Jigger and Saw

I like patterns. Visual patterns as well as audio patterns. My wife and daughter are forever gently laying their hands on my hands to stop my fingers from tapping with the beat of whatever song happens to be playing. Often times their gentle hands are magically transformed into high-pitched, shrieking voices crying out for the insanity to stop. The funny thing is that I usually have no idea I’m even tapping. It’s just something I do. Part of my brain hears something in the beat of the music that, for some reason, it desperately needs to imitate.

Whatever the reason, I find myself tapping along with the beat of songs, or really any kind of beat that I happen to come across. I recently had to have an MRI and I don’t mind telling you I was a bit worried about laying on a bed, my face covered with a cage and sliding headfirst into a long tube.

As it turned out, it wasn’t all that bad. There were these loud, rhythmic sounds making a constant pattern that I found very soothing. At one point I said to the technician, “Look, I’m finding it really hard to stay awake. Is it okay if I fall asleep?” He seemed a little confused by the question, but said, “If you can, go right ahead.” About half an hour later, I woke myself up snoring.

I’m telling you I really like patterns!

You would think a person like me, who really enjoys patterns, would be the shining star of any and every dance floor. Not so! The term “two left feet” doesn’t even begin to describe me dancing. If you’re a bad dancer, then you hope that you get to dance somewhere near me in order to not look so bad. When it comes to dancing, my fascination with patterns turns ugly and I look something like Elaine from Seinfeld.

I don’t know what it is. I can hear the rhythm, I can feel the beat, but I just can’t get my body to move in conjunction with what I’m hearing. It’s really strange…both the situation and my dancing.

The same thing goes with the words in the songs. Case in point; Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville had parts that were a bit hard for me to decipher. In fact, I sang one three-word phrase from the song wrong for more than 10 years!

In my defense, Margaritaville came out in about 1977-1978, when I was in the sixth or seventh grade. Having a Southern Baptist minister for a father meant that I had no idea what a margarita was. Truth be known, I also thought he was singing, “Wasting away,” instead of “Wasted away,” so I just thought he was singing about hanging out and being lazy in some crazy town with a strange name. But I liked the song all the same.

So there I am, a young naïve boy listening to this song all about drinking margaritas and having no idea what in the world it was talking about. Combine that with the fact that I was listening more to the syllabic patterns than the actual words and it’s easy to see how I made this mistake.

This is the line in question:

Wasted away again in Margaritaville,
Searchin' for my lost shaker of salt.

But this is what I heard:

Wasted away again in Margaritaville,
Searchin' for my lost jigger and saw.

So it’s the 1970’s. I hear this song, confuse the lyrics and permanently cement the wrong words “jigger and saw” in my mind. I even heard this song sung by a couple of kids at school in a talent show, but I still heard jigger and saw instead of shaker of salt.
(I realize you couldn’t get away with singing a song like this in a school talent show today, but come on, it was the 70’s!)

Jump ahead to the mid 1980’s. I’m driving somewhere with Gordon, my brother, when this song comes on the radio. We’re both singing along and having a blast. Then we get to the part where I sing jigger and saw. Gordon almost runs into a ditch he’s laughing so hard. I, on the other hand, am saying, “What? What? What’s so funny?”

Remember, I’ve been singing this song wrong for at least 10 years. By this time it made perfect sense to me. I mean, I had no idea what a jigger and saw were, but I had no idea what a margarita was either…I just assumed they went together.

Rest assured, that Gordon and I laughed plenty that night.

Jump ahead to 1988. While I knew what the correct words were, in the back of my mind I still heard the words, jigger and saw. Anytime I heard the song I just had to consciously change the words from jigger and saw to shaker of salt. And I had somehow managed to make it through my entire college career without my jigger and saw word change secret becoming common knowledge…until...

I’m out with my future wife at the classic burger joint, Snuffers, here in Dallas when Margaritaville starts playing. I start laughing and, suffering from a momentary lapse of good judgment, decide to explain the whole thing. I think I even sang it wrong a few times in an attempt to stress how much shaker of salt and jigger and saw really do sound alike.

To this day we can’t hear that song without busting out laughing. I’ve tried to explain it to our daughter, but I think it’s just one more thing on her list of stuff that proves her dad is strange.

Next time you hear Margaritaville, by Jimmy Buffet, try singing Jigger and Saw in place of Shaker of Salt and see if it doesn’t sound right.