LAKE CITY—This is a laid-back city with sleepy streets that are lined with mossy trees and old Victorian houses. In other words, this region of Florida is about as Southern as you get.

A lot of people don’t understand Florida. I have visited several states this year, and every state seems to have its own screwed-up ideas about Florida.

People in the North perceive Florida as a tropical paradise where Cuban girls stand at roadside kiosks selling Navel oranges, cigars, Cape Canaveral trinkets, Key West timeshares, and Mickey Mouse hats.

And I’ve met Southerners in places like Arkansas and Tennessee who think Florida is full of retirees who speak with New York accents and listen to Sinatra while wearing their jogging suits.

A few months ago, a lady from Kentucky told me that she didn’t think Florida qualified as part of the American South. I just smiled and blessed her heart.

If you remember nothing else from this poorly written column, I hope you remember that we who live in North Florida are very different

from people in Orlando, Tampa, or Miami.

We border Georgia, and Alabama. This means we eat okra, pimento cheese. It means we do not pronounce Gs at the ends of our ING words. It means we would not be caught dead wearing nylon workout wear.

Would we wear NASCAR tank tops and cutoff jean shorts? Yes. Jogging suits? I think not.

But getting back to Lake City. I’m in town to do my one-man show tonight. I arrive at the theater. I am running a little late for soundcheck. Already on stage ahead of me is tonight’s band. They are named the SongFarmers. They’re rehearsing.

At most of our little shows we usually have musical groups. Most often it’s a bluegrass band or a traditional Americana band, sometimes Dixieland jazz.

We’ve worked with lots of small-town bands who are ridiculously talented and deserve all the…

This holiday season has the potential to be a good season as long as you aren’t a total jerk.

The question is, how do you NOT be a jerk when the world is full of jerks? They’re literally everywhere. Waiting on every corner. In fact, it’s almost impossible not to flatten four or five jerks just backing out of your driveway.

Lots of people act like jerks nowadays. It’s become “trendy” and “hip” to be a jerk. Personally, I blame that there newfangled internets.

Yesterday, I was in the grocery store and I saw something very jerkish. Three strangers stood in an aisle, browsing shelves. A man, a college-age girl, and a little old woman.

They were all standing at the shelf of potato chips. You know the aisle. Every store has a potato-chip aisle. In this aisle are roughly 127,024,211 bags of Frito-Lay products.

Which just goes to show you that times have certainly changed. When we were kids there were only three kinds of chips available. Fritos, potato chips, and those stale pretzels your mother used to buy which

tasted like leftover rations from World War II.

But today, thanks to society’s great thinkers and brilliant minds, we have tons of chip-brand choices. They have such weird flavors out now that I cannot imagine normal people actually spending money on these things. Chips such as—these are actual flavors:

—Cinnamon and Sugar Pringles.
—Walker’s Shrimp Cocktail Crisps.
—Flaming Steak Chips.
—Peanut Butter potato chips.
—Lay’s Nori Seaweed Flavored potato chips.

I wish I could have been at the marketing meeting when someone came up with seaweed potato chips.

“Hey, I have an idea, Frank! Let’s make a potato chip that tastes like material scraped from the bottom of the ocean floor!”

“I love it!”

“I second this motion!”

“All in favor, say aye!”

“We’re all gonna lose our jobs for this, aren’t we?”

“Yep.”

Food…

It’s eight days until Thanksgiving. The neighbor’s house is buzzing. There are vehicles lining the street. Minivans, trucks, SUVs, Fords, Kias.

My neighbor’s family is in town to celebrate an early holiday. His grandchildren just arrived from Georgia. They’re playing in the front yard. I overhear them screaming, “TAG! YOU’RE IT!”

“I’M NOT IT! YOU’RE IT!”

“NUH-UH!”

“YES-HUH!”

“OUCH! I’LL KILL YOU!”

“I DARE YOU TO TRY!”

“#$%!@”

“HELLLP! GRANDPAAA!”

Just yesterday, a cantankerous elderly man up the street asked if I would help hang his Christmas lights. I reminded him that it’s too early. He insisted. So, I pointed out that I’ve had two back-surgeries, one tonsillectomy, and I’m Southern Baptist.

He is Pentecostal and doesn’t believe in tonsillectomies.

It took three hours on a ladder to hang those god-forsaken lights. He stood below and preached my ear off for the entire time.

When we were through, I was sweating. He opened a garage refrigerator and asked if I wanted an ice-cold chocolate milk.

“That depends,” I said. “Is it manufactured by the Anheuser-Busch Company?”

Some Pentecostals can’t take a joke.

“Chocolate milk will be fine,” I remarked.

Christmas

comes earlier each year. It wasn’t but a few weeks ago that children in pirate costumes were at my front door, panhandling for candy. Now it’s Christmas lights in November.

And if you ask me, the holidays can’t get here quick enough.

My wife has already started cooking to get a jumpstart on Thanksgiving. She’s practicing. Our little home is alive with aroma. It smells like cornbread dressing, allspice, and sweet potato pie.

There are candied pecans on the counter—fresh from the baking sheet. My wife will brain any man who ventures near them. This I know from the trial-and-error approach.

A ham is in the oven. And a poundcake is in the immediate vicinity. I sampled both without permission this morning and got neutered with a melon baller.

She…

It’s not a good idea to let your kids ride in the bed of a pickup truck. It’s a bad idea, actually. Of course, most people already know this. But apparently some don’t.

Oh, well. I suppose that people are going to do what they’re going to do, even if it’s a fatal mistake. Otherwise we wouldn’t have so many karaoke bars.

I was in traffic yesterday when I saw a vehicle carrying four boys in its truck bed. I was behind them at a stoplight. It wasn’t busy traffic, there was no real danger. And, I’m sure the driver of the vehicle wasn’t going very fast, but it’s just a bad idea.

You can trust me on this. I know what I’m talking about. We used to ride in the bed of Mister Danny’s pickup before and after Little League practice, or when riding to games. I estimate that during my Little-League years, each week I would spend hundreds of hours in the back of a Ford pickup with my sweaty teammates who smelled

like gut-eating buzzards.

We were not a great team. We were the team who always showed up looking like a bunch of messy-haired inmates on punitive work-release programs from a state institution.

One of us, and I’m not naming names here, (Darren Marion Jenkins) even kept a package of cigarettes rolled in his sleeve. They were just candy cigarettes, mind you. But to us he was James Dean.

Mister Danny would pile nine boys in the back of his pickup, four crammed in the front seat. Also in the truck bed were two duffle bags full of wooden bats, baseballs, and a Coleman cooler full of Mister Danny’s special “coaching juice.”

Every game went the same way. We would jump out of the truck and end up playing a really slick uptown team who wore matching black uniforms. These teams were usually named after some…

COLUMBUS—It’s a rainy night in Georgia. I have an interview on the local evening news. This is a monumental occasion. My mother called to make sure I was wearing clean underwear.

The last time I was in Columbus, I was in college. I was wearing clean underwear then, too. I was an adult student, traveling with a bunch of eighteen-year-old music students on a school trip. That weekend, I saw some of the world’s most accomplished pianists perform in concert. And it was great.

I was a different person back then. Back then, I had this ridiculous idea that I was going to be a pianist one day.

I wish someone would’ve told me life doesn’t happen how you plan, no matter what kind of underpants you wear.

Anyway, being on the news is a big deal. I have only been on the news twice before.

The first time, I was helping judge a barbecue competition. Me and my friend Buck were interviewed on a local channel. There were cameras with blinking lights, teleprompters, cameramen giving hand signals,

and a makeup lady kept powdering my face and saying, “I’ve never seen so much oil on one godforsaken forehead.” And the interview basically went like this:

“So, tell us about the upcoming event, Sean.”

“Uhhhh…”

“Sean, what can people expect at this event?”

“I uhhhh...”

“Back to you, Terry.”

The other time I was on the news was when my cousin accidentally stole a luxury sedan. His elderly father-in-law had forgotten that he’d agreed to let us borrow his Buick for a road trip. He reported the car as stolen.

We got pulled over in Tennessee. After much confusion with local law enforcement officials, we all had a good laugh about it. And I can say one thing about the upstanding penal system in Tennessee, they serve delicious hamburger steaks.

But getting back to Columbus. Tonight’s news interview is about the…

I bought a jigsaw puzzle at the grocery store today. The box features an ornate cathedral with red roses and blossoming foliage. The cathedral is in Germany. The puzzle cost two bucks.

My mother and I used to do jigsaw puzzles. Big puzzles. We did them together. I was no good at jigsaws, but she was an expert.

Long ago, puzzles cost seventy-five cents, and provided hours of distraction. We needed distractions back then. We welcomed anything that took our minds off my father’s untimely death, and the gloom that came thereafter.

My mother looked for distractions that made us laugh, things that made us smile, games, puzzles, crafts, or road trips.

Once, she took us to Branson. She took me to see a Dolly Parton impersonator. The show was spectacular. After the performance, the woman in the blonde wig hugged me so tight she nearly suffocated me with her enormous attributes.

When my mother saw me locked with the buxom woman, she shrieked and started praying in tongues. She yanked me by my

earlobe and drug me away. And I have been a lifelong Dolly Parton fan ever since.

Anyway, my mother loved doing things with her hands. She made large quilts from old T-shirts, she gardened, she did puzzle books, anagrams, crosswords, cryptograms, she knitted, crocheted, and painted.

She played cards with me, sometimes checkers, and she was a Scrabble fanatic. But jigsaw puzzles. Those were our thing.

My mother started each puzzle by saying the same thing:

“We gotta find the corners first, that’s how you do it.”

The idea was that once you found the corners, the rest of the puzzle would come together. Thus, we would sift through twenty-five hundred pieces, looking for four corners. Once we found them, we’d dig for the edges.

We’d place pieces into piles, then link them together. Piece by piece. Section by section. Mama and I could spend a…