Life, with Jimmy Buffett. Happy New Year!

I've been watching Jimmy Buffett videos on YouTube. One of them, introduced by Buffett, is dated 1973 and he explains that it is his first music video.

My history with him goes back about that long. One early song, "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes" came out in 1977. The line, "if we couldn't laugh, we'd all go insane" was the first time I pinned up a musician thing on my teeny-bopper corkboard. I wrote that out on a white lined index card, and put a tack through it. I see it there still, hanging crooked from the lower left of the cork board, giving me wisdom every time I looked at it.

From then, I held to heart many great Buffett lyrics. He made his first album in 1970 and he is still producing them 38 years later. We grew up together, you see. Having been a liveaboard sailor, like Buffett, I know what 'Boat Drinks' are. Having having shivered in Maine for 30 years I lived these lyrics: "Lately, newspaper mentioned cheap air fare, I gotta to fly to saint somewhere, I'm close to bodily harm."

Now that I'm 48, I know what he means when he sings,

"One day I'll soon be a grandpa. All the pretty girls will call me "sir," Now, where they're asking me how things are Soon they'll ask me how things were."

Ah, well, "I just had to go back to the island, And watch the sun go down, Listen to the sea roll in."

Hope your New Year has some ocean sunsets in them!