After we ate, the pickers came over to
our house.
Soupy Davis is a shrimper from Bradenton. Lowell played rhythm
guitar while Soupy played fiddle. Then he switched to guitar and played "The
Sheik of Araby."
He sounded like Leon Redbone with his arthritic old
fingers.
Brenda and I sat out on the porch and listened to Gerald and Lowell and Stanley
Parker, Uncle Ed's son, talk about cars, outboard motorboat engines, deer hunting,
and fishing strikes until away after dark.
When we scattered Potter's ashes
in Parker Bayou, Stanley took the Friendship out.
He said Uncle Ed ate fried
mullet three times a day every day and the first 50 years it was fried in lard.
He lived to be 80.
Stanley wasn't saying it didn't hurt him. He was saying
it killed him.
But when he was 79 years old he could dip the corks on the
cork line. He could hop back in the boat out of the water like a cat. And he would
jump in the pocket and throw a shark out of the net by its fins and possibly its
gills.
He had arms and a chest on him like a weight lifter.