Jimmy and his Dad - Freemantle, Australia - 1987
“I was supposed to have been a Jesuit priest
Or a Naval
Academy grad
That was the way that my parents perceived me
Those were the plans that they had
But I couldn’t fit the part
Too dumb or too smart
Ain’t it funny how we all turned out
I guess we are the people our parents warned us about”
“We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us About”
We are all products of our environment, and the
child-rearing environment of the early fifties was pretty straight-forward.
Like most of the other war babies I know, I come from a fairly dysfunctional
background. My parents worked for as far back as I can remember. I know that’s
where my worth ethic came from. They were typical middle-class Southerners in
most regards, but there were also inherited traits that set them apart.
My father was a man of simple rules, though he could be
totally unpredictable. We were well-known along the Gulf Coast
as a seafaring family, but when World War II broke out, my father joined the
Air Corps. I guess we have a hidden flying gene in there among all that salt
water. My mother was the visionary. She loved music, musicals, and anything
that had to do with the arts. She had attended college for two years before the
Great Depression sent her out into the workforce, where she stayed for nearly
sixty years.
My father’s idea of my future was hinged to the past. He saw
me working on a boat. My mother taught me to dream and expand my horizons
beyond family traditions and my childhood surroundings. They sure as hell did
some things that I loved them for and some things that really pissed me off,
but I still love them and love to go back to Alabama to visit….
I had made it a habit of coming home whenever I bought a new
plane. It had become a ritual and a good excuse to visit my folks and get the
approval of my purchase from former Army Air Corps master sergeant J.D. Buffet.
Dad and I had never really talked about his flying days. I was so enamored of
the exploits of my grandfather that I forgot that my old man had had a few
adventures of his own. All I really knew was that he had been a flight mechanic
in the war and had worked on B-17’s in Maine,
B-25’s in Africa, and C-47’s in India. Now that
we were both older and I had become romantically involved with airplanes, it
became a wonderful opportunity to stay in touch with my dad. He had ridden with
me in every airplane I had owned, and there had been a lot of them…
One day we had come in from a grueling day of multiple
takeoffs and landings on the Cumberland River
and I was venting my frustration about crosswind when my dad casually said,
“You should try one with a fire on board.” He proceeded to tell me a flying
story that made my day of training look like an afternoon at the spa.
He had been flying over the Himalayas
from his base in India
on a test flight in an old C-47. There was just the pilot, co-pilot, and my
dad. They were cruising along when suddenly a fire light came on, indicating
that the heater in the plane was on fire. It was located in the lower nose
compartment. My father donned a gas mask, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and went
down below. He found the heater ablaze and the fuel line that fed from the main
fuel tank to the heater spraying aviation fuel, which immediately burst into
flames. He managed to put the fire out and close the fuel valve. He picked up
the headset that was connected to the flight deck to report to the pilots that
the fire was indeed out. There was no reply. He climbed back out of the belly
and found no one flying the plane. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the
pilot and copilot preparing to bail out. They had failed to inform my dad of
their intentions. The master sergeant ordered the officers back to the
controls, and when they landed he reported them to the commander of the base
and they were grounded.
“You never told me that story,” I muttered in disbelief.
J.D. never got to ride in the Albatross. To put it in old
Army Air Corps terms, shortly before I bought it, he was ground zero for a
direct hit, a hit from which he would not recover.
In early 1995 my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s
disease. He knew something had been wrong but wasn’t sure what….After the
initial shock and once the devastating news had settled in, my father and I
talked. Our conversations were more personal than they ha ever been…By the time
he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, we had fortunately already made our peace.
We had made it passed those testosterone-produced clashes that seem to be rites
of passage for fathers and sons. But he was a fighter and in the next breath
would come out swinging, ready to “take the bull by the horns,” as he put it.
He never talked about licking Alzheimer’s like it was some kind of opponent he
was going to defeat. He knew his fate. He told me he just wanted to so a few
things he had never gotten to do. He was going to study his options and let me
know.
When tragedy of such proportions occurs, the only thing you
can do is hope that there have been some good times. It’s hard to catch up. My
parents had gotten to enjoy the fruits of my success. They went to shows, hung
out backstage with my crew and band, and acted like that was unique, wonderful,
and very small group of people known as the parents of successful rock stars.
They had traveled the world together, hoping to cruise on through the last part
of their lives in the comfort of their nest, called Homeport. But that was not
to be.
My father always had a great sense of humor. I think that’s
where mine comes from, so I think he would be most pleased if I told this
little story. One day I got a call from him, asking me to come to Alabama…I didn’t know if
he would ask me to go to Mars on mainland China…We were sitting at the end of
the pier. Pies on the eastern shore of the bay were not just structures that
jutted into the shallow waters. They were not just shelters from the
near-tropical summer sun. They were wooden islands…My father had overseen the
construction of a pier that ran from the house on the bluff for the length of
four football fields. It was his signature upon the landscape of the eastern
shore…Since his retirement, the pier had been his base of operations….We were
looking out over the shallow waters of Mobile Bay, savoring the day and the
unique taste of fresh fried oysters on buttered French bread with hot sauce and
tarter sauce, which mad eup the sandwich that’s synonymous with the Gulf Coast
– the oyster loaf…
He drained the last sip of his Barq’s (rootbeer) and stared out across the bay.
“You know what I was just thinking about?”
“What?” These days that could be a loaded question.
“Remember when you got thrown out of the sailing club for
leaving the race and sailing all the way across the bay?”
I only had to think a moment about that major event in my
misspent youth. It had been the same kind of day as today.
“You bet I do,” I said with a laugh.
“I never told you, but that was about as proud as I ever was
of you. I mean, being the first Buffet to get a college degree was good, don’t
get me wrong, but that time you decided to light out on you own, that was a
moment.”
Tears came into my eyes. I started to drift back to that incredible day…
“You know why I chose to fly instead of go to sea?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it was what I wasn’t supposed to do. Looks like you
have made a career out of that, doing what you’re not supposed to do. I’m proud
of you, boy.”
Today when I join him for his walks down the oyster-shelled
driveway out towards old Highway 98 or down to the end of the pier, I think of
the lines from a song that I wrote about a fictitious but favorite character of
mine named Desdemona.
“Her heart is in the kitchen, but her soul is in the stars.”
Change the pronoun, and you have my dad
– J.D.
Jimmy Buffet – From “A Pirate Looks at Fifty” (Fawcett
Crest, 1998)
