time I had heard of something called a pool chiller, not a pool heater. It sounded like a useless extravagance, something only Jared and Ivanka might logically be able to afford, but now it seems more necessary than a refrigerator or a ceiling fan. Summer pool temperatures, I’m told, can go up well into the nineties, making a dip worthwhile only if you bring along a lobster and some potatoes to boil.
Yet, I like it here. Not so much during this Big Heat, better enjoyed as that Fritz Lang 1953 noir classic, but most of the time. Tomorrow, according to predictions, it’s going to drop about ten degrees. (Revising this May 3, it is 79˚ and rainy. I went off to play squash, not very well, but it’s been a long time.)
Yesterday, I was out on the tennis court, battling it out and losing to a man about two dozen years my junior. That’s no excuse. He was the type of player who always drove me crazy, the kind who hits everything back without going for too much until I’m overextended and go for too much myself, and I either miss the line or a lob goes flying over my head, and I find myself gasping for air, desperately trying to retrieve it. Even if I do, I’m gassed for the next point.
The guy driving me crazy was an Iraqi, and I am Jewish. I’m ashamed to say I was apprehensive about this at first. I wasn’t sure of his views and what would transpire. Would this be some version of a blood match? That was the last thing I wanted. But having recently moved and searching for players in my beloved game, I said yes to an offer I found on the BYOB (as in Bring Your Own Balls) website I had just signed up for.
He turned out to be an extremely nice guy, in his late fifties, an engineer who had recently retired after thirty years in Texas with a well-known US tech firm whose owner is Jewish. Further, he was an anti-Saddam Iraqi related to a politician who played a leading role in that benighted country after it went semi-democratic, or whatever you would call their current politics, which includes, as most of us are aware, radical jihadist groups in league with Iran. My opponent readily admitted there were problems. He elected to live in Miami Beach.
This mixture of people and backgrounds has immediately made this area attractive to me. It is naturally multicultural without the ritualized woke enforcement of DEI. I feel like I am living in a Cuban-Venezuelan-Argentinian-Jewish-Black-WASP-Brazilian-French and who knows what melting pot.
Literally within hours of moving here—we are still in a rental—I found we were living across the street from Rabbi Shmuel Mann of Chabad of the Venetian & Sunset Islands and his wife, Zipporah. (When they say Chabad is everywhere, they mean everywhere.) We spent yesterday evening on their synagogue’s rooftop, which has a spectacular view of Biscayne Bay and the Miami skyline, for a Shabbat dinner.
We are also within walking distance of Casa Caracas, which makes some of the best pastries I have ever eaten, and Lucali, the Miami Beach branch of the legendary Brooklyn pizza joint.
What’s not to like?
Well, maybe months when the “real feel” is 104.
You wonder how people managed to live before air conditioning. Raymond Chandler wrote an admirable description of the California version:
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.”
I lived in LA and know what he meant. But there’s something more important about relocating than the pluses and minuses of the weather that are ever-changing anyway.
The novelty of the move will not last.
According to our AI “friends,” the average American moves 11 to 12 times in their lifetime, roughly every five to seven years. I’m a little under that, en toto, although I have lived in NYC, Hanover, N. H., New Haven, CT, Los Angeles (for fifty years), London, Mijas, Spain, Prague, Nashville, and now Miami Beach with various shorter stops in between.
But what I have noticed is that in the end, after a relatively short time, it doesn’t make that much difference. No matter where you are, you’re still you. You carry along that indelible permanent possession, the three-pound collection of neurons and related matter under your skull that defines, for the most part, who you are and how you will behave and react, how you feel about yourself and others. In other words, it governs your mood, along with your stomach.
Moving will not be your salvation. Only mastering, to the limited extent you can, your own mind brings change for the better.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t move. Not a single move I have made in my life do I regret. Some indeed were made too late, but at least I did them. They say travel broadens. Moving broadens more. You’re not just a tourist. You’re living somewhere. You’re making necessary adjustments (“Where’s raer Joe’s?” “Do you know a good dentist?”) and meeting new people. The mind has to expand.
I have fond memories of Nashville and do not regret one minute of living there. It’s a fascinating place, not just for the music, but it was time to go.
Part of my wanderlust comes from being a writer, an occupation that requires constant stimulation, for better and often for worse. You find yourself saying goodbye to people and places you have grown attached to, even loved. But the urge to move is too strong. Hemingway may be the prototype. He seems to have spent time in nearly every country in the world, not to mention parts of the USA from Key West to Northern Michigan.
I won’t be giving away too much by saying that some of the EMET sequel will be set along the seven miles of Miami Beach sand. It might be more of a conventional murder mystery than the first one, influenced as I am by the many excellent crime writers of this region, particularly the late Charles Willeford, one of the greats of the genre, who wrote a book with that slyly mordant title, “New Hope for the Dead.”
But the spiritual aspect that makes EMET somewhat different from most crime novels and thrillers will not be neglected. The Golem will resurface—how could he not—somewhere between South Beach and Moscow, where I have also spent time, both before and after it was part of the USSR.
How soon I will complete the sequel is anybody’s guess. But apropos of the aforementioned rooftop Shabbat dinner, Rabbi Mann spoke of something in the more orthodox Jewish tradition called “counting the Omer.” This refers to counting the 49 days between the Second Night of Passover and Shavuot, when God gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai.
The rabbi used this counting as a reminder to those in the assembly not to be lazy, to be intense about their studies and work. He mentioned he had passed my house the other day and had seen me typing at my desk through the window. Had I finished the sequel to EMET yet, he asked?
Er, no, I thought. Nowhere near. Had I been lazy? I hadn’t been counting the Omer. What day was it? This was embarrassing.
So I replied, I have to write several articles a week for the Substack. That takes time. The rabbi seemed mollified, at least temporarily.
First published in American Refugees
