Jimmy Buffet, my Mother, and poet R.S. Thomas

A brief, personal reflection on returning to Virginia

The supermoon over a nearby golf course where Rafa and I have been going for our early morning walks and retrieving

I’ve been back in Virginia for a few days.  Cherry and I are enjoying settling into our life together here, and it’s been a joy to go on long walks in the morning with Rafa.  The cool mornings with the remnants of a supermoon have been a special treat, but I admit I miss my new, good friends in Houston, even with its oppressive heat dome. 

Jimmy Buffet’s death surprised me but also conjured a nostalgia for the lighthearted, upbeat affection his life and music inspired. 

Nibblin’ on sponge cake
Watchin’ the sun bake
All of those tourists covered in oil
Strummin’ my six-string
On my front porch swing
Smell those shrimp they’re beginnin’ to boil

And after admitting he’s “waistin’ away in Margaritaville,” Buffet sings the refrain that yields increasing clarity as the song progresses:

Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
But I know it’s nobody’s fault
…
Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
Now I think, hell, it could be my fault
…
Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
But I know it’s my own damn fault

In a time when people seem less apt to admit their uncertainty, much less their fault, Buffet’s easy-going, self-deprecation surely is refreshing.  The NY Times published an excellent obituary, and included at the beginning is a short video of Buffet and the Coral Reefer Band playing “Margaritaville” in Houston.  I thought some of you might like to see some of my former parishioners from Christ Church Cathedral – I haven’t looked very closely at the audience, but I can guarantee you that several are there.  Such good people.

Later this week, I’m off to North Carolina to meet my brother and sister for our mother’s burial.  Mom’s parents were both faculty members at Duke University, and Mom was the oldest of three children.  She was also beautiful. And I sometimes think that physical beauty, combined with being the first-born and coming from a family with very high expectations, can come with some costs. 

My mother, Nancy Little Hendrix

But the picture of our mother that has always been my favorite is of Mom as a little girl, feeding dog food to a crow in her backyard.  It reminds me of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in which the poet remembers a time when all of nature “and every common sight, / To me did seem / Appareled in celestial light.”

Our mother was bright, but her dream and vocation, she believed, was to be happily married and to care for her children. Our parents’ divorce, therefore, was beyond devastating, and as she got older, our mother struggled emotionally. But one thing always brought Mom back to herself – returning to the ocean. She was always happy there. She and Jimmy Buffet would have liked each other.

Mom at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

I’ve come to believe, along with many saints and mystics, that there is a place in each of us that is not touched by time or sin or any of the vicissitudes of this mortal life. It might be what St. Paul called our true life, hidden with Christ, in God. Or “the Divine Indwelling.” For our mother, that essential, true life always seemed to come back when she was at the beach. 

Today, a good friend sent me a poem as a birthday gift, knowing that Cherry and I love to visit an island off of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  It’s by the Welsh poet and Anglican priest, R.S. Thomas:

Island

I would still go there
if only to await
the once-in-a-lifetime
opening of truth's flower;

if only to escape 
such bought freedom and live,
prisoner of the keyless sea,
on the mind's bread and water.

~ R.S. Thomas

I told my friend, it was the perfect gift for me.  Returning to our favorite island off of Massachusetts doesn’t make all my troubles go away, but it helps to change my relationship to them. I often find that the open landscape of the shore and the moors, the beauty of sunrise and sunset, the expansive night sky, and living more in sync with diurnal rhythms in a little cottage that is a bit more porous to nature – all of it has a salubrious effect.  

Clockwise from top left: Miacomet looking toward the ocean (photo by Max Wolf, Rector of St. Paul's, Nantucket), the south shore, and two pictures of "the Serengeti" at the Middle Moors

Theologically, R.S. Thomas expresses something of what I feel in his poem, “Pilgrimages.” The poet reminiscences about traveling to primitive Bardsey Island, off the coast of Wales, and concludes:

There is no time on this island.
The swinging pendulum of the tide
has no clock; the events 
are dateless. These people are not
late or soon; they are just
here with only the one question
to ask, which life answers
by being in them. It is I
who ask. Was the pilgrimage 
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that in times 
like these and for one like me
God will never be plain and
out there; but dark rather and 
inexplicable, as though he were in here?

And finally, in yet another very short poem, “I think that maybe,” Thomas probably says it best:

I think that maybe
I will be a little surer
of being a little nearer.
That’s all. Eternity
is in the understanding
that that little is more than enough.

Three repetitions of “little.”  That’s all.  And it’s more than enough.