Author Description

In Cervantes' great novel of the early seventeenth century the main character, rattled by reading countless books on chivalry, wanders out into the Spanish countryside as a knight errant, bent on conquering villains and succoring damsels in distress, not knowing that the world of chivalry he is entering had disappeared over a century earlier. In his wanderings he consistently mistakes poor peasant women for princesses, inns for castles, and innkeepers for kings. He unfailingly mistakes priests and monks for villains. His true love is a poor maid he has never met who lives in a nondescript village he has never visited. He attributes his every defeat to the work of enchanters. His words are always elevated and righteous, his deeds deranged. His family and friends, sane, caring, and dull-witted, try to cure him in ways that reveal their own lunacy. We soon begin to feel that his disconnection from reality may not be uncommon. In his memoir, Fernandez recounts the Fulbright Lectureship that took him and his family to Spain where he taught a graduate seminar in organic chemistry at the University of Madrid. But a quite different pursuit soon captured him: the Quixotic pass-time of recording the lives of those men and women who follow the footsteps of the famous knight of La Mancha. Such people add sparkle, substance, and occasional exasperation to the lives they touch. One such person is a Cracker from the piney woods of north Florida, a major character in this memoir, who transplants himself into the Hispanic community of Ybor City (Tampa) as a postal employee, becomes a civic leader, politician and writer. And using the pseudonym of the Green Hornet (a popular radio crime drama of the day) he also becomes a crime fighter. Later he encourages his family to discover the wonders of Spain, their ancestral country of origin. This calm, pleasant, outgoing man seemed to enjoy living his active life in turbulent pursuits. Another character, a Spanish dandy, focuses exclusively