Potter and Suzette lived in Santa Rosa
Beach, in a two-story house with a deck on the second floor.
They lived there
so long that Potter used to hunt ducks around the dune lakes with a Springer Spaniel
dog, and fish in them, for redfish and sea trout. Now there are so many houses around
the lakes you can't do that. Expensive houses. Architectural Digest homes.
Town and Country homes.
Suzette's house was not a Town and Country
home.
But it was comfortable, and had a lot of art and music in it, gourmet
cooking, Balder called it pork-by-the-sea, a corruption of porc-with-a-c.
Art and music and gourmet cooking, laughter, story-telling make a house a home. Fish
caught locally or a deer ham or goose sausages Owen brought down from up the country,
taking local seafood back north with him.
Owen spent his summers with Potter
and Suzette, working as a deckhand with Potter and Slim on the New Florida Girl,
out of East Pass Marina, in Destin, and picking with Potter backing him on rhythm
guitar at a fiddler's convention in Atmore, Alabama, I remember.
Potter was the best rhythm guitar player since Riley Puckett, and a good
lead singer, until he tore a vocal chord trying to sing over a rowdy crowd at The
Warehouse, in Destin.
* * *
The house had a spiral staircase inside, so when Potter died, the paramedics
had to lower his body off the deck.
"There goes $100,000 worth of fine
dining," Suzette said.
* * *
A year after Potter died, Duke wrote "Potter's Moon," a song which
still gives me goosebumps.
Owen inherited his Martin guitar and Balder inherited
his Chevrolet Caprice Classic, which once sat in the front yard of the trailer on
the beach in Grayton Beach.
Potter kept a black plastic bag of empty beer cans in the trunk, to claim
he was a scrap metal recycler, and get around the open container law.
When
he tried to sink the car as a snapper reef, the beer cans kept it afloat.
The Coast Guard hung a Hazard to Navigation flag on it and used it as a target for
gunnery practice.
This isn't true, it's just the kind of hyperbole that Old
Folks made up.
* * *
Woodie Long has a gallery in Santa Rosa Beach.
Old Folks used to
see him and Dot at Folk Fest in the North Atlanta Trade Center every year, when he
worked in Atlanta, in the corporate cubicle dot-com culture.
Every year,
Woodie would have painted another 1,000 paintings and Old Folks would have written
another dozen books, and posted then on the Internet. Hoping his dot-com employer
didn't find out and sack him for conduct unbecoming a senior information development
specialist.
* * *
When Old Folks got his first technical writing job, in Fort Walton Beach,
Potter said, "Giving you a job with a desk and a typewriter is like making Frank
Pitts in charge of all the hogs on St. Joe Point."
Who knew the habits
of the hogs better than Frank Pitts?
I did the work. I got promotions and
raises. Performance bonuses.
I worked for an employer off and on for 45 years,
and for 25 years I worried about losing my job for being a writer--something I could
not help.
Try that and see if you can do it any better than I did.
You can't even imagine doing that.