Christmas morning I drove to Port St. Joe
along Highway 98. There was no traffic.
The TV had been full of stories about
airport delays and retail sales.
Like that was news. It's overcast.
Cool, not cold. I have on a T-shirt.
In my book, I'm writing about a dig
we were on with Chief and Dr. Dailey,
where we swam at WindMark Beach.
There are robin red-breasts on the roadside.
Rouge-gorge. I cooked one once using a recipe
from Larousse Gastronomique, although I never baked
a pie with four and twenty blackbirds in it.
On the dig I made my famous scungilli marinara
out of left-handed whelk, or Busycon perversum.

The wind was blowing. What Potter called
a Crazy Southeaster. Waves pounded the shore.
One time when we dug on the Navy base we had
a weather day, and didn't go to the site. We were staying at
Granny Brown's. Potter was too, although sometimes he slept
on the Friendship. They didn't go out when the sea was rough.
That morning, we ate breakfast together. I said, "Surf's up."
We went to The Jetties to body-surf. Me and Potter and Brenda,
in her itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka dot bikini.
Potter and I swam out to where the big waves broke.
The lifeguards panicked, and whistled swimmers in.
We waited for the right wave. The lifeguards whistled.
The swimmers who went in looked at us, like gapers looking at
a car wreck on the interstate. We caught the wave we wanted
and rode it all the way to shore, stepping out in one smooth motion,
and walking past the lifeguards. "You whistled?" Potter said.
I said, "Close the beach." Pancho and Lefty. Willie Nelson
and Merle Haggard. As Brenda is the witness. This really happened.

We dug a Weeden Island burial mound,
8BY3, on the Navy Base, that C. B. Moore
had excavated. We were digging in his backfill.
Mottled soil. No fitting sherds. It was an honor.
More men have walked on the moon than have done that.
He is pre-WPA, that Golden Age of American Archeology.

We were cooking and watching a program on C-SPAN2
about how the New York Times Book Review chooses
which books to review, and I heard Brenda scream, "Jack."
I thought she was being attacked by a giant cockroach.
I looked and a man was sitting at a computer terminal,
typing, and over his monitor he had a yellow and black
EVIL GENIUS bumper sticker. What could that mean?
Nothing. When I told Owen, he said, "It's like Nashville
and bluegrass. They know who you are. They have your records."
I looked evil genius up in Google, and it's a role-playing game for sugar-feebs
who never heard of the IWW, or think it has something to do with pro wrestling.
But this was the true genuine historical article of veneration, like the Shroud of Turin.
They know who I am. They have my books. They have my bumper sticker.
That's it. That's all. There is no "rest of the story." It ends here.
Born, died, in-the-service.