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As long as I had known Pat Carver, I had never seen her flabbergasted, not even the day a co-worker and I sent a double martini to her table when she was having lunch with the pastor of First Baptist Church, where she is a member.
But Earl McKinney and I came as close as anyone I know - simply by having lunch.
I had asked the Rev. Bill Hild Jr. (who had succeeded the pastor lunching with Carver) to lunch because of his kind support during a tough time in my life, and Earl, who happened to be walking by our table, stopped and joined us.
It was, to say the least, an unlikely threesome.
I had (and probably still have) a decidedly un-Baptist reputation based on my former (and a few current) habits, my spiritual orientation and my association with a variety of new age belief systems, not to mention my liberal, pro-choice, pro-drug legalization and disestablishmentarian beliefs.
(Now there's a word - disestablishmentarian - I have been dying to use in print for some time. It means, basically, in favor of separation of church and state.)
Earl had been disaffected with the church, his across-the-street neighbor, for a variety of reasons, some of which, he said, had to do with his choice of Christmas decorations.
He had felt pressured, because he lived on Church Street where residents and churches customarily go all out with Christmas decorations, to join in, and had resisted. He finally had come up with a large "Humbug!" banner accompanied by a slightly off-color sign and a life-size manger scene to which he had added an annually growing number of pink plastic flamingoes - 72 at top count. All of them, as pointed out by my colleague Chase Squires in a story on Earl's death, had their rear ends pointed toward the church.
And in 1996 he was ready to escalate things with a new "Christmas card" sign that would have made the one with Santa's reindeer crashing into an outhouse and a play on words about the "Schmitt House" seem tame by comparison.
Main Street director Gail Hamilton had pleaded with Hild to make peace with Earl so that he wouldn't erect the sign, and Hild had taken the first step in what led to a major, if not total, de-escalation of hostilities. (The Humbug sign and the Schmitt House card remained as long as Earl owned the house.)
When Pat Carver saw the three of us breaking bread together, she begged us to wait long enough for her to go get her camera so she could record what was, if not a historic, certainly an unusual moment. But we were gone long before she could make it.
Interestingly, my first memories of Earl also had a Christmas connotation. When I moved to Dade City in 1973 I was 29, and there was this old (he was 49, which seemed older then than it does now) guy with a long white beard and a fringe of long white hair walking around town. Every time I saw him, I greeted him by saying, "Hi Santa," which I am sure I thought was incredibly witty and original.
As karma would have it, the years went by, and my long hair and the beard I grew turned white, and I began having people greet me in public as "Santa." After the first several thousand repetitions I began to find it extremely irritating.
I wanted to apologize to Earl, to whom I had never been introduced, but learned I couldn't because he wasn't speaking to me out of anger about a column I had written years earlier about a Dade City political flap.
Mutual friends thought it would be appropriate for us to start speaking so his not-speaking could be more effective and so I could clear my conscience with an apology for the Santa cracks.
We did, and, after pointing out in rather strong language how glad he was that I had gotten my comeuppance, we became pretty good friends.
Part of the agreement was that I would have to take over as the Town Character when Earl died, and when the news came on May 2 that he had, I knew that, no matter how many people might think I am well qualified, I would still be out of my league.
No matter where you stood on the subject of Earl, he was an original, he was unique and he lived his life in a manner that reminded, or should have reminded, the rest of us that we sometimes allow ourselves to be too much influenced by the expectations of others.
Those who benefited from that reminding, thank him.