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The man in question pulled his folding metal basket cart on the subway and looked around. He was dressed in a thawb and what looked like a Jinnah hat. He smiled at the car and looked around before pulling his cart up behind himself in car exit opposite where he entered. He seemed neat but not clean with probably tobacco stains on his fingers. We exchanged nods and I went back to my whatever. He fingered some piece of paper with multicolor writing on it the entire time he was in the car but not in a nervous way so much as in a manner to keep his hands busy while his mind wandered. The paper equivalent of twirling a pen. He and I left at the same shop, but I let him go first. Before exiting, he dropped the paper he was manipulating into a metal pamphlet container mounted by the entrance to the car. I waited a beat and let him completely exit before grabbing the paper.

This is what it said:
Front

Back

The paper itself smelt strongly of spices or oils that were alien to me. Probably the vanilla or lilac of generic “nice smell” of a culture more used to things more potent. I scanned the paper and returned it to the metal pamphlet holder the next time I took the subway.

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I wanted to again try to canoe at Biscayne National Park but found that the concessionaire only rented them during narrow windows or for tours so opted for the Miami Art Museum.  I would later know that the best view of the day occurred on my way in:

20101127-MiamiHDR-2342

I cropped out the homeless

The museum was hosting a Susan Rothenberg exhibit that was lazily lit and poorly arranged.  The pieces had no narrative to tie them together except the theme of horses and even the artist’s commentary clashed with the presentation.  I can’t stand when artists “evoke” an idea which to me was always a way to use a stereotype of something to save the hard work of conveying an idea and I found the temperature and humidity recorders to be the most elegant things present.  The permanent collection wasn’t much better and the curator knew not how to compose descriptors.  Half of the pieces said “<one extreme> yet <another extreme>” and this becomes tired quickly leaving me to kill time some other way until my host got his practice time in.

I walked around the Miami cultural district and saw genuine bag ladies as well as a fellow in a hospital gown tooling around in a wheelchair.  The bagperson is new to me and is hard to find below hardiness zone 7 so there are fewer in New York and Philadelphia which have panhandlers and street performers but few general “bums”.  On my way back I drove leisurely, knowing that even after I returned to near Alex and Ashley’s apartment I’d need to consume 2 hours of time.  The main road parallel to the ocean in Miami Beach was an alien environment.  The inhabitants cut neatly across all strata of society and attractiveness and as much as I wish I were “different” from they we’re all from the basic pool of humanity.  A crying woman wearing a bikini top and short shorts ran out of a restaurant, mounted a scooter and started driving across lanes of traffic, I slowed down when it looked like she was about to tumble off the scooter and when she did a motley group came from all directions to sweep her and the scooter from the road.

Back near the apartment, I took pictures around the Bass Museum of Art which I would later learn had a much more impressive (to my interests) permanent collection than the Miami Art Museum and played with light and shadow poorly (none of the pictures went in the keeper category) for an hour or so.  Towards the end I was doing 30-60 second, very long, exposures of the area and a man was standing off to the side holding something.  As I left I saw it was an unhomed person holding his bedding, waiting for me to finish so he could lay down next to the museum’s reflecting pool.