Fiesta was the working title of
Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
Fiesta figured in Old
Folks's work.
He was always going to music festivals, book fairs, or art
fairs, and his motto was "Enough is as good as a feast."
Hemingway
called his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast. It was as much about art--and
gastronomy--as it was about writing. Although not so much about music.
Florida
gets its name from Pascua Florida, or Feast of Flowers.
Old
Folks wrote about Florida a lot.
OLD FOLKS AT HOME is about Florida.
It's a memoir, only not posthumous--he publishes it in real time, as he writes it,
at The Daily Bulletin.
With color pictures.
Anne Rowe wrote
a book called The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination. It
left Old Folks out.
The Book Lover's Guide to Florida left him out.
The Florida Artist Directory left him out.
Old Folks defined a Florida
writer as the one left out of the year-end round-ups of What is the Florida novel?
Who is the Florida writer?
Old Folks was the one left out, and his books
were about what that felt like.
The poor boy at the party. The one not invited
to the feast.
Old Folks would have his own feast.
He would serve
salmon mousse and Oysters Brown. That's Oysters Rockefeller with star anise instead
of Pernod. Or Penrod, as Uncle Wayne called it. Go down to The Bonfire and get me
a bottle of Penrod.
Old Folks's last installment of OLD FOLKS AT HOME had
Uncle Wayne sending kids too young to drive to the drive-through at the Bottle Stopper
for a fifth of whiskey.
Florida, you could just walk out your door and catch
a mullet in a cast net.
You could pick an orange off your own tree.
You've heard about a man so poor he didn't have a pot to piss in, or a window to
throw it out of?
If you're poor, your waterfront property belongs to someone
else. They just haven't taken it away from you yet.
But they're going to.
They want you working on the plantation.
They're going to give a shrimper
a medallion, like a New York City cab driver, and if you don't have a medallion,
you can't shrimp, until everyone works for aNTHRAxx, and wears a uniform with a racing
stripe on the shirt and your name above the pocket.
And who would hire an
old broke-dick dog like Old Folks.
Did you ever see a name tag that said
Old Folks.
Old Folks is superfluous, redundant, he has been retrenched. Superannuated.