Thursday's Place: Margaritaville

Please forgive this personal recollection, but I’m away from family this week and feeling sentimental about it.  Lately, I’ve been marveling, too, about how things that were once simple and fun have become, over time, remarkably complicated.

I first visited Key West in 1987.  I was attending, as the diocesan representative, a conference in Miami on music and liturgy.  As was often the case in those days, when it wasn't as obvious that mainstream Christianity was in decline, the discussions were lightweight and designed to allow clergy to burnish their resumes, network for future elevation to the episcopate, and drink prodigious amounts during the cocktail and dinner times.

In other words, for someone in his early thirties, it was a drag.

Fortunately, a woman whom I had been seeing for a couple of years was there as the representative of her diocese and, in a moment of wildness [my life is a series of ordinary events punctuated by these moments when I seem to lose my reason], I suggested that she and I play hooky and take a drive down the long highway to the Keys, just to see what they were like.  After all, we were in south Florida, so why not?

That was a propitious moment of wildness, as it turned out.  We were just going to drive to Key Largo, but the day was beautiful, the winter traffic light, and as it had been snowing every day in dreary, gray Erie, Pennsylvania, I kept driving that rented Dodge Neon further and further south over those gloriously blue waters until the highway ran out.

It should be noted that this was before Key West became the tourist mecca it is nowadays.  Cruise ships were not allowed in port, for example, and the town still had some genuine characters about, rather than the ones who play to the visitors these days.  The gay community had discovered the charm of those tumbledown old shanties and had begun to transform the side streets into showplaces.  Small, funky businesses were opening, a hand-rolling cigar factory still remained, and everyone knew that Ernest Hemingway really didn't hang out at Sloppy Joe's, but rather at Capt. Tony's.

Then there was this little, newly opened burger shop that was capitalizing off of the popularity of one-time resident Jimmy Buffet's song, "Margaritaville".  Rumor had it that it was even owned by the singer/songwriter himself.

There really wasn't much to it, a narrow storefront that held a counter, some booths, and a few tables.  All I recall of the menu was that I ordered a "Cheeseburger in Paradise", which was one of the songs that was on a well-used 8-Track in my car.  Other than that, it was entirely ordinary, save for the fact it was a really good cheeseburger.

Well, maybe the menu was ordinary.  The experience would be the opposite.  I worked in those days as the bishop's assistant, serving as his driver and general dogsbody while we drove over that empty, often poor, quarter of Pennsylvania.  The days were gray and the roads covered with dirty late season snow, and the congregations tended to be more hostile than one would expect from a collection of Christians.  I had not taken a vacation in a year and a half, was trapped by a job that I was beginning to dislike, and saw the grim harbinger of the future looming before me in that empty rectory with its dodgy furnace to which I would return in the evenings.

Florida was none of those things.  I was free, and with freedom comes hope; with hope comes the rediscovery of joy.  In the sunlight, the azure waters, and the audacity of the Key West state of mind, I began to surrender my vexations.  That evening, still in Key West and enjoying a late dinner before the long drive back to Miami, I proposed and she said "yes".  I was grim no more and the future's cast was far more bright.

That narrow burger joint has since become a chain of restaurants, bars, gift shops; cookbooks; a brewery, and even a retirement community. I can still order a Cheeseburger in Paradise, but it's from the menu of the Margaritaville restaurant in a casino twenty minutes from my home.  Key West has changed, too, and is far less funky and far more mercenary than it was thirty years ago.

Well, what isn't, I suppose?

However, there is still a moment that presents itself when I experience what Melville called the "damp, drizzly November in my soul", when job, co-workers, politics, the system in which I abide, the cussedness of parishioners, the coercive directions of canon-quoting bishops, all begin to weigh on me and I long for sun, surf, and those azure waters.

When I'm fortunate to have both the time and money, off I go.  But, when I'm trapped by the season or the circumstances, the memory of that lost day wandering in the casual ease of the Keys, and of what was achieved that day that was of lasting, then I can at least mentally return to that quiet afternoon the turned out to define much of the rest of my life.  Paradise, indeed.