A wooden swing was set in the backyard at our old house in Unicoi. There was nothing special about it (on the surface). But it's the first place I thought of when I heard Jimmy Buffett died. I remember swinging on that set at 7-years-old and singing:
I like mine with lettuce and tomato/
Heinz 57 and French-fried potatoes/
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer/
Well, good [gosh] Almighty, which way do I steer?
Always "Good gosh almighty" because even if we wanted to be beach bums, we still had church on Sunday morning. And obviously, I wasn’t having a cold draft beer, because, you know, sinners.
I thought about Captiva Island, Florida. When I was 23, I went there to film a yacht show. There's a different magic to a place like this in December. You drive 75 out of winter in Tennessee, through the cold dirt of Georgia, and into dancing palm trees, deep blue water, and white sand that requires sunglasses, or your retinas will be scorched. You feel stowed away from the rest of whatever is happening from the mainland.
We were filming the sunset on Thursday night before the show started, and I played "A Pirate Looks at Forty" on my little iPhone speakers. Watching the tide take my flip-flop into the purple water lit by the setting sun, I felt movement in my chest, like easy waves -- a longing for this, whatever this is, forever. And I understood Jimmy Buffett (and myself) a little more.
And I thought about New Smyrna Beach. We took my dad there for his 60th birthday and had a miserable time. On the first day, it hit the 30s for the first time in Florida since Bill Clinton was president. And the rest of them rained sheets into our condo.
Being stuck inside a 4-bedroom house with the entire family playing some variation of Monopoly was … something (I love my family; coop me up with any crowd of people, and I'll become more crotchety than a state politician).
But on the last day, I wanted to knock something off my bucket list: rent a car and drive down A1A with my dad, listening to Jimmy's album named after the Highway. Dad loves that album. That longing I felt on the beach came up, and it painted a picture of a Ford Mustang, the sun shining down on me and the palm trees swaying in warm breezes sent to the mainland from the Bahamas.
We got a Nissan Versa, and the rain started whipping in with the wind.
But the bluetooth worked and we had "Tin Cup Chalice," "Migration," and Jimmy trying to reason with hurricane season. Once we got past Cape Canaveral and through Titusville, the sun came out. Melbourne Beach smiled up in the afternoon orange. We got those warm Eleuthera breezes. And we had "All the Stories We Could Tell" as we drove with the international waterway on the right and the Atlantic bobbing on our left.
I have my best ideas about what Jimmy Buffett was singing about because of what I've experienced along the coast. But I've never found it, and I don't think he did either. As much as I love these memories, Jimmy is best listened to when you're in the muck of winter, there's no sun in the forecast, and you just want to long for something else: St. Somewhere, perhaps.
There was a lot of cheese around him, sure. I wonder why there's a Margaritaville hotel in Gatlinburg. When I saw Jimmy live in Kansas City, it was unnerving to see that many Iowans in aloha shirts with parrots on their shoulders. But I believe Jimmy was always longing for something. He wrote songs about it to give words and music so others could feel it, too. That's beautiful. That’s art (even if he made millions off of it).
So I'm sad today. You always are when you lose people who put words to your childhood and your longings. I'll be singing "He Went to Paris, looking for answers to questions that bothered him so" a little differently today.
RIP Jimmy.