Beat Reporting

In a Heart Beat

The first time that I flew in an airplane was near the end of the 1970’s. There is a lot I do not remember from those years of late teen hood, so my exact age at the time of the flight may remain a mystery.

The Eastern Airline that carried me is long gone and security back then was almost visibly non -existent. I was not yet a licensed driver, neither was I credentialed by academic institution nor traditional employer. I had never laid eyes on a credit card, so a paper trail is unlikely.

I came of age as an emancipated minor, legally unfettered, though without many of the freedom’s that marked the end of the more traditional childhoods some of my contemporaries came up from. I had lived a lot, during the time that the State of New York was my guardian, yet I had never really been anywhere.

Intellectual growth in my formative years was deeper than it was wide, still, I became the first person in my immediate family to experience air travel. That first flight came during a period of what my recovery community called “geographical cures”. Acute loneliness and alienation were the maladys from which I sought relief and Southern Florida was a coastally feasible destination.

The flying was uneventful. The landing was transformative.

It was late when our plane descended and Miami appeared, a seductive collage of tungsten light, that taunted the newcomer and threatened the night. I was captivated immediately though, by the spaces in between the glow. I recognized the slivers of darkness wedged into eternal daytime as if they were my own. My heart ached with longing for the intimacy they withheld from me, while they offered themselves with reckless abandon to make The City whole.

Childhood contradictions fostered a streetwise naivety that makes it unbearable for me to be a tourist in any relationship. Time spent in the melting pot of the Taft Avenue Group Home armed me with healthy suspicions about the moral clarity of absolutes; good or bad, black or white, insider vs. outsider. I grew to despise the hypocritically symbiotic connection between safety and distance that only fostered segregations. I became an obsessed lover for truth, driven by compulsion rather than attraction to dispel the fear of forbidden relationships and expose the exclusivity of invisible boundaries. How sad the anonymous face a city could put on. In my new incarnation, I had to know Miami, secrets first, before I could belong to Her. Inclusion, for me, has always been a sacred space. This feeling crystallized on that night flight and I carry it with me still. The ache in the pit of my stomach when I know that there is so much more to know, has made me a tolerant journalist and an impatient guest.

Brenda Ann Kenneally

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