A Bubble Off Plumb

I can’t begin to say how my heart hurts over some weekend losses. One will remain private, but the other is the death of Jimmy Buffett.

I have been a fan for so long that Jimmy was still doing free concerts on the North Lawn at the University of Florida. As he caught on and gained popularity, we had to pay to see him in Florida Field. Once, he was there with the supergroup the Eagles. Wow, what a night. I think the tickets were $40, and I remember Jimmy yelling from the stage ‘I can smell that #*i^ up here and y’all going to get mighty hungry before we’re done!’

But more than the concerts and the music was the way he could capture my own angst in song, like he had a pipeline into my brain. He got it all, the freedom of the Florida waters and the chaffing of the soul at having to conform – at least a little – to regular hours. He also fully understood and wrote about cutting loose when payday and the weekend rolled around, a constant from the island cultures to Livingston, Montana.

When I was working up in that part of the world, a local author won a prestigious writing award for Westerns. I went out on the story only to discover he – Tom McGuane – was Jimmy’s brother-in-law, married to his sister Laurie. She and I had a lot to chat about, since we grew up within 50 miles of each other.

That kind of said a lot about Jimmy. He was a commoner, like the rest of us. He knew what we were thinking and feeling because he was us.

That tells itself in the lyrics. In my opinion, A Pirate Looks at Forty is in a dead heat with Tangled Up in Blue by Bob Dylan as to the best poetry going. After all, a song is a poem put to music.

Take the stanza that begins ‘Yes I am a pirate, 200 years too late’ and instead put in a whole lot of other occupations. One day editor will fit there, and cowboy fits perfectly today. It’s sad and it’s wistful and it hurts the heart. There are things – like being a cop or a cowboy or a writer – that aren’t jobs, they are part of who you are. When those things are next to impossible to be, or do for a living, it is a deep ache that never completely heals.

And people must be what they are, what they are born to be. It’s just sad that, as Jimmy put it, the occupational hazard is the occupation’s just not around.

So, we continue to hold on, eking out a few more years, hoping to make it to retirement still being who we are and doing what we do. But the road that trip takes is going to be a lot rougher without Jimmy along to pave it for us, saying what we don’t have the words for and laughing at our heartache to keep from going insane.