Living and Dying in 3/4 time

I know the song by Jimmy Buffet. I suppose you could call me a parrothead because I know the words to all his songs. My favorite is A Pirate Looks at 40. Although I am well past forty, I remember the time with a smile.

Living is a waltz. Two steps sideways and one step back.

Funerals are not the joy that they are advertised by the churches to be . . . .

Off into the streets of gold, meet up with the old man who died 30 some years ago and look down on the living.

God bless us all. I do not know this is not true, but the grief is real right here on earth as if not one bit of that is true...

In fact, I cannot imagine it to be true. If it were, I would not want to go.

I think, I do. That life is the prize. Keeping it is our quest.

The reason we write is vanity.

We do not want to be forgotten after our departure.

Love,
Betty

Hey, as long as they have cheeseburgers in Paradise.

Dear lin,
There was a hamburger joint on hyw 301 in the 80's called Ma Fadds. It was a little box by the side of the road with a window to order from. She was inside the box. Everything about the hamburgers was wonderful..a burger not too lean, freshly sliced tomatoes, onions, lettuce, toasted buns, and a soda in a bottle with a straw.

Development took over her space. But she had the best hamburger on earth. Too bad that Buffet had not had one. He could have written a song.

Love,
Betty

Buffett does have his own restaurants, and excellent ones they are. They're in Hawaii. Cheeseburger in Paradise is one. One of my fondest vacation memories is sitting at a table by the window on the second floor, eating a fabulous burger and looking at the ocean. They let you keep the mugs, which turn blue when cold.

Can't remember the name of his other restaurant we ate at; I do remember that they played his music non-stop the whole time.

Cheeseburger In Paradise lyrics

Tried to amend my carnivorous habits
Made it nearly seventy days
Losin' weight without speed, eatin' sunflower seeds
Drinkin' lots of carrot juice and soakin' up rays
But at night I'd had these wonderful dreams
Some kind of sensuous treat
Not zuchinni, fettucini or bulghar wheat
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat

Chorus:
Cheeseburger in paradise (paradise)
Heaven on earth with an onion slice (paradise)
Not too particular not too precise (paradise)
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise

Heard about the old time sailor men
They eat the same thing again and again
Warm beer and bread they said could raise the dead
Well it reminds me of the menu at a Holiday Inn
Times have changed for sailors these days
When I'm in port I get what I need
Not just Havanas or bananas or daiquiris
But that American creation on which I feed

Chorus:

Cheeseburger in paradise (paradise)
Medium rare with mustard 'be nice (paradise)
Heaven on earth with an onion slice (paradise)
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise

I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer
Well good God Almighty which way do I steer for my

Chorus:
Cheeseburger in paradise (paradise)
Makin' the best of every virtue and vice (paradise)
Worth every damn bit of sacrifice (paradise)
To get a cheeseburger in paradise
To be a cheeseburger in paradise I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise

I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer
Well good God Almighty which way do I steer for my
Cheeseburger in paradise.

Put a smile on me! Love, Betty

There's a Buffet restaurant in Key West. Named Margaritaville. Used to be really good, known for the quality of its homemade key lime pie. Now kind of a tourist trap. The key lime pie is frozen, not nearly as good as it used to be, and overpriced.

On the up side, the black beans and rice are tops.

They play JB music all the time, and that makes it worth a visit.

There's an adjacent JB gift shop, too. You can buy the books he's written. He is a good writer.

My wife has been a parrothead since JB first became well-known. The only time she ever swears is when she's singing a JB lyric along with the record and the lyric has swear words.

I think there's a Margaritaville in every airport everywhere. With a COOL little model of Buffett's Gruman hanging from the ceiling.

I seldom eat hamburgers, but am trying to figure out how to find one at 2:30 am. Of course, cooking one would be an option, but my husband would decide I'd gone crazy.

Tomorrow.

Love, Carol

See if Abe can fix you up. I think he lives near Hamburg

However, Lin, there is a famous story the hamburger was invented in Seymour, Wisconsin, and frequently they celebrate by making a record size hamburger.

Carol

Seymour isn't the only place staking a claim (sorry about the pun!)

http://hubpages.com/hub/Top-Ten-American-Recipes

Want to go to the 2010 Seymour festival? Check it out here:

http://www.homeofthehamburger.org/

Anyone who looked at the Seymour festival site has got to have been impressed!! I know it is a little off topic, but that is the place that celebrates the beginning of the hamburger! My ex-daughter-in-law was from Seymour and I often went there to do training at the high school. My ex-daughter-in-law's father owned the longest running hardware store in Wisconsin until he retired a few years ago.

Wisconsin just can't be beat for its notoriety of all kinds.

Okay, back to JB and Living and Dying in 3/4 time. We do that here in Wisconsin. We don't hurry anything usually.

Carol

Okay.... maybe Abe also lives near Cheeseburg

Dear Carol,
I know the secret to the great hamburger. It is not ground round or chuck but the cheap stuff with the fat in it so it sizzles and smokes. Add what you want, but that lean stuff makes hard lumps that have no flavor and are a dry burger.

Those cheap stuff hamburgers are the smell that knocks your socks off and makes you long the the cheeseburger with all the trimmings.

I started this post because my daughter-in-law's mom passed on the 10th. She was devout Catholic. She raised 8 children alone because her husband died back when. She had all of her arrangements made down to what she should be laid to rest in, what rings she should wear and the letter to all the children to read after her passing. She is having two funerals. The one here for the relatives here, and one in Michigan where she will lay beside her husband. She thought about this a lot and had every detail arranged.

She was a very nice person.

She firmly believed that she would be re-united with all of those whom had gone before. I guess that is what faith is about. The believing in stuff that cannot ever be proven, before or after death.

I have a serious lack of faith at times. I know all the verses, the platitudes, the quotations that soothe the spirit. It all seems wrong somehow. Non-sense.

And yet, we need to believe. It keeps us going on with hope like reciting a prayer we learned as a child comforts us.

Perhaps that is it. A childs prayer.

Love,
Betty

Why do so many writers' and musicians' discussion group threads eventually morph into conversations about food?

Betty,

To get into my personal theories, beliefs, whatever, about what happens after we kack, and why we have to believe something about it in the first place might offend many people. But if it's any comfort, your post kind of reflects how I have felt for a long time. I think it's a reasonable option for thinking people.

Al

I struggle a great deal with these concepts, which is why the cheeseburger/hamburger discussion was so much easier to think about.

One night I was very sick. Everyone came to say good-bye. I heard voices and felt people who were not there touching me. I thought I would go to sleep and not wake up in this world. I knew I would do that because in my mind you get very, very sick and then you die.

Once again, I was wrong and could see God smiling, that he was in charge, that his grace and blessings were what was important and the thing is to let go and let God, and live while here on this earth (Dick Stodghill spoke one time about the importance of living and not just existing.) So the hamburgers and cheeseburgers may be what paradise is all about anyway, joyful food, joyful nourishment.

The more questions I ask, the fewer answers. So every day I wake up. For a while I did not plan a future, but now I have next Christmas planned out. But I've also learned we really can't plan much of anything, that our control is down to what to eat for dinner, what loving words we say, what we wear for the day, smiles, tears, and JB's picture of paradise filled with cheeseburgers.

Love, Carol

When I am tired, I close my eyes and go to sleep. I do that without fear or questions or expectations. I simply close my eyes.

When I die,I would like to believe in my soul rising to some beautiful place; but I am afraid that at life's end, our body is just tired of living and goes to sleep. Only there's no awakening.

In my sleep, I dream because I am still organically alive with a brain that has recorded stuff still going on. In the sleep of death, the organic brain is gone. Therefore, it would be sleep without dreams.

I find joy in the beauty of this world, the relationships, the magnificense of all we can attempt and sometimes accomplish. I sometimes fear that final sleep because I want what I know to continue. Mostly, I try not to think about the last sleep. But when I do,

I remember that I go to sleep without fear at least once in 24 hours, and sometimes for a short nap.

I have to go with the Athens, Texas story from Shelagh's link:

Quote :

Newspaper columnist, Texas historian, and restaurateur Frank X. Tolbert
said that this food vendor was Fletcher Davis. Davis operated a café at
115 Tyler Street on the north side of the courthouse square in Athens,
Texas, in the late 1880s. Apparently, Davis had been selling an unnamed
sandwich of ground beef at his lunch counter. In 1904, Davis and his
wife Ciddy, with backing from local businesses, took their sandwich to
the 1904 World's Fair. Fletcher and Ciddy Davis launched their invention
from "Old Dave's Hamburger Stand." A reference to a New York Tribune
article written at the time about the fair called a hamburger the
innovation of a food vendor on the pike. Tolbert said that Old Dave was
Fletcher Davis from Athens. During the 1980s, Dairy Queen ran a
commercial filmed in Athens, calling the town the birthplace of the
hamburger. In November 2006, The Texas State Legislature introduced Bill
HCR-15, designating Athens as the "Original Home of the Hamburger."

Sorry, Wisconsin

As to what makes a hamburger great, it's using meat with a bit of fat left in, and not over-mixing or shaping the patties - just enough to get them to hold together as they cook.

My mom's family mad a special mix for hamburgers that consisted of finely chopped cabbage, lettuce, onions, and tomatoes moistened with mayo. Still the best for me.

Ann

I was at a dinner party Friday night and the host served Greek burgers (spanoko-something). They were made of ground chicken mixed with feta cheese, spinach, basil and McCormick mixed spices. Delicious! They also served corn tossed with a fabulous balsamic vinegar/mustard mix. And homemade banana cream pie.

Betty wrote:

Quote :

I know all the verses, the platitudes, the quotations that soothe the
spirit. It all seems wrong somehow. Non-sense.

And yet, we
need to believe. It keeps us going on with hope like reciting a prayer
we learned as a child comforts us.

As to the first part, the platitudes, to my way of thinking, were based on a concretization of a symbolic, metaphorical message, so it's no wonder that it seems like nonsense to a thinking mind.

As for the prayers, my mom loved to embarrass me publicly by relating to family, friends and strangers my apparently limitless versions of that nightly prayer: "If I should go to town before I left here;" "If I should lock the garage before I go to town," etc. What she never seemed to realize was that I would say anything to avoid saying, "If I should die before I wake."

It's a wonder any of us survived the harm done by those prayers and concretizations.

Just me.
BTW, when my ashes are finally dispersed, I hope my children will all honor me by singing Jerry Jeff Walker's "Redneck Mother":

He was born in Oklahoma,
His wife's name's Betty Lou Thelma Liz
And
he's not responsible for what he's doing
Cause his mother made him
what he is.

And it's up against the wall Redneck Mother,
Mother,
who has raised her son so well.
He's thirty-four and drinking in a
honky tonk.
Just kicking hippies [around] and raising hell.

Sure
does like his Falstaff beer,
Likes to chase it down with that Wild
Turkey liquor;
Drives a fifty-seven GMC pickup truck;
He's got a
gun rack; "Goat ropers need love, too" sticker

And it's up
against the wall Redneck Mother,
Mother, who has raised her son so
well.
He's thirty-four and drinking in a honky tonk.
Just kicking
hippies [around] and raising hell.

Well,
M is for the mudflaps
you give me for my pickup truck
O is for the Oil I put on my hair
T
is for T-bird
H is for Haggard
E is for eggs, and
R is for
REDNECK.

Up against the wall Redneck Mother,
Mother, who has
raised her son so well.
He's thirty-four and drinking in a honky
tonk.
Kicking hippies [around] and raising hell.

He's up against
the wall Redneck Mother,
Mother, who has raised her son so well.
He's
thirty-four and drinking in a honky tonk.
Just kicking hippies [around]
and raising hell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcBOcwgb4OA&feature=related

Ann

To die is to remember what it was like in, say, 1900.

Dear Al,
Explain about how dying is remembering 1900.

I like you very much.

Ann, In my wildest imagination, I would not have thought that 'Redneck Mother' connected to you in any way. ME, yes.

I am that tough and that mean.

Love,
Betty

Betty, a few years ago, Susan (younger daughter) gave me a Jerry Jeff CD for Christmas. I was calling off the songs on it, and when I got to "Redneck Mother," Dave threw himself across the couch to grab it from my hands and tear it open. At the same time, son-in-law Chris sprang upon the entertainment system, and between the two of them, they sped it around to the selection in record time. Within seconds, almost everybody in the room was singing along at the top of our lungs. I say almost. My daughter-in-law (from upstate NY) and my nephew, born as his father, my brother turned 40, and who was still in HS at the time just stared at the rest of us with their mouths open.

Shortly after it was first recorded, I had accompanied their dad, who was still my husband, to a meeting of independent insurance agents in New Orleans. We had attended the opening gathering and met several couples who were impressed with Bill's audio tapes on how to sell insurance. As the festivities were ending, we decided to tour the Quarter and happened into Pat O'Briens. I happened to be wearing black silk dress slacks and a loose, long red satin shirt with a printed Pucci silk scarf. Our new friends were a tad surprised when I whipped off the scarf and tied it - Apache style, around my long and then very blonde hair. The first song played was - you guessed it. I started singing along, not even changing "around" to you-know-what. Bill and I were appointed the official planners for where to go and what to do after the meetings were done each day. We made many important contacts on that trip.

What can I say. Sometimes I am Snow White, sometimes Rose Red.

Ann

Wow Ann. Now that was a picture in my mind.

That song is one that gets people singing.

DK, interesting thoughts on dying. To be tired. To want to sleep. I have never reached that point, even when I was so ill.

I liked when you said:

"I find joy in the beauty of this world, the relationships, the magnificense of all we can attempt and sometimes accomplish. I sometimes fear that final sleep because I want what I know to continue."

That is how I feel.

Carol