Jan
16
2010
Oshun in Miami
Author: SamMiami was the place where I saw Oshun for the first time, or knew I was seeing her, for the first time. She’s the African goddess of love and all the fine things in life, and related to rivers, too, they tell me. I caught a glimpse of her one night when I was dancing. It was very late. You could say that I really didn’t know what I was seeing, and at the time, that was certainly true, but I know for sure I saw something that couldn’t have been anything else. I was there to visit an old friend, he’d invited a few old college buddies down to visit him the week before he was getting married. We were supposed to spend the weekend entertaining him, then help pitch in with the wedding ceremony.
I love Miami’s luxury hotels, they have a spirit of true accommodation that speaks to my own taste for refined things. I love waking up with nothing but possibility ahead, and in truth, it makes me so excited I can also get a little nervous. So it was good that we were there with something specific in mind. We had to entertain Joey. His favorite places in Miami are way too numerous to mention, and even more troubling to remember, because I am still very unclear about everything that night.
We started off at a local pub, a nice place that serves a pretty likable crew of regulars. This was a real boys night out, but we decided we weren’t going to do the traditional bachelor party thing. He was really devoted to this girl, and didn’t want any of the usual kinds of fun that you see in films. So a pub lead to a few games of pool, and somewhere in there was a dinner, and then a club. Between the dinner and the club is where things started to shift. I hadn’t had much to drink, so I can’t put it to that, but there was something strange when I started to smell cinnamon and clove in the air. And oranges, too. I thought it was the city, and the citrus. The smell was much, much stronger in the club, and in one moment, the woman that I had been dancing with turned into something else. She told me later that was Oshun I was seeing. I can’t describe her very well, other than saying I saw something in her eye that was more than a sparkle. And their wedding was blessed from that moment on.
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