It was the year the Beatles first came to America, and they had just been to Miami for the first time. For those lads from Liverpool, I've seen the shots of them in the warm sea, and I know they'd not known anything like this.
I know, because it was the first trip I remember to Miami: I was just old enough to have memories, that stay with me, like songs, all my life.
We spent day at the Deauville Pool, guests of a man (a friend of my dad's?) who was staying in the same suite the Beatles had just vacated. Telling stories of girls knocking on the door, crying, kissing the walls.
But of all those memories, staying with our friends who are like family still, and trips to Monkey Jungle, Parrot Jungle - kids stuff - there are none that compare with Venetian Pool, in Coral Gables. And going back with my husband, after all these years, seeing a little girl who looked like me, who was exactly my age when I was there, playing with her brother being watched over by her father.. swimming in the same natural spring waters (it's the largest man made natural pool in America). Knowing it hadn't changed - that these were the same coral shapes that my father, living, had touched, and the joy that it was every bit as beautiful as I remembered it - a Hollywood vision of Italy, created from a coral quarry, dug to create the homes in this incredible place, just south of South Beach, Miami. It opened in 1923, the Gatsby era, and the ghosts of that time - and of my family, as children - haunt it today.
I have mixed within my photos, two shots by my father, Art Carin, the top shot, and the one of my sister in her blue swimsuit. His legacy - his eye - watches over me, informs everything I do.
And this is a song that has played ever since, which I offer to you, as the sound track to my life.
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