Rodger Aidman
A Kendall dentist, who has long been a part-time jazz musician, has now written his first novel.
The walls of Glatstein & Aidman’s dental office in South Miami’s Kendall region are lined with pictures. Pictures like the Taj Mahal and Amritsar’s Golden Temple in India, which serve as inspiration to a local dentist who’s proving it’s never too late to try new things.
Rodger Aidman has been helping patients to smile at the same dental practice since 1978. Now 61, Aidman is still practicing dentistry, but he also is an aspiring fiction writer who recently self-published his first novel.
Aidman says becoming a dentist was always his dream; a dream close friend Nelson Cruz confirms.
“When we were in junior high school he always said to me he wanted to be a dentist, and sure enough he’s been a dentist for 35 years,” says Cruz, who’s known Aidman since the two took Spanish class 50 years ago. “He accomplished what he wanted to do.”
Landing your dream job and succeeding in it is more than most people can hope to achieve in a lifetime. But not Aidman. When he turned 40, Aidman began coveting something else.
“I think a lot of people, when they hit the decade. The 20s, 30s, 40s, they kind of assess their lives. You know, ‘where am I now?’ ” And at 40 I started kind of feeling that I’m getting older and I want to get better at something,” Aidman says.
Enter a new career as a musician.
As a student at Southwest Miami High. Aidman played the piano and guitar in the school band. So returning to music was a natural progression. He enrolled at Miami Dade College for jazz and classical piano classes, graduating with an associate’s degree in music. Four years ago, Aidman was invited to join a band. He brought on Cruz as the band’s drummer and the Intransigents were born.
The quartet, which also includes Mac Cowden on trumpet and Carl Hersh on cello, performs at least one show every six to eight weeks, treating its audience to cover tunes from artists across several musical genres.
“He applies himself and with a music group that’s what you need,” says Cowden, a doctor, who invited Aidman to join the band. “Someone who just buckles down and gets the work done. That’s what Rodger does.”
“The question I get asked all the time is ‘how do you have the time to do this?’ ” says Aidman, a married father of two. “I feel like I have lots of time. Rather than sit in front of the TV set or sit in front of the computer, I would rather write or do music.”
Writing is another career Aidman took on when he turned 60. Reflecting on the summer he turned 13 and was allowed to hop on a Greyhound bus from Miami to Texas, Aidman began putting his experiences on that trip on paper
The result was Summer of ’63, a fictional account of the summer of a young Jewish boy’s life after he celebrates his bar mitzvah.
Inspired by actual events that occurred in his life during that period, Aidman confronts a variety of historical issues, including the death of President John F. Kennedy.
“In many ways this book is a legacy for me because even though it’s fictional, it is a family story,” Aidman says. “I feel a lot more fulfilled actually since I’ve written this book. Before I was a person who thought they had a book in them. Now I know I’m a person who knows they have a book in them.”
And, he says, he’s not done with writing: He’s already thinking about his second novel based on his experiences in India.
