Eccentricities, Etc.

I popped into Town and Country not long ago to buy some essential item and was delighted to run into one of our long-time residents, Tony Tharp.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will reveal that Tony hails from Leland, Mississippi, where Highway 61 of blues fame crosses Highway 82, about a dozen miles from Greenville, where my family lived when I attended Ole Miss. He also once worked for a friend of mine, Hodding Carter, editor and publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times, affectionately known as the DDT. Leland is not very far from where the Southern meets the Yellow Dog.

Tony arrived in Oriental not long before I did, but unlike me (though some may disagree), he is a bit eccentric. This characteristic is not unknown among Oriental residents, I believe.

I learned that Tony is once again expressing his eccentricities in a web site, tonytharp.com.

Check it out. You may be alternately amazed, amused and enlightened. Perhaps even occasionally enraged.

He posts his entries from his sailboat, Yoknapatawpha. Those of a literary bent will recognize the name. Few know, though, that the late William Faulkner kept a sailboat on Sardis Lake near Oxford, Mississippi. In the 1950's, the sailboat was maintained by another Mississippi eccentric, V.P. Ferguson.

I'll bet even Tony doesn't know that.