How My Mother Almost Became A Parrothead

I guess it's my fault really. I knew she was depressed. I mean more depressed than usual. She wa always depressed. Born depressed, I think. Anyway, she'd gotten to where she couldn't be bothered to play solitaire online or watch Law and Order marathons on the tube even. Yep, it was that bad.

So I said to her, "Mom, why don't you pack your things?" -- I could have said "Your muumuus and slippers," but I like to think I'm more tactful than that-- I said, "Come to Florida. We'll get a nice hotel room on the beach, park ourselves on one of those cushioned lounge chairs with the umbrellas, sip some wine or guzzle some Rum Runners and just relax. We'll lie in the shade, listening to the waves erode the shore. And the white birds- egrets or ibises or seagulls or whatever the hell they are-- we'll listen to them squawk and watch them dive for French fries in the sand, and just chill. You can forget about everything. Your friends who died of cancer. Your friends who didn't die but might as well have since they moved so far away. "

Normally, my mother wouldn't leave her apartment unless a fire alarm was going off but to my utter shock she agreed to make the trip down. She missed Florida I guess. She'd only moved one state away but it felt further. There was no ocean in Georgia and more importantly, no ocean breezes. The summer sun was just as hot, even hotter up there, and the only way a body could get any relief was to hunker down and blast the A/C. She lived in constant fear of power outages.

So she was coming, she said. Back to Florida, the beaches she used to love, the sun she used to worship until she went from a maiden with a golden, glowing tan to a matron with a brown leather hide and a case of Stage 3 Melanoma. But she didn't change religions, even after she'd had a huge hunk of poisoned flesh surgically removed from her thigh. As a sun worshipper, she wasn't just devout, she was a fanatic.

I found a deal at a 3 star hotel on a nearby beach. The rooms were small but you were up to your ears in amenities. By amenities, I mean bars, mostly. The Seaward had a couple of restaurants but they were really just bars in disguise. Everything they served was fried, from the food to the customers.

After our first full day of lying in the sweltering shade, dodging the sun's UV and other inexplicably less infamous rays, we rode the elevator to our rooms trying to decide if we should call room service or order out for a pizza.

Then on the sixth floor, the elevator stopped and a middle-aged man carrying an oversized tropical cocktail in his hand and wearing what appeared to be the top half of a parrot on his head, stepped inside. He wanted to go down, he said, didn't realize we were going up, so he started to step back out.

"You're coming with us, " my mother insisted. "Up to the fifteenth floor and then you can go back down after we get off."

I was glad he didn't put up on a fight because I wanted to get a better look at him.

"What the hell are you supposed to be?" my mother demanded. She can be very blunt at times.

"I'm a Parrothead," he said.

"What the fuck is a Parrothead?" she said.

My mother can be rather profane when she is not

a) being blunt
or
b) sound alseep.

Actually who knows what she's up to even then.

"We're Jimmy Buffet fans, " he explained, "We like to get together to have a good time and raise money for various charities."

My mother held back a hiccup and asked, "Do you have to drink a lot?"

The fellow, who could've easily passed for an ornithologist gone wild, took a long thoughtful sip form his flamingo-shaped straw, then shook his head.

"Uh, that's a personal choice, " he said.

As my mother pumped him for information it occurred to me that a charitable donation, while tax-deductible, might also help offset some of the pain of a hangover, at least the portion attributable to guilt.

"I think I'd like to become a Parrothead," my mother declared. "How do you sign up?"

This kind of shocked me because when I was in high school I had some Jimmy Buffet albums and she'd said she didn't "care for" his music then.

He looked at her doubtfully but said, "It's easy. There are chapters all over the country. You just go online, google Parrotheads, and then join the group in your area.


The elevator dinged then and we thanked the nice man with the parrothead for his information as we got off on our floor. The woman who gave me life and lived to tell about it appeared somewhat deflated but I was secretly relieved to know that the chances of my technologically-challenged mother ever decking the halls of this hotel, both plastered and feathered, were extremely slim. Why, just the week before she'd emailed me to tell me she couldn't get on the internet.