On my drive home from an overdue stop at the dry cleaners early Friday evening, I had a random urge to listen to Jimmy Buffett. I cranked up the volume on “Margaritaville” and belted out the chorus, transported back to my Florida childhood for a moment, away from the rush hour traffic heading westbound out of D.C. in the first hours of a holiday weekend. “Cheeseburger in Paradise” recalled beachside snack shacks, the kind where styrofoam boxes and tin foil serve as plates and no one ever bothers to wipe the salty fingerprints off the ketchup bottles. And then “A Pirate Looks At Forty” came on, and all I wanted was to be on a boat somewhere, with nothing but blue horizon on every side and salty breeze battering my eyelashes as waves crashed under the bow. When I got home, I lamented to my husband about Northern Virginia’s lack of those street vendors who will chop the top off a coconut with a machete for you and hand you a straw to drink from it.
The next morning, I learned the pirate had died sometime in the night. I’m no music critic, so I won’t try to elucidate how Buffett’s music managed to capture the feeling of bringing the boat in at sunset to fry up the day’s catch and wash it down with a cold drink. I can only say that it does.
My first memory of hearing his songs was as a kid, after a day of
