Traveling with Uncle Bert‪.‬

As a child, I longed to see the world. I grew up in a family where no one--well, almost no one--went anywhere except to New York State's Catskill Mountains in the summer and once in a great while, in the winter, to Florida. Miami Beach. What I wanted was the exotic, and I said so. Why can't we go somewhere exotic? I asked my parents as they loaded the car for our annual trek to the mountains, and they would laugh. Exotic! It became a word they used to tease me with, and sometimes taunt. But that never stopped my craving for the exotic or my belief that it did exist, somewhere. Ironic, for nowadays the idea of the exotic is politically incorrect. To consider any place exotic is to advertise not only one's egocentricity but provinciality. We've all learned that the Other is not really Other. And while that may be a social advance, I do regret the loss of the exotic, or rather the freedom to yearn for it and to feel awestruck on finding it. Although my parents didn't frequent Miami Beach, I had an unexpected chance to see it. My Uncle Bert and Aunt Lily invited me to accompany them there during a school Easter break. I accepted right away. I wanted to explore, and this was the best in the way of exploration that I could hope for just then. I was fifteen. Bert and Lily's older son, my cousin, was a student at the University of Miami, and they were going to visit him.