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16 Practice Miami Beach, Florida Lux et Veritas. Light and Truth. A good motto, along with Levavi Oculos, raise your eyes, look up, lift your spirit. There is a photo of my mother, a young woman lying on a beach towel looking up with such a radiant loving smile, just to recall it I am fortified. Take this, sweetheart, she seems to say, and put it right in there with the big abstractions. We do battle with truth and each other. Something, it, escapes us. We love it, but we don’t get it. At least not often enough. So it goes, we say, and then it doesn’t. Hungry, thinking these thoughts, I stop at a fast food place on Collins. I take my burger, fries and Coke, on a red tray, to a table near the window to sit in the light and watch. The steady traffic, the changing light, the old beachfront hotels and apartment buildings, some occupied, some abandoned. Rooms where the honeymooners honeymooned, where runaways and the homeless hide. 17 My mother told me, this used to be known, back in the forties, as Chicago Beach because of all the people from Chicago who vacationed here in the winter. I sip my Coke and imagine card games on beach towels, baby oil on sunburned backs. Levavi Oculos. I look up to see the reassuring blue of the sky, and someone flings a rope from the top of the building. A man in green fatigues, a pump gun strapped over his shoulder, rappels down the face of the building, stops abruptly next to a closed window, unshoulders the gun, pumps a shell into the chamber, smashes the glass with the gun-butt, turns the barrel into the dark room and fires and fires again. Someone is dead or about to die, I think, but before an image of that room can form in the vacuum after the blasts, the routine way he reshoulders the gun tells me this is practice. I am watching the S.W.A.T. team practice. He drops down the rope in no great hurry. I look up in the light. Another man in green fatigues steps off the roof, rappels down the rope, fires two blasts into the room and so on. Lux et Veritas Levavi Oculos ...

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