If you didn’t know that Jimmy Buffett was raised Catholic, the last line of ‘Margaritaville’ is a dead giveaway...

Michie · Sep 7, 2023

Too often lately, it feels like the offices from which we’ve historically taken our cues — our political and community leadership, the punditry, local authorities and even some church groups — are populated with unserious people who can’t rise to a moment. Those who aren’t peddling pure boilerplate and calling it constructive thought are offering endless scolds about how we should live, think and speak, and how, if things aren’t getting better, it’s because we’re not doing enough of the right things. We should constantly be doing ever more of all these right things, it seems, until the world is saved and humanity perfected and then, finally, we may rest.

These exhausting harangues have become as penetrating (and authentic) as prop knives. They fall upon our ears like an approaching storm we’ve heard for too long -– an over-familiar sound and fury, often signifying nothing.

Which is why the Jimmy Buffetts of the world are important to have around, and why it is worth a respectful pause and some consideration when they pass.

There was something poignant in Buffett’s passing at the start of Labor Day weekend, when the days are growing shorter and the flip flops and Hawaiian shirts must be put away along with our fantasies of living on a beach, responsible for nothing beyond bringing dessert to the next get-together. Sweaters come out in the evening and time seems suddenly too valuable to waste away searching for misplaced meaning, too fleeting to reclaim the misspent days which, valued too late, are forever lost.

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