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Meeting a legend incarnate on my way to hearing a legend in the making sing about him on the banks of a river synonymous with the state they love did it for me, but finding the heart of the annual Florida Folk Festival at White Springs tends to be a highly personal quest.
To the thousands of visitors who spent all or part of the Memorial Day weekend wandering the 250-acre Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center Park, finding the heart of the event may not have even been a priority.
Surviving miles of trudging from one musical or cultural venue to another in the searing heat of a freshly arrived Florida summer is a priority for some.
Getting to the right stage at the right time to hear a favorite artist perform does it for others, and finding the right shaded spot to enjoy any of the myriad ethnic foods offered by vendors is the day-maker for yet others.
Maybe it is the journalist in me that makes me look for a fleeting minute or few minutes that embodies the festival every year.
I do the same thing in New Orleans, sometimes wandering the French Quarter for hours until I see the center that I seek - a 9-year-old tap dancer striking fire from the pavement with the bottle-caps he has pressed into his sneakers to be the taps he can't afford, or a lonely saxophone player going into his third hour of playing on a hot night with only 74 cents on the wide expanse of worn felt that is the open top of his instrument case.
Sometimes I don't find that center, and that is okay, too. Not finding it doesn't take away from the overall experience - but finding it sure adds something.
My wife and I both have bad legs - hers permanent, mine only temporary from a muscle pull, but we caught a ride part way on a courtesy golf cart and limped the rest of the way to see our friends Jon Semmes, Pete Hennings and Ingrid Ellis play at the River Gazebo stage.
That is a stage for purists. It is a place where musicians, usually under the supervision of another well-known Florida folk music figure, Frank Thomas, play almost exclusively songs about Florida, and play them without benefit of electrical amplification. A glance at the sweat-stained newsprint schedule in my backpack told me that Boomslang Swampsinger and Doug Gauss, a quiet soft-spoken singer who shares my desire to change the Florida state song to something less embarrassing than the racially insensitive Old Folks at Home, would also be there.
And I wanted my wife to hear Bobby Hicks, the talented, brash, outspoken Tampa songwriter and performer whose passions for Florida and for what he believes have led him to a confrontation or two.
Audiences at folk festivals move in and out like the tides, and as I was headed down the stairs to the gazebo, I found myself face to face with Stetson Kennedy, the 85-year-old firebrand civil rights activist who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and, after writing The Klan Unmasked and other books, had a $1,000 per-pound bounty on what one writer described as his "135-pound-body."
There was only a second for a brief handshake and greeting before Kennedy went on his way (briskly climbing stairs up which I would later limp) and we settled in to hear Hicks sing I'm Florida, Need I Say More? which has a line in it naming Kennedy as one of the people and institutions that characterize the best in the state.
A few minutes and several songs later as I walked away from the gazebo, I saw a young woman sitting under a tree, playing a banjo badly.
But she was playing badly and slowly because she was learning, and something she had seen and heard somewhere had made her want to learn in the same way I saw musicians at a nearby campground often huddled off in pairs. One would be earnestly watching the fingers of the other as the notes almost visibly flew from banjos, mandolins and guitars and the process was repeated until a song was learned.
If, in a period of only a few hours, you see an icon of a culture, hear that icon revered and then see the process by which that culture is transferred within a generation and from one generation to the next - heat, mosquitoes and sore muscles take a back seat to the realization that you have glimpsed the essence that you sought.