My grandfather liked to cut his own Christmas tree and did for as long as he could. He would start looking a month or so in advance, scouting the woods for that perfect shape and when the time came would go out with an axe and bring it back to the house still smelling of the December damp and chill. 

It is much easier to imagine Christmas and all the traditions like cutting a tree up north where nature tosses in snow and blustery skies to make everyone’s cheeks rosy like the mythical Santa. In the south, in Florida, it’s a little harder to get that same snowman-winter wonderland feeling going. But we have our ways and if this is how you have always known Christmas then this is how Christmas ought to be.

Some years the temperature drops and it’s downright chilly but that never lasts more than a day or so. The chill itself felt like a gift savored but soon gone like a Popsicle in summer.

The tree was an important part of the ritual, building up to people gathering to eat too much turkey, tearing into presents and just being happy to be together. When the tree arrived Granny got out the boxes of decorations. There were long strands of silver tinsel that we put on the tree strand by strand (and after Christmas took off the same way and carefully laid out flat for the next year). Not like now where you see trees with all their tinsel still in place, on the curb awaiting trash pickup.

There were regular lights the size of the bulbs in today’s nightlights and a cherished string of bubble lights that we nursed along for many years. I don’t remember many individual ornaments but we had a few. It was really the warm glow that the lights threw around the room that I recall best.

We had a set of white reindeer and of course I painted one of their noses red with nail polish. I seem to recall a little sled, too.

Under the tree was a white skirt and before long it was nearly covered by mysterious wrapped gifts. My grandmother, who was the most upright and well behaved person otherwise would creep around the tree when she thought no one was looking and find each of her presents. She would handle them and bounce them up and down to get their weight and find out if they rattled. She would run her fingertips over the contours and try to figure what it was. My mother says that Granny would even unwrap and rewrap if she could get away with it and was not above poking around in the closets for gifts not yet wrapped.

Poppa passed away in 1981 and Granny’s last Christmas in 1983 was spent in a hospital in Gainesville after she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and would only last two weeks. We all came, her two daughters and their families, and took turns staying with her. For Christmas I had gotten her a new cane with an ornate brass handle bought before I knew she would not walk again. She unwrapped it and turned it over in her tired hands and said how pretty it was. She opened all her gifts lying in her hospital bed and exclaimed over them as if they were treasures but it tired her out and she soon slept.

On New Year’s Eve around 6 in the afternoon while my mother and sister were out to grab a bite to eat she closed her eyes a final time and went home.

The natural tree went away and was replaced by the silver one that my mom later kept in a box in the closet. We still gathered and decorated and plotted how to surprise each other and held hands while saying grace over turkey and dressing. We regained our sense of joy but it will always be tempered by the knowledge of those goodbyes.

In September of 1950 when I was three and a half years old a hurricane blew in from the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Florida coast around Cedar Key. With the unlikely name Hurricane Easy the storm broke national records for most rainfall (38.7 inches in 24 hours at Yankeetown) that stood for years and is still the Florida record. 

My family was right in the middle of things.

The year of the storm my mom and dad had opened a café in Chiefland, Fla. they called the City Grill. It was on US 19 where it came through the center of town. There were sidewalks in front of the block-long strip of stores that nestled up tight to either side of US 19. On the opposite side of the street my father’s father ran a hardware store.

The City Grill was open three meals a day. Breakfast and lunch found a lot of locals sitting at the counter or hunched over tables but for dinner most locals were at home and it was folks traveling north and south on US 19 that stopped to eat. The jukebox stood ready to take your nickels, and coffee was a dime.

Things were going pretty well as summer slipped out of August and into September. In those days there was not the complicated early warning system we now have for big storms and Easy crept up the coast with little initial warning.

It dumped torrents of rain on Yankeetown south of Gulf Hammock and on the way up caused the tide in Tampa Bay to rise by 6.5 feet flooding north Tampa with two feet of water.

When the warnings were sounded in Cedar Key (situated 29 miles southwest of Chiefland) some people left and others decided to stick it out. The storm swept into Cedar Key with 125 mph winds and then made a big counter-clockwise loop out into the Gulf, all the while gathering moisture, dumping rain and putting Cedar Key in a siege-like state of enduring sustained winds of over 100mph for nine and a half endless hours.

Those who remained in town huddled in the high school. Out of 200 buildings in Cedar Key, 150 lost their roofs and a full 90% were damaged. All 100 of the boats in the town’s fishing fleet were destroyed.

My father was in Gainesville when it all started and my mother was in Chiefland running the café. I was in Gulf Hammock in a house my grandfather built down a sand road back in the woods. We didn’t know what was coming.

My mother says that as the storm really kicked in people swarmed from Cedar Key and the many homesteads out in the swamps and woods and along the Suwannee River into Chiefland, the nearest town looking for shelter and food. My father drove down from Gainesville and they kept the café open and fed everyone who pushed through the door and out of the rain and wind. After a while they stopped giving people checks for their meals and just kept cooking and putting out hot food and hotter coffee while the winds howled outside.

I don’t know what everyone knew or when. I was just a small child but I do remember being in that house and the sound of the wind thrashing the trees and scratching at the house looking for a way in. I was scared but I was also curious. I later heard someone say that the wind was so strong that it took a pine needle and buried it four inches deep in a tree. It was such a vivid statement that to this day I believe I saw that very thing though it’s likely I did not.

What I do know is that at the height of the storm, when it had made its loop and hit Cedar Key for the second time and started inland that my father came for us.

He drove down US 19, dodging tree limbs on the road, the rain almost horizontal and the night so black that everything wet shone like silver. When he got to Otter Creek, midway between Chiefland and Gulf Hammcok, the State Police had closed the road because of flooding and the danger of downed trees and power lines that followed the road. (Three people died in Easy, all from electrocution from downed lines.)

“Sorry,” the State Policeman in his slicker said, “you can’t go through.”

My father told him. “My little girl and my wife’s parents are down there. I’m going to get them.”

The police must have pulled the barricade aside because he did come and get us. We bundled into his car and he drove us back to Chiefland through the furious night.

They kept the café open until no more people came in looking for help.

The next day, like most days after hurricanes, was sunny and despite the damage all around us it was almost like it never happened.

The only thing I know for sure is that for the rest of my life I always remembered that my father pushed past the police and drove through the crazy black night and storm to save me. That’s what fathers do.

Went out for an early morning appointment the other day and started wondering about people you see on the street at that hour. If somebody is walking with a shopping cart full of stuff and you can be pretty sure that person is homeless. But, lots of others are not so easily pegged. Still, that’s a time of day when a lot of homeless folks are moving from their nighttime hideaways to their daytime hangout spots.

And that got me to thinking that when I was kid it was rare in north Florida to see a homeless person. There were a few hobos and on occasion some rootless soul that you just knew couldn’t stay in one place but it seemed more a choice than a terrible circumstance. Those days someone would come up to the house and ask if you had any work and maybe they’d rake your yard or whatever you asked and you’d pay them with a meal served to them outside. They’d eat in the shade, say thank you ma’am, hand back your plate and be gone.

Today it’s not only marginalized people who are out of the mainstream and into the subculture world of homelessness, whether through addiction, post traumatic stress or mental health issues, it’s also families: moms, dads with kids or just moms or dads with kids. People are living in cars, sleeping in church parking lots and trying to keep clean and get the kids to school. This is definitely not the world I grew up in.

I moved to Miami when I got grown and before too long moved to New York City. About that time the movie Midnight Cowboy came out and I understood how someone might dream of getting out of the dirt and chaos and crime and head down south. Fred Neil — a boy who grew up in Florida and was a well known songwriter to other musicians but largely unknown to the public — gave us a song (Everybody’s Talkin’) that was used in that movie and performed by Harry Nilsson for a Grammy and I think it really sums up the allure.

“Everybody’s talkin’ at me/ I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’/ only the echoes of my mind… I’m going where the sun keeps shinin’/ through the pouring rain./ Going where the weather suits my clothes./ Banking off the northeast wind/ Sailing on a summer breeze,/ Skippin’ over the ocean like a stone.”

Fred Neil spent some time in New York too around the same time I got there. Bob Dylan played harmonica for him down on Bleeker Street, Fred did concerts with Joni Mitchell. Roy Orbison and the Jefferson Airplane recorded his songs but he's still largely unknown. 

I was a folkie back in Miami and I knew who he was.  Right before I moved north I went to see Fred in a coffee house in Coconut Grove. He came out, never said a word, sat on a stool and did a bunch of his songs. He didn’t talk, didn’t look up, just hung over his guitar and gave it to us. Then he stood up and walked off.  I remember that night all these years later and remember that he sang about something just beyond your grasp, some bittersweet thing like weather that suits your clothes or the thought that something might change somehow.

Today, thinking about Fred Neil and all his music I looked him up on Google and found a fredneil.com website that lists all his records and lyrics, has a bunch of photos. It was put together by a web guru from the Netherlands who told me he was just a fan, like me, when I asked him about the site.

Fred went on to found the Dolphin Project on Earth Day in 1970 with a friend. That attracted a bunch of other people like a young Jimmy Buffet and brings to mind another classic Fred Neil song, The Dolphins.

“This old world may never change/The way it’s been/And all the ways of war/Can’t change it back again./I’ve been searching for the dolphins in the sea/And sometimes I wonder/Do you ever, think of me.”

It was a great combination of the big issues like world peace put together with the very personal do you ever think of me. He stopped appearing or recording but remains a songwriter’s writer. Plenty of folks like Stephen Stills name him as an influence and the Jefferson Airplane used to not only cover his Other Side of This Life but also dedicated a song to him at their concerts. And we are left with a handful of gravelly-voiced songs on LP now reissued on CD and the question, “sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me?” I do.

Fred Neil died on Summerland Key in 2001.