This essay has been percolating for almost six months now. It’s not quite a sermon, but it does ask some questions about new life and where to find it on the Monday after Easter.
On September the first last year, a startling announcement hit many of us in our social media scrolling along that day.
Jimmy Buffett had died of cancer. There had been rumors around his health for some time, with various postponements and cancellations piling up through the summer before. It turned out he’d been fighting a particularly nasty carcinoma, yes, one that’s likely triggered by large amounts of sun exposure, for four years.
His daughter Delaney said shortly afterwards on Instagram: “Despite the pain, he smiled every day. He was kind when he had every excuse not to be. He told us not to be sad or scared, but to keep the party going.”
Keep the party going — that’s a classic “Buffettism.” That’s the aspect of the man most people know, and even relate to.
I do not want to portray Jimmy Buffett as some kind of holy man or secular saint. He had no intention of being either. His own history led to plenty of jokes about being a “very lapsed Catholic,” but he did show many signs of that upbringing. If you know his song “Fruitcakes” you’re familiar with “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” which rings a certain pre-Vatican II bell for many. There were comments in biographical asides about a youthful consideration of ministry such as “I was supposed to have been a Jesuit priest or a Naval Academy grad”; if you were like many of us a subscriber to “Margaritaville” radio on SiriusXM, you often heard his voice repeating the line about how “We’re not the descendants of theologians, we’re the descendants of court jesters.”
Where I do want to challenge Jimmy, unfairly now given that he’s a bit constrained in answering back directly, is how whether he’s talking about Americans in general or artists and singers in particular, I think you could say we’re descended from the court jesters who tried to add some theological insights to their act, and got sent to the New World for their troubles.
Jimmy Buffett was not trying to sneak theology into his music, Catholic or otherwise, though he did say to open one early live performance of his perhaps best-known song, “Margaritaville”: “This little song sort of combines a hangover cure and fourteen years of Catholic education into a song; it’s a little bit weird, but it sort of works out.” The theology at a certain level is organic.
But there’s a common thread through all of Jimmy’s music about keeping perspective, about finding balance, not just work-life balance as is so often said today. In “One Particular Harbour,” his narrator sings:
I used to rule my world from a pay phone
Ships out on the sea
But now times are rough
And I got too much stuff
Can't explain likes of me…
The Broadway reworking of it updates to “rule my world from a cell phone,” but the idea and the rhythm stay the same.
A New York Times reporter who followed Jimmy around through those preparations for the stage observed how hard Jimmy Buffett worked at being a fun, relaxed, laid-back guy, and noted in that context in reference to Alan Jackson’s “It’s 5 o’Clock Somewhere” which includes Buffett late in the song and video: “Take away the jaunty island beat and you’ll find a song about a man who is so miserable that he can’t bring himself to return to work from his lunch break.”
She’s right about that, and it’s no accident Jimmy worked that song into his standard setlist. Stephen Metzger wrote in 2018: “In the song “Summerzcool,” Buffett writes “Bust your ass to get the good life / You make a habit out of overtime / When the big report card comes / Your priorities are way out of line.” The message is that one needs to embrace “summer,” to get away from all of one’s duties and obligations, particularly in terms of work, and head to the water, have a few drinks, have some fun. In the context of the pun on "school," the invocation of a report card makes sense, but there is an ambiguity. Who is the principal or teacher filling in the grades? Is it God? Is Buffett talking about divine judgment in a song celebrating a beach party?”
Divine judgment, or simple human perspective: if our lives are all about work, or entirely devoted to party life, we are getting it wrong. And Jimmy was by all accounts someone who admitted he never stopped working on getting that balance right. It was hard work, but finding that balance between vocation and enjoyment was worth the effort.
In my family, I probably rank close to fourth of four as a so-called “Parrothead,” as his fans are known. I have seniority on my siblings, but not the same level of commitment. In all my life, I’ve seen him and his Coral Reefer Band twice live, both times at Purdue in my student days. I vividly recall him smiling on stage in the early 1980s, saying how much he loved coming to Midwest university venues in the heart of winter, because he could tell we needed a change of scenery from snow-covered parking lots to create the luau going on inside the Elliott Hall of Music. He talked between numbers about chatting with the waitresses at the Steak and Shake on Sagamore Parkway before launching into “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” and the next time I was there, the staff was all still abuzz over his friendliness, and the size of the tips. It wasn’t just a line typed into his script for the show. He was building a brand, perhaps, but he built loyalty back then that now has Purdue grads from 1982 looking at retirement to a Margaritaville-themed community, which seems a bit much to me. I may not have drunk the whole margarita, if you will. Others in my family have traveled distances to see Jimmy Buffett in concert, and they have the headgear to prove it. None of us are likely to retire into a Parrothead Gables Nursing Care facility, but in general, he’s a bard we can agree on.
For me personally, in the last years of my time in parish ministry, I found myself drawn to the song “Oldest Surfer on the Beach.” Jimmy didn’t write that one, but Mark Knopfler did, and I could go on about him for a while, too. Jimmy made Mark’s song his own, even as the distinctive guitar playing of the latter marked the recording.
In the words, though, as much as the music, there’s a lightly mournful wistfulness at play which I find helpful. The lesson of limits, and how “time is now more precious...”
“I stopped searching for perfection, many waves ago. What really matters is the here and now, and that's about all I know.”
Dang. I’m tearing up just typing those words again. Because I’m still, at my age, trying to find that balance Jimmy was singing about. Which maybe wasn’t so much about the balance between work and life, but between now and everytime else. Between past and present, the immediate and the anticipated. “What really matters is the here and now, and that’s about all I know.”
There's nothing that I want to do
No place I'm trying to reach
Only time is now more precious to
The oldest surfer on the beach
Jimmy Buffett was someone who had to work at being present in the moment, and he wasn’t always successful. He was a driven individual who accomplished much, but knew something about how accomplishments could go, the way of making enough money to buy Miami . . . if you know “A Pirate Looks at Forty” you know where that money goes.
And if you know the words to “Margaritaville” (and who doesn’t?) you should be at least dimly aware of whose fault it is. Not hers, not some malign fate, not God’s. Most messes I got myself into my own darn self, to paraphrase just a bit.
Again and again, singing about parties and fun and celebration, Jimmy Buffett also reminded us that we have the final word on some of the most important decisions we will make, and we have it in us to make the right one, to sail a true course to a particular harbor (or harbour, as that particular title distinctly spells it).
Perhaps the most meaningful song in all of Jimmy’s own hand is, for me, the story song “He Went To Paris.” It’s based on a true story, but as he’d be first to say, it isn’t constrained by mere facts. The genesis of the song was one-armed, not one-eyed, and he met him in Chicago, not Paris or on a Caribbean beach, but the payoff in the story as told by Buffett, ostensibly to him, goes:
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."
That’s the heart of what I think I’m still mulling over, six months after the untimely death at 76 of a man who surely should have lived to at least 86. A story we tell ourselves, drawing in experiences and accounts and mistakes and achievements by those around us, and turning them all into an account of who we are trying to be, with more control over things than we like to admit sometimes. Some of it is magic, and truly some of it is tragic, but the heart of the story is whether we can find the place to stand or sit and smile and say “I had a good life all the way.”
That same song begins:
He went to Paris looking for answers
To questions that bothered him so
Did he find answers? Yes, even if not to the questions he started with. Sometimes the key to a good life is being able to ask different questions.
In a memorial address for fellow musician Allen Toussaint in New Orleans, Buffett makes his transition from a standard obituary narrative to what would become his musical reflection by saying “as the good nuns and brothers used to tell us, ‘The soul lives forever.'”
The Catholic boy in Mississippi and Alabama had to talk about the immortal soul in Louisiana, especially at a funeral. The day after Easter, many are still asking themselves questions about time and eternity and the immortal soul. Those are good questions, but they aren’t the only questions. What are you doing with your right now? Not so much whether your right now is going where it should to get to eternity (where we all will end up, which Jimmy references often, in fact), but do you see your right now for what it is, a gift, a blessing, even . . . a reason to party? Or are you putting it off to tomorrow, day after day, in service of a right now that frankly isn’t worth your time? “My boss just pushed me over the limit/I'd like to call him something/I think I'll just call it a day.” (Hat tip, Mr. Jackson.)
“Come Monday” was Jimmy Buffett’s first Top 40 hit, and in some ways his biggest traditional best-selling recording. He wrote it in a Howard Johnson’s in California in 1973, while missing the woman who would later be his wife. It came out the next year on his album “Living & Dying in 3/4 Time,” where the theological strains in his writing are evident right there in the last things of the title.
In my preferred version of the song, he puts his hiking boots on (not Hush Puppies), and looks forward to getting away from how he makes his living to take a walk with the woman he loves. There’s no solution to the puzzle of wanting to be somewhere you’re not, or doing something other than what you’re making a living at, without other people. Even in one of his most apparently solitary songs, “Tin Cup Chalice” (religion, anybody?), it turns out he’s singing it to someone, you maybe, and he’s making a strange proposal to fire up Jerry Jeff Walker’s Packard to roll on down to the islands “where the shrimp boats tie up to the pilings.” I’d been hearing this erroneously for years, thinking he was firing up marine motors in a boat made by Packard, but my brother Brian who knows a Buffett song or two educated me a few weeks ago on the subject. It was a 1947 Packard, in fact.
The point being you do this in community. Which is what Jimmy Buffett concerts and being a Parrothead is all about. No, it’s not the only way to find community, and you can misuse the setting, but like church life, you can misuse those settings as well. Buffettism isn’t a church, but Jimmy’s music has an ethos which takes some time and reflection to reveal. I’m not the only fan of his songs to think so; just a few internet searches on “Jimmy Buffett” and “spirituality” or “themes” will keep you reading for a long, long while.
Yet I’m here on Easter Monday. “Come Monday, it’ll be alright.” The weekend can be as long as a workweek, especially if you’re a musician playing Labor Day weekend shows. Monday, even Easter Monday, can be the dawn of a time to take stock, step back, gain some perspective, and think about the safe harbors (harbours) you’ve known, the good life you’ve seen others living. And in community, but ultimately in your own heart, you’re going to have to decide whose fault the mistakes were, when you’re going to Paris or the islands, and who you will be when you get there.
Jimmy, thank you for inspiring me, and for inviting so many into a community of warmth in a cold world where icy slush in West Lafayette can be a foot deep. You took pleasure in the hard work of bringing Parrotheads together to think about what’s magic, what’s tragic, and what a good life is and can be.
“And where are my Junior Mints? I want my Junior Mints!” If you know that song, you might recall just after that line, by a logic that makes perfect sense if you’re a Jimmy Buffett fan: “We need people that care.”