I was in Tupelo, Mississippi on the day that Jimmy Buffett died. If Elvis was the king of rock and roll, then Jimmy Buffett was certainly the court jester, making music equally as memorable, though often tongue in cheek and never taking the whole rock star thing too seriously.
When I first heard the news of his passing, two songs popped into my mind: Lovely Cruise and Incommunicado. Lovely Cruise was playing when I tuned in to the memorial tribute to Jimmy on his Radio Margaritaville satellite radio channel. It’s a great metaphor for life in general, and his specifically, with lyrics like,
Drink it up
This ones for you
It's been a lovely cruise
I'm sorry it's ended
It's sad but it's true
Honey it's been a lovely cruise
These moments we’re left with
May you always remember
These moments are shared by few
There's wind in our hair
And there's water in our shoes
Honey, it's been a lovely cruise
Incommunicado isn’t quite as obvious, but it speaks to my heart this morning. The verse that is echoing through my mind like a CD on repeat is,
Now on the day that John Wayne died
I found myself on the continental divide
Tell me where do I go from here?
Think I'll ride into Leadville and have a few beers
Think of "Red River", "Liberty Valence" can't believe
the old man's gone
But now he's incommunicado
Leaving such a hole in a world that believed
That a life with such bravado
Was taking the right way home
The word ‘incommunicado’ means, “not able, wanting or allowed to communicate.” (Jimmy Buffett always taught me more vocabulary than my high school English classes). It’s a bit of an oxymoron that I’m writing so many words about a word that refers to the inability to communicate, but that was Jimmy Buffett in a nutshell. To quote his own words from Distantly In Love, “I can’t help but be, ruled by inconsistency.” He was at his best when working with contradictions, irony, or a play on words and turn of phrase. I am painfully aware that I am not talented enough of a writer to communicate what I’m really feeling in this moment, so I too am incommunicado and am relying on his lyrics to help get me across the finish line.
He wrote this song, I believe, because he could remember where he was and what he did on the day that his childhood hero died. He probably didn’t know and likely never met John Wayne, just like I never met Jimmy Buffett (though I did send him an invitation to both my high school graduation and wedding, but I digress), but when a childhood hero dies, it feels big, there is a gravity to it that pulls at you in unexpected ways. It feels like the death of your youth and the final step in a right of passage wherein your childhood is officially gone. For Jimmy, that was the day that John Wayne died and his memory was flooded with images from his favorite movies starring the Duke. Jimmy Buffett was my John Wayne.
I was introduced to Jimmy Buffett by my college age cousin Denise when I was 14 years old. Denise was to me what Uncle Billy was to Jimmy Buffett in his semi autobiographical song Pascagoula Run….an on ramp to fun that was otherwise beyond reach. She played me the Volcano cassette while riding in her car and I was hooked from the first song, which ironically, was Fins. Right there in the front seat of her car she taught me how to make a shark fin with my hands over my head and then lean left when Jimmy sang, “fins to the left” and then to the right when he followed with “fins to the right.” Somehow this music seemed like the silly kids songs you grow up with, but these were for grown ups. All I wanted to do was grow up and be an adult, so I didn’t yet know that grown ups just want an excuse to be able to act like a silly kid from time to time. Denise gave me a copy of the album and it became my obsession. Within a matter of days I had played the entire thing so many times I had every word to every song memorized. It was the first time I can remember something truly speaking to my heart and connecting with things within me that I didn’t even know were there. It was as if the tide had come in and washed away the shoreline, exposing long buried treasure for me to discover. His songs made me laugh, made me cry, made me think, made me blush, but mostly made me long for a life beyond Pulaski, Tennessee. I literally spent my study hall in the Giles County High School library looking up pictures and facts about the places he mentioned in his songs: Montserrat, Antigua, Trinidad. Once I located them and learned all there was to know, I fantasized about the day I would sail into their harbors. Within a year I had convinced my parents to hire my aunt, who painted sets for plays, to paint my room to look like the tropical shoreline that graced the cover of his first novel, Where Is Joe Merchant?
Denise took me to my first Buffett show the next summer. Jimmy Buffett’s Outpost Tour came rolling into the Starwood Amphitheater in Nashville, August 1991. This was my first concert and it was practically a portal to another world. People from eight to eighty were dressed like they were kicked back on the beach on a tropical vacation, but we were in fact in a gravel parking lot in Tennessee. Somehow they transformed a parking lot into a Caribbean shoreline. Jimmy described this scene best in the song Here We Are, as a “family reunion costume bbq. All the black sheep, family outcasts, and a freak or two.” I would not go another year without seeing him in concert for nearly a decade, catching shows in Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago and New Orleans.
When we got home that night I stayed up all night and read Tales From Margaritaville cover to cover. The deal was sealed that night. I still have that copy of that book sitting on the bookshelf in my office. For an only child living in a tiny town like Pulaski, Tennessee it was an access to the world and the source of all my hopes and dreams for my life. I’ve been writing what I feel since I was in fourth grade, but after reading Tales From Margaritaville I wanted to be a writer, and I gave it a decent shot, at least the best I could at that age. When I was seventeen I started writing a book that I titled Seashores or Summer School. The plot was pretty simple and a little too on the nose, a teenage boy from a small Tennessee town loads up his typewriter and dog in his jeep and heads off for the coast via Memphis and New Orleans, but it gave me a vehicle for sifting through my complex teenage emotions. I wrote around fifty pages, never finished it, but in a bizarre bit of serendipitous kismet, my life began to take shape somewhat like my not so short story. A few years later I would live in Memphis and over the next twenty years I’ve spent more time in New Orleans than any town I wasn’t living in. I spent time in the Caribbean and although I never lived on the coast, I did live in Florida and spent a lot of time on all of its coasts and several in Central America too. I met a girl who was a lot like the girl I was writing about in my story; one that scared me to death but I couldn’t get enough of either. I got a dog, not a Siberian Husky like my title character, but a loyal companion nonetheless, although I never did get that Jeep. Que sera sera.
For better or worse, I took his advice and tried “living my life like a song.” I “followed on the song lines that only dreamers see….not known for predictability”, often completely uprooting my life and career, setting sail on a moments notice, following the horizon for new adventures. Eventually I did find myself sleeping in a hammock in a grass hut on a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea. My first mission trip found me in the San Blas Islands with the Kuna Indians and I’ve never felt more like Jimmy Buffett in my life. I think that was when I realized it was time to stop trying to be him and be what he was calling all of us to be….ourselves. When I went to work with Latin American Missions and boarded my first plane to spend the summer in Central America I put on my headphones and played Far Side of the World to commemorate finally leaving Pulaski and venturing out to see the world. I didn’t see nearly all of it, but I’ve seen a lot more than most kids who grew up in Pulaski. Oddly enough, that little farm on Chicken Creek has become my Margaritaville and I’m ready to go home. I guess in some strange way, the timing of his passing is poetic to me. My story isn’t over yet, though the first and second acts have certainly come to a close. This morning, sitting on the front porch of my new, old home, back where all of this began, things have come full circle. Maybe time really is a flat circle, where what we have done we will do again and again. Regardless, I reject the nihilism of Nietzsche and prefer the philosophy of Jimmy Buffett, so I’ll close with a line from his song Love in the Library, “Write your own ending and hope it comes true.”
