But the rest were mostly low points. I looked forward to the day when somebody bought our house, perhaps to use as a tourist attraction (SPACKLE KINGDOM, 5 MI.), and we could pack our remaining household possessions—a piano and 48,000 “He-Man” action figures—into cardboard boxes and move to Miami to begin our new life, soaking up the sun and watching the palm trees sway in the tropical breeze. At least until the aluminum sliced through them.

Before my wife, Beth, left on the jet airplane to buy us a new house, we sat down and figured out what our Price Range was. We used the standard formula where you take your income and divide it by three, which gives you the amount you would spend annually on housing if you bought a house that is much cheaper than the one you will actually end up buying.

With that figure in mind, Beth took off for our new home-to-be, South Florida, and my son and I, who had never been in charge of each other for this long before, embarked on the following rigorous nutritional program:

BREAKFAST: Frozen waffles heated up. LUNCH: Hot dogs heated up. DINNER: Choice of hot dogs or frozen waffles heated up.

Also in the refrigerator were many health-fanatic foods such as pre-sliced carrot sticks placed there by Beth in hopes that we would eat something that did not have a label stating that it met the minimum federal standard for human armpit hair, but we rejected these because of the lengthy preparation time.

Some of you may be wondering why, considering that this is the most important financial transaction of our lives, I didn’t go with Beth to buy the house. The answer is that I am a very dangerous person to have on your side in a sales situation. I develop great anxiety in the presence of sales people, and the only way I can think of to make it go away is to buy whatever they’re selling. This is not a major problem with, for example, pants, but it leads to trouble with cars and houses.

Here is how I bought our last car. I didn’t dare go directly to the car dealership, so, for several consecutive days—this is the truth—I would park at a nearby Dairy Queen, buy a chocolate cone, then amble over to the car lot, disguised as a person just ambling around with a chocolate cone, and I would try to quickly read the sticker on the side of the car where they explain that the only part of the car included in the Base Sticker Price is the actual sticker itself, and you have to pay extra if you want, for example, transparent windows. After a few minutes, a salesman would spot me and come striding out, smiling like an entire Rotary Club, and I would adopt the expression of a person who had just remembered an important appointment and amble off at speeds approaching 40 miles per hour. What I’m saying is, I shopped for this car the way a squirrel hunts for acorns in a dog-infested neighborhood.

When I finally went in to buy the car, I was desperate to get it over with as quickly as possible. Here is how I negotiated:

SALESPERSON: (showing me a sheet of paper with figures on it): OK, Dave. Here’s a ludicrously inflated opening price that only a person with Rice-A-Roni for brains would settle for. ME: You got a deal.

I am worse with houses. The last time we were trying to buy a house, I made Beth crazy because I was willing to make a formal offer on whatever structure we were standing in at the time:

ME: This is perfect! Isn’t this perfect?! BETH: This is the real-estate office. ME: Well, how much are they asking?

So this is why Beth went to Miami without me. Moments after she arrived, she ascertained that there were no houses there in our Price Range. Our Price Range turned out to be what the average homeowner down there spends on roach control. (And we are not talking about killing the roaches. We are talking about sedating them enough so they let you into your house.)

Fortunately, Beth found out about a new financial concept they have in home-buying that is tailor-made for people like us, called Going Outside Your Price Range. This is where she started looking, and before long she had stumbled onto an even newer financial concept called Going Way Outside Your Price Range. This is where she eventually found a house, and I am very much looking forward to seeing it someday, assuming we get a mortgage.

They have developed a new wrinkle in mortgages since the last time we got one, back in the seventies. The way it worked then was, you borrowed money from the bank, and every month you paid back some money, and at the end of the year the bank sent you a computerized statement proving you still owed them all the money you borrowed in the first place. Well, they’re still using that basic system, but now they also have this wrinkle called “points,” which is a large quantity of money you give to the bank, right up front, for no apparent reason. It’s as though the bank is the one trying to buy the house. You ask real-estate people to explain it, and they just say: “Oh yes, the points! Be sure to bring an enormous sum of money to the settlement for those!” And of course we will. We consumers will do almost anything to get our mortgages. Banks know this, so they keep inventing new charges to see how far they can go:

MORTGAGE OFFICER: OK, at your settlement you have to pay $400 for the preparation of the Certificate of Indemption. CONSUMER: Yes, of course. MORTGAGE OFFICER: And $430 for pastries.

But it will all be worth it, to get to our house. It sounds, from Beth’s description, as though it has everything that I look for in a house: (1) a basketball hoop and (2) a fiberglass backboard. I understand it also has rooms.

At The Miami Herald we ordinarily don’t provide extensive coverage of New York City unless a major news development occurs up there, such as Sean Penn coming out of a restaurant. But lately we have become very concerned about the “Big Apple,” because of a story about Miami that ran a few weeks ago in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times. Maybe you remember this story: The cover featured an upbeat photograph of suspected Miami drug dealers being handcuffed face-down in the barren dirt next to a garbage-strewn sidewalk outside a squalid shack that probably contains roaches the size of Volvo sedans. The headline asked:

CAN MIAMI SAVE ITSELF?

For those readers too stupid to figure out the answer, there also was this helpful hint:

A City Beset by Drugs and Violence

The overall impression created by the cover was: Sure Miami can save itself! And some day trained sheep will pilot the Concords!

The story itself was more balanced, discussing the pluses as well as the minuses of life in South Florida, as follows:

–Minuses: The area is rampant with violent crime and poverty and political extremism and drugs and corruption and ethnic hatred. —Pluses: Voodoo is legal.

I myself thought it was pretty fair. Our local civic leaders reacted to it with their usual level of cool maturity, similar to the way Moe reacts when he is poked in the eyeballs by Larry and Curly. Our leaders held emergency breakfasts and issued official statements pointing out that much of the information in the New York Times story was Ancient History dating all the way back to the early 1980s, and that we haven’t had a riot for what, months now, and that the whole drugs-and-violence thing is overrated. Meanwhile, at newsstands all over South Florida, crowds of people were snapping up all available copies of the New York Times, frequently at gunpoint.

All of which got us, at the Miami Herald, to thinking. “Gosh,” we thought. “Here the world-famous New York Times, with so many other things to worry about, has gone to all this trouble to try to find out whether Miami can save itself. Wouldn’t they be thrilled if we did the same thing for them?” And so it was that we decided to send a crack investigative team consisting of me and Chuck, who is a trained photographer, up there for a couple of days to see what the situation was. We took along comfortable walking shoes and plenty of major credit cards, in case it turned out that we needed to rent a helicopter, which it turned out we did. Here is our report: