My daughter can cry at will. It’s a useful skill for a pre-teen, but I haven’t found an occasion to try to use it myself. Until today. Today, one of my heroes died, and I was shocked to find that I wasn’t as sad as I thought that I would be. I thought I’d try the crying at will thing, but came up dry. I didn’t understand. Am I a monster? I searched my soul for the reason, and came up with what I think sums it up: I’m so overwhelmed with gratitude for the influence that Jimmy Buffett has had on my life, that I have little room left to mourn.
If you have asked me why we quit our jobs, bought a boat, and sailed off into the sunset, you’ve probably gotten one of two responses:
The first response is longer winded: I first heard Buffett when I was in high school 30 years ago. Since that day, I’ve been obsessed with the lifestyle, and the idea of buying a boat. That translated into a three decade scheme to get “out there”. When my wife and I started dating, I made sure that she was onboard with getting on board before we got too serious. We got married, and kept planning. The date kept pushing back until one day we decided to just bite the bullet and buy a boat.
The second response is more succinct: If you listen to Jimmy Buffett long enough, eventually you buy a boat.
More simply stated, I bought a boat because Jimmy Buffett made me do it.
The music of Buffett has set me on this path, and kept me there. The true seed happened when I listened to an interview he gave about the time period when he first started making it big. He reminisced that he didn’t know how long the fame train was going to run, so he used the first big paycheck to buy a sailboat. If it all turned south tomorrow, he reasoned, he could always sail off on his boat.
There was something tremendously freeing about that attitude. It’s not a shirking of responsibility or a demonization of working hard. It’s a recognition that you gotta take life a little less seriously and that there are beautiful, simple things out there that you can always turn to.
So, on the day after the passing of Jimmy Buffett, I find myself in gratitude for the attitude and lifestyle that he taught the world about through song. It’s that attitude that convinced us to move to Hawaii when we first got married. It’s that spirit that led us to jump off a boathouse as part of our wedding ceremony. It’s that promise of “a better way” that got us to move onto a boat and sail off with the family.
Here’s to you Bubba, and thanks for being my guide. You left us too young, but had a great run.
Crap. Never mind. Now I am crying.