Twenty-five years ago, I spent my twenty-fifth birthday in Nashville. At the time I was a new, young minister at my home congregation and one of our members was having bypass surgery at Centennial Hospital. It was a cold, gray, and rainy December day, and once I left the hospital I decided my twenty-fifth birthday would be a perfect excuse to make a pilgrimage to Rotier’s, a local legend eatery that also served as a source of inspiration for one of my childhood heroes, James William Buffett.
Jimmy Buffett was another December baby, born Christmas Day 1946 in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The music and lore of Jimmy Buffett was arguably the most significant influence in the first twenty-five years of my life. It was through staying up all night reading my cousin’s copy of his collection of short stories, “Tales From Margaritaville”, when I was thirteen, after attending my first Buffett concert, that I found motivation for my own writing. In the book, he quotes Mark Twain, “Write what you know.” When I was in fourth grade, my creative writing teacher — Fordie Franklin — put a pencil in my hand and said, “Write what you feel.” Write what you feel, write what you know — thirty-seven years later I still am. I’ve written about that plenty, so I won’t rehash those old stories, but I wanted to tell this one as I’m approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of my twenty-fifth birthday. I may not be an award winning writer, but I am at least the writing equivalent of a Sunday driver. Get comfortable, we’re going to meander a bit and take the long way around.
After flunking out of Auburn University for focusing on fraternities more than scholastics, Jimmy eventually graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a degree in history and journalism in 1969. He spent the next two years busking and playing in bars in New Orleans. The influence of New Orleans on his life, writing, and performing cannot be understated, as he documented in his own words in the song “University of Bourbon Street”. Though I was not planning on patterning my life after this part of the Jimmy Buffett story, I too flunked out of my first year in college due in part to my spending more time in a frat house than a classroom. Jimmy’s journey began in the southeastern corner of the state at Auburn and mine began in the opposite northwest corner of the state at the University of North Alabama in the Shoals, where Jimmy would later record his albums “Coconut Telegraph” and “Beach House on the Moon” in 1980 and 1999 resepctively. Just like Jimmy, I found myself in in the French Quarter a month later and I was never the same again. The nineteen year old boy who felt like he was born again in New Orleans, is now a fifty year old grandpa who goes by the moniker “Gumbo”, with grandchildren he nicknamed Roux, Nola, and Mardi......my greatest hits.
Jimmy moved from New Orleans to Nashville in 1969 to pursue a country music career that never took off, and found work as a writer for Billboard magazine to pay the bills. Perhaps it’s unfair to say his country music career never took off; it was actually just a looong time coming. Twenty-five years after his career launching, but only #1 hit song “Margaritaville”, he had another #1 hit with country music superstar Alan Jackson, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”. One year later he would release his — you guessed it — twenty-fifth , and only #1 selling studio album, “License to Chill” which was an album of duets with a number of country music superstars. Ironically, the man who couldn’t make it in country music, would shape the next several years of Music City hits by influencing countless beach themed country hits for other artists, often being name dropped in the lyrics, and practically having his mantle taken up by country megastar Kenny Chesney.
In 1971 he played the first show at the now legendary Exit/Inn, which is located a mere three tenths of a mile east of Rotier’s on Elliston Place. One of my prize possessions is a copy of a show he played there in 1974, a full three years before “Margaritaville” was released and launched what would become the Parrothead tour de force that eventually made him a billionaire. During my teenage years I spent as much time as possible in West Nashville in the stretch across from Vanderbilt University where Elliston Place and West End Avenue converge; home to Centennial Park, the Parthenon, Exit/Inn, Elliston Place Soda Shop, Tower Records, and Rotier’s.
Parrotheads the world over were introduced to the significance of Rotier’s to Jimmy Buffett when he released his boxset “Boats, Beaches, Bars, and Ballads”. The boxset included “The Parrothead Handbook” which told of real world restaurants and hamburgers that influenced the writing of his song “Cheeseburger in Paradise”. He specifically name dropped Rotier’s in Nashville and their famous French Bread Burger from his early days as a struggling journalist/musician. On my twenty fifth birthday I found myself in West End, a quarter mile from Rotier’s, and decided it was the perfect day to make a pilgrimage to my adolescent Mecca for a cheeseburger.
I approached walking into Rotier’s on my twenty-fifth birthday with an almost religious reverence, as if I was entering an odd sort of church. I was no longer a teenager filled with naive dreams; I was now a man with children of my own and a different set of values and sense of purpose for my life, but those influences could not be denied, and frankly, they deserved to be honored. Those tropical adventures I dreamed of in my teens would be a catalyst in my travels to Central America as a missionary. On this day, I walked through the doors and rejoiced silently when I saw the booth sitting below the picture of Jimmy Buffett was open. I took my seat, ordered my burger and milkshake and reveled in the sensation that I’d completed some long and arduous quest. For the next half hour I sat taking it all in, and in hindsight, it was probably obvious what I was doing. That’s the only explanation I have for what happened next. A tiny, elderly woman stopped by my booth and struck up a conversation. I sheepishly shared details of what I was doing — a tale I’m sure she’d heard many times through the years — and then she sat down and introduced herself. Her name was Evelyn Rotier, owner of the place bearing her family name. For the next hour we talked like old friends as she shared stories of her time living in Pulaski as a student at Martin College when it was still just a women's only school, of the secret to their cheeseburgers (a special blend of several cuts of beef) cultivated by her late husband, and yes, stories of Jimmy Buffett. Before I left, she gave me a Rotier’s keychain, and obliged as I asked her to sign a napkin for a keepsake of this milestone day, using a Rotier’s pen that I kept. I walked in with a fantasy that I would somehow encounter Jimmy that day, but I walked out with a something beautiful that I didn’t even know I needed: someone to recognize that our childhood dreams have tremendous gravity even into adulthood, and sometimes we just want someone to listen with genuine interest in our stories. I’ve tried to take that with me and provide it to others in the twenty-five years since. Jimmy Buffett influenced my dreams and my writing, but Evelyn Rotier influenced my ministry and my humanity. We just want to tell our stories and we want someone to listen. To borrow a line from my own masthead, “So I'm going to talk, whether or not you listen, but I hope that you will.”
Before I left the restaurant, I used that pen, and a napkin, to write a poem commemorating the quarter of a century that encapsulated my life. The name of the poem was "A Quarter Passed". Not my best work, not poet laureate worthy, a little cringe worthy to tell the truth, but honest and genuine, which is the best any art can strive to be.
This year, as another quarter of a century has passed, I originally planned to go back to Nashville for the day, though sadly, neither Jimmy Buffett or Rotier’s are with us anymore. Rotier’s was shuttered, and then torn down after 75 years in 2021, and Jimmy died two years later at the age of 76 — the symmetry between their demise and the fact that another quarter would pass for me to reach the same age, isn’t missed by me. As much as both realities make me sad, such is the journey of life, and I think there’s a lesson in that. It’s time to leave your heroes and memories behind and take up their mantle in your own way. To borrow from Paul in 1 Corinthians, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” To borrow a line from Jimmy from “Love in the Library”, “write your own ending and hope it comes true.” I have. I will. And I might even pen another poem.
Instead of spending the day in Nashville, I've decided to spend the day in my hometown, sitting in the front window table of the coffee shop I've come to love, staring out over the downtown of my hometown that I have, and will always, love. With it being 50 I had planned so many big things originally, but the more I sat and thought about it, this seemed more meaningful now. One of the blessings that has come with age is less and less do things like ego, ambition and FOMO get in the way. You learn who you really are, not who you want to be, who others want you to be, who you are expected to be, but just who you are and you learn to be ok with that. More than ok, you learn to celebrate who you are, so Happy Birthday to me, and let me sum it all up with lyrics from another hero -- Todd Snider, the "Mayor of East Nashville", who died just a few weeks ago -- it's too late to die young now.
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