Now he lives in the islands, fishes the pilin's
And drinks his green label each day
Writing his memoirs, losing his hearing
But he don't care what most people say
Through 86 years of perpetual motion
If he likes you he'll smile, then he'll say
"Jimmy, some of it's magic, some of it's tragic
But I had a good life all the way"
-Jimmy Buffett, He Went to Paris
It's been a year of losses in our world, as I've mentioned here before. My mother, Peg's best friend, my uncle, half of one of our favorite pairs of folks in all the world. Tack a hurricane onto all that, and you've got a calendar filled with grief.
So in the midst of these grim milestones, I didn't say much about the death of Jimmy Buffett on September 1st.
Everyone my age has a Jimmy Buffett story, how the songs and the lifestyle they represented became part of the architecture of our lives. Social media lit up with those homages in September, and I stayed silent as I processed the loss of my mother and the mangling of Wyldswood in Idalia a couple days after Mom's funeral and two days before Jimmy died. It was a lot.
But the holiday season brings remembrance and reverie, at least for me, and listening to the 1996 album Christmas Island the other day brought me back to so many times and places, all long gone now.
Apparently Jimmy (I feel weird calling him by his first name, but calling him "Buffett" makes this sound like a term paper) seems to have experienced the same thing looking back on his life over the holidays.
Merry Christmas, Alabama
Merry Christmas, Tennessee
Merry Christmas, Louisiana
To St. Bart's and the Florida Keys
Merry Christmas, Mississippi
Where I started this wild and crazy run
Such a long way from that first birthday
Merry Christmas, everyone
And merry Christmas, Colorado
Though far from you all I have roamed
'Tis the season to remember
All the faces and the places that were home
'Tis the season to remember
And to count up all the ports of call I've known
And to thank his mercies tender
For I'm never far from home
Merry Christmas to my saints and guardian angels
Who protect me as I roam
'Tis the season to remember
All the faces and the places that were home
Guess my life's moved at near light speed
Since I started this wild and crazy run
Such a long way from that first birthday
Merry Christmas, everyone
'Tis the season to remember
No, we're never far from home
As for me, my first memory of Jimmy Buffett was on my mom's AM radio in the old Datsun, around the sixth grade. He didn't make an impression on me any more than the Captain and Tenille or Seals and Crofts.
It was only years later, when I was at undergraduate pilot training in Columbus, Mississippi, that I re-encountered his music. Late in my year there one of our instructors in T-37s, a roundish guy from Ohio named Rick Cott, invited my roommmate and me to supper on the deck with his wife. We ate hamburgers and drank margaritas and listened to You Had to Be There, Buffett's 1978 live album. Rick and his wife were the first of a whole archetype I'd encounter over the years, rust belt Ohioans who listened to Buffett, wore aloha shirts, and dreamed of the day they'd retire to Florida and live the Margaritaville lifestyle. Parrotheads before there was such a thing.
I picked up my own cassette copy of You Had to Be There as I was leaving Columbus in 1987, and soon had a whole library of JB albums to serenade me through the miserable winter I spent in Alamagordo at Fighter Lead-in, picturing myself in the Sunshine State, maybe in quirky Bay County with its dirt roads that led right down to the water's edge. A few months before, I remember flying a T-37 into Tyndall and seeing the trailers and the empty stretches of beach for the first time, and as a Californian being amazed that the world he described in his songs seemed to exist here.
Eventually I ended up in Virginia flying Eagles, and about a year into that assignment a buddy invited me to a Jimmy Buffett concert at the William & Mary football stadium. This was the first of three JB concerts for me over the years, the last being just before we moved back to Florida from Charleston--I was trying to convince myself to be happy about that move, or at least resigned to my fate. At this first concert I was exposed to Parrothead excess, with my squadron mate dancing around the football field drunk on pina coladas with a styrofoam headdress covering his ever-broadening bald patch.
When it came time to go to war and we left for Saudi Arabia, Mom sent me a pile of cassettes for my fancy new Walkman, among them a forgotten Jimmy Buffett live album called Feeding Frenzy. I can't listen to that album today without smelling the sweat, the jet and diesel exhaust, and feeling a little of that incredible experience. Those songs became the bones of a set I built for myself in some distant future, after I survived the war and committed to living a life of fullness as an act of gratitude for still being alive. And that full life would be in the Florida I'd created in my imagination:
And there's that one particular harbour
Sheltered from the wind
Where the children play on the shore each day
And all are safe within
Most mysterious calling harbour
So far but yet so near
I can see the day when my hair's full gray
And I finally disappear
I reckon God was listening to all that, because maybe six months after we returned home I finagled an assignment to Tyndall AFB. The first few weeks were spent in a rental in Mexico Beach, now long gone after Michael, flying jets during the day and guzzling blender drinks on the beach in the evenings. It's a wonder I didn't end up weighing 300 pounds. Then there was the unlovely house on the lovely bayou, and the arrival of my Jim and then the sailboat, an S2 that looked like something right out of a Jimmy Buffett song.
Buffett played in the background of a lot of what followed--law school, more kids, building and fleeing a law practice to go teach, then back to PC to pick up where I left off. I quit listening to his new stuff, stuck in a time and a sound from which Jimmy himself had long since moved on in the course of building a billion dollar empire around the fantasy I first encountered on Rick Cott's back deck.
But he was still around, particularly when P and I started going to Wyldswood together and spending time in the last of Old Florida, like a backdrop for an old Buffett song about drug runners and empty beaches and folks who came to town running from some trouble Up North.
P's met Jimmy Buffett, because of course she has. And of course it was at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, over a beignet. Thankfully he didn't woo her away before I arrived on the scene.
Of all the songs that hit me in the gut during the last few years, I'd have to say Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On still makes the tears well up as I think back on the days after Hurricane Michael.
If a hurricane doesn't leave you dead
It will make you strong
Don't try to explain it, just nod your head
Breathe in, breathe out, move on
And it rained, nothing really new
And it blew, seen all that before
And it poured, the earth began to strain
Pontchartrain buried the 9th Ward to the second floor
According to my watch the time is "now"
The past is dead and gone
Don't try to shake it, just nod your head
Breathe in, breathe out, move on
And that song returned for me as Issac and George and our crew cleared down trees and worked to clear the mess at our beloved Wyldswood before Peg arrived a couple weeks later. It's a Florida thing, having to display a little grit and resilience when the material things you hold dear are swept away every few years. Breathe in, breathe out, move on.
And in the midst of that horrible moment we lost Jimmy as well. I feel like an old friend who's shared this ride with me for decades just passed behind the curtain. There won't be any more goofy songs, like his last number, My Gummy Just Kicked In. He always captured the zeitgeist for our generation, as we all got older and fatter and more ridiculous by the day. But it was a fun ride together, all the same.
So long Jimmy. Fair winds and following seas.
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