Although my heart has the song of Jesus, there is still a low acoustic calypso background to it and Jimmy himself humming along with the chorus.
I listened recently to some of my favorites, " Tin cup for a chalice", "He went to Paris", "Trying to reason with hurricane season" "Cheeseburger in paradise" and of course "A pirate looks at forty".
Any man who can write a song that hits in the top forty about a cheeseburger is just O.K. with me.
So like I said, I tried the life.
It may not have been done completely how he wrote, as I did it sober and in my mid thirties, past my crazier years.
I loved the freedom of beach combing on whim, heading out to the open sea at a moments notice and diving for your own lobster and snow crab claws and fishing deep in the ocean for dinner. That was one of the greatest experiences of my life, but still something was not quite complete...
I moved there with my 1987 Ford F-150 truck loaded with tools in the back, my old Navy sea bag packed and about $1000 in cash in my pocket. A few months earlier I went down to visit my brother who had moved there two years before. Watching the ocean gently lapping the shore at night, I knew I was supposed to be there. It was a week long vacation and I came home giving my boss two weeks notice. He asked if I needed more money to stay and I told him no, that I just did not want to look back in my seventies saying " I wish I had...".
Who could argue with that?
I sacked out at my brothers for a week and found a room at a boarding house across the road from the ocean. A couple days later I found a job wiring a fishing boat. Then I fullfilled a longtime dream of working on boats, for a Cat and Detroit dealer, repairing charter and cruisers engines.
I kayaked almost daily thru the mangroves and out past the sight of shore.
Somewhere inside a peace was made with myself. I was fifty pounds lighter, tanned and happier than I'd been in my entire life. I looked out across the ocean that I intimately loved and knew one undeniable fact..
It was time to go home.
I was into my second year there and realized that I truly had needed this time, this life. I needed the quiet and solace to allow God a deeper foothold into my soul. He did not need me to take it to accomplish this, but I think out of love and kindness he answered my souls prayers on the surface, of the ocean and the sand.
I did not know that He had greater plans for me and that He would answer my souls deeper prayers, the ones I was not yet aware of.
Two weeks after returning home to N.Y. I had a dinner with my soon to be Wonderful Wife at a mutual friends house. A few months later we were engaged and in that same year, married.
Jimmy Buffet missed this in all his songs....
He sings about the freedom of the ocean, of sails and adventure and an untethered peace.
I now have been married over a dozen years and have been graced with an amazing family.
Since then I have swum in the ocean a handful of times. There is no more beach combing at whim but there is an amazing woman I call my Wife and three exceptionally wonderful boys. I have found the true longitude and latitude of Paradise.
I hear Jimmy's songs now and I realize what he missed..
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