I Drove by Mar-a-Lago with My Ghost Mom

Plus: A Fancy Pig, a Scam, and Other Tales from South Florida

I went to South Florida

and found it overrun with ghosts, but in a good way. It wasn’t sad, it was beautiful. Most of the hard and terrible things have already happened, and the ghosts seem content now.

I’m talking about the kind of ghosts who appear when you return to the one place that still breaks your heart.

It could be where you made your worst decision, or had the best year of your life.

Maybe it’s where you met that one friend, the one you miss even now.

It’s probably the place where you were young—where you found out what you’re good at or, for a time, where you lost all hope and got it back again.

This past February,

Eric and I left Otter Springs in Northern Florida and headed south. I’d been shivering for six weeks straight. I watched out the window as live oaks gave way to palm trees. At a rest stop near Orlando, I stepped out of the truck, saw the heat shimmering on blacktop and felt the familiar and comforting white-hot blast furnace that is the South Florida sun.

In Deerfield Beach, south of Boca Raton, I saw shadows of us: young Eric and Tina, glimpsed running out of the Phar-Mor building, which doesn’t exist and is now a Walgreens. We were running in the warm South Florida rain, dashing to the ghost ship – our huge red ‘72 Delta 88 convertible. We were carrying videos and beer for an afternoon of lying on the couch in our ghost apartment at Vista Gardens, which in 2024 is still a real apartment complex with a nice pool.

Eric and I went to the currently existing Vista Gardens and lurked around, peeking in windows like prowlers, like our former next-door neighbor who used to stand outside naked and look in the bedroom window at us. We looked for evidence of the graffiti we wrote in Sharpie on his mailbox, as if it would be there after thirty-two years.

We stood at the mailbox and imagined our ghost selves on a midnight bike ride; that time we rode over after we’d moved crosstown to a different apartment. We remembered laughing as we defaced his mailbox, laughing with the exhilaration of being still young and out on bikes, and just the right amount of drunk in the balmy Florida night.

When we lived there, we kept two lizards in a cage. Now Vista Gardens has giant iguanas roaming freely, like most of South Florida. We saw a big one, about three feet long, sunning by the pool. The invasive species are beyond control at this point. The native alligators can’t keep up with the South American lizards and boa constrictors, but that’s South Florida. Out of control in every way. It’s nothing new.

On the grassy swale

outside Vista Gardens, I saw a flash of our old dog Jim. A glimpse of her black shape, her curly tail. That’s where I walked her, where mockingbirds dive-bombed her tail, trying to grab fluffy strands of fur to make their nests. Or maybe we made that up. We didn’t know anything about birds then.

Jim, incidentally, once appeared after her death as a solid, no-joke ghost, so real that a stranger saw her and commented. This happened when we were in line at the Dairy Barn, a drive-through convenience store, in the Delta 88 with the top down. When it was our turn at the window, the clerk handed Eric a dog biscuit.

“What’s this?”

“That’s for your dog, the black dog in the back seat. Where did it go? I just saw it there!”

Jim wasn’t in the back seat because she had died a few days earlier. She was already buried in our backyard on her pink dog-bed pillow. But I wasn’t surprised to learn she was still watching out for us.

Jim died at age 13, while I patted her and talked to her as she lay on the white tile floor of our first house. It was a little pink cement block house with a sliding door that led to a heated pool. Jim wasn’t a swimming dog but she once gamely let us launch her in the ocean waves, riding on a queen-sized air mattress. The day Jim died, Eric was at work, but my mom and dad were there because they loved Jim too, and they stood beside us as she took her last shuddering breath.

That night I lay in our bed and Eric held me while I cried. It was my first loss, and I hadn’t known about that kind of pain.

A few days later, my cousin Carol sent me a sympathy card. She’d loved Jim too. On the front it had a photograph of a solar eclipse. A big black circle surrounded by a corona of brilliant white fire on a black background. Carol had understood that it was a picture of grief: the circle like a hole, the emptiness that remains where a life used to be. I still think of that photo; I still have the card.

South Florida remains my dream life. It was a dream about water and it lasted 16 years. Living there, I thought about the ocean every day. I was either on the beach or driving by the beach or riding my bike to the beach or thinking about going to the beach. I clocked the colors of the sea, how it was turquoise off Palm Beach island, and more greenish-blue at Boca, then changed to the perfect aqua at the Strip in Ft. Lauderdale.

One afternoon,

during our February visit, I went on an escapade with my ghost mom. I set off alone in the truck and said out loud, “Mom, come with me, we’re going to Palm Beach.” And for the next hour I drove and talked to her about the past.

For my ghost mom and me, memory lane is an actual road: Florida State Road A1A. It follows alongside the Atlantic Ocean and the part we love is the section from Boca to Palm Beach. In her life on Earth, Florida was her second choice. She’d always meant to end up in California. My mother didn’t get the road she really wanted, the Pacific Coast Highway from Big Sur to LA, but she had A1A instead. A1A was our drive.

The drive is about two things: the ocean and the houses. A few spots have houses on both sides, but the primo part is north of Sloane’s Curve: ocean to the east, houses to the west. I’m talking about the tile-roofed Spanish palaces from the 1920’s, the Mizner castles, the Venetian extravaganzas, and the house named Mar-a-Lago.

If you’re not paying attention, if you’re looking at your phone, if you don’t love every second of that drive then I don’t know what we could possibly have in common.

When I reached Palm Beach, I turned around at the Breakers Hotel, home of the $195 brunch, and parked near my final destination: Worth Avenue.

I live in a 22-foot travel trailer. There’s no full-length mirror. I have one dress, a wrinkled linen thing from Target that I keep in a ball in my so-called closet. For my Palm Beach outing, I wore the dress and some eyeliner. I thought I looked nice but I always think I look better than I do. That’s what happens when you don’t have access to a decent mirror.

On Worth Avenue,

I almost fell victim to a scam. It was one of those deals where a shady company rolls into town and takes a short-term lease on a high-rent shop to sell some super-expensive shitty products. A semi-handsome Borat type was launching compliments into the air from an open doorway. I wanted to get one of those compliments. I engaged. Next thing, I’m sitting in a swivel chair and he’s dabbing crap on my face and about to ring up a rose-gold metallic tube of something that was priced at over a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars! I started laughing.

I said “I live in a campground.” He didn’t know what I was talking about.

I said “I don’t have the kind of life where I need to look good, ever.”

Out on the street I felt dazed. What just happened? For a second I’d seriously considered buying that tube. I decided to forgive myself.

The last time I’d walked down Worth Avenue, I’d been legitimately young and pretty. And here I was, many years older, a grieving person with a ghost mom in the car, barely holding it together, visiting a minefield of memories. No wonder I almost lost it on Worth Avenue.

Alexander McQueen in the window of Saks

I pulled myself together and enjoyed every second of the rest of my stroll. I was a little disappointed at the number of regular people, like me, cluttering the sidewalk. But I got to see what I’d come for: a few gorgeous young women with long tanned legs in Prada and Versace. Pairs of older women with tight shiny faces, one in Chanel overall short-shorts with matching jacket and handbag. A guy, probably someone’s personal assistant, walking a pig. Some of the stores have a person who will hold little dogs while their owners shop. I like observing the men, with their bare tanned ankles showing above Tod’s driving shoes, and their manicured hands. I like looking at rich people. Sorry, I just do.

The best sight I saw on Worth Avenue

When I was young I thought I might someday live at Mar-a-Lago, because for a time I crazily believed anything was possible. I must have first seen it on a vacation with my parents, from the back seat of our station wagon. Oh, that gate! The arch, the tile, the doors made from carved wood finials. The tower rising up over the palms. I thought it was the best house in the world.

Back in the car, heading south

after my jaunt through Palm Beach, I passed Mar-a-Lago. Beefy guys in sunglasses and dark blazers were directing a line of cars through the gates. The traffic jam gave me an extra moment to peek down the driveway towards the house. As I passed the cars, I was disappointed to see they contained only ordinary looking people, waiting for their turn to enter.

I was happier pre-1973, when Mar-a-Lago still belonged to Marjorie Merriweather Post, or even better, between ’73 and ’81, when it belonged to the US government and therefore, technically, kind of belonged to me.

With my friend Timmy Chainsaw, in front of the Mar-a-Lago gate, 1990

As I drove south toward the real world, I let my mom drift away. I let her go back to the place where my younger self might reside. Maybe there, in a different world, we’re still on Worth Avenue, having lunch at Ta-Boo. She’s wearing yellow and I’m in hot pink and we both still have big hair, and we’re still best friends and nothing bad has happened yet.

But I’d reached my limit on memories. I needed to look at the ocean and think of nothing. Ghosts can be tiring and I was done for the day. ⁜

Cruising Deerfield Beach in the 90’s with Jim

Thanks for reading or listening. Please feel free to leave a comment. I appreciate getting your comments and will always answer.

We’re in New Hampshire for six more weeks, then back on the road.
Hope you’re doing ok!
It’s also ok to not be ok – you know that, right?

Love, Tina

Jim and me at our Vista Gardens apartment, in the Big Hair era.