Growing Up Grove

I spent my early childhood in Coconut Grove, the oldest permanent settlement in the greater Miami area.

Born in 1963, my earliest recollections of The Grove are idyllic but spotty: Our low-slung mid-century modern house at the dead end of Tigertail Court, indigenous vegetation creating a canopy over it. The length of the home seemed to go on forever.

I’ll always remember our friend Jorge exclaiming “you have a long house” when he visited for the first time.

We met Jorge at Silver Bluff Elementary School in Coral Gables, along with a group of kids I can’t forget, some of whom we reacquainted with at St. Hugh Catholic School after we returned from Los Angeles for seventh and eighth grade.

I remember walks across Bayshore Drive to the area my dad called “The Bay” – long before it became David T. Kennedy Park. We threw pebbles into the water and explored this “wilderness” with abandon and for what seemed like hours.

It probably wasn’t hours.

The people on Tigertail Court: Mrs. Tobin next door, the Hensley kids on the other side – Mark, Jay, Johnny, Dougie. Somebody down at the corner of Tigertail Court and Kirk Street I only knew as “Mister ‘O’” because I heard my older brother Paul call him that once.

The crab holes in our backyard always scared the shit out of me – and the crabs themselves with their creepy sideways walk.

There was a weird sinkhole-looking thing back there too – you could look down that hole and its darkness implied that the chasm went on forever.

The collection of plastic plants in a rectangular planter as you got down the hall from the bedrooms at the precipice of the sunken living room. The rarely used dining room on the far side of the living room, with elegant and sleek table, chairs, china cabinet and a heavy liquor cart on wheels that I once pushed off the step into the living room…

I don’t remember who saw this debacle first, but I hid under the dining room table and repeated – “It wasn’t me. It was somebody who looked like me.”

I might have meant my twin brother, but it could have been that I wasn’t referring to him at all.

Just somebody that looked like me.

I remember the plaster shark spinning around in an enclosure just before heading onto the Rickenbacker Causeway on the way to Key Biscayne

I remember Pinocchio’s Pizza in the Grove, in the same complex as a convenience store called The Cold Spot. Walking barefoot inside the old A&P and coming home with filthy feet.

Royal Castle’s little square hamburgers…

The Five-and Ten.

The Florida Pharmacy in the Engle Building and a barber on that side of the street named Joe who used to cut our hair…

The old Texaco station.

I’m priming the pump, and the memories are coming.

If you grew up in The Grove, what memories stand out for you?

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• A&P
• Bayshore Drive
• Coconut Grove
• Coral Gables
• Engle Building
• Key Biscayne
• Miami
• Royal Castle
• Silver Bluff Elementary
• St. Hugh Miami
• Tigertail Court