Santa has always been kind to my family. And I don’t mean the “Santas” at the mall, or the business world Santa… I mean the real Santa. Yeah… Yeah… I hear you, but wait. 

When I was first married, we were really poor. Oh we ate ok and had a roof over our head, but not much more. We were stationed in Germany. When Christmas came around we had just enough to by a Cuckoo Clock for her family and mine. Then we were broke. We decided we couldn’t get anything for each other. The enlisted club where I was stationed had slot machines.  

It was only a few days till the next payday and we had groceries in the cupboard so we took our last few bucks… I mean very few bucks… three or four bucks to entertain ourselves at the slot machines. Quite quickly I hit a jackpot. I didn’t tell Emily. It wasn’t a huge jackpot but enough so that I could buy her a surprise present. After that I was ready to go. But I figured Emily would want to play for a bit longer. But no… she was ready to go home too. 

Certainly you’ve figured out that she hit a jackpot too and didn’t tell me. There were two “mysterious” presents under the tree from “Santa” on Christmas morning. So was it just luck… or was it Santa. Stop!!! Don’t answer that question yet. 

A few years later, after we had a basketball team worth of kids, I always wanted my Christmas tree and living room to look like a toy store on Christmas morning. About the time my oldest daughter started having doubts about Santa we were stationed in England… way before internet and on-line ordering. So she asked for an impossible present less then a week before Christmas… a pair of stilts. And she stuck to it. A pogo stick nor anything else would do. We traveled to London, Oxford, and all over the country side. There were no stilts in all of England. Well… I won’t give you the details, but on Christmas morning, there was a pair of titanium, magnesium, and chromemolly stilts under the Christmas tree. Hummmm… Santa? Don’t decide just yet. 

Through the years the same sort of thing happened from time to time and kid to kid. There was the Cabbage Patch doll crisis… we won one at a raffle. There was an unobtainable electronic guizmo that we got when we found it by some miracle. And so it went. I was a pretty good provider (if I do say so myself) so stuff like this didn’t happen every year… just every once in a while when really needed.

When my kids started having kids on their own the same kinds of things kept happening. We had a lot of family Christmases with the whole family at my house, and no matter how much my kids were struggling financially, “Santa” always made sure my living room looked like a toy store.

The last time “Santa” stepped in was when my oldest daughter’s youngest was having his doubts about Santa and was testing. It was the year of the great X-Box shortage. Her son was insistent that nothing else would do. She couldn’t afford it even if they found one, but I told her that money wouldn’t be a problem… just find one. She tried on-line… ebay and everything you can imagine. Nothing. We went to every electronics, department, and toy type store in the region… again nothing. Then on one last chance we went back to a local Circuit City three days before Christmas. They told us they were getting in a truck the next day and that they might… might have an X-Box on it.

We couldn’t reserve it or anything like that since they weren’t even sure it was going to be on the truck. We were told that someone would have to be there the instant it came in… if it came in. So, my daughter went to the store when it opened up and stayed in the store all day long waiting for the truck. By the afternoon everyone in the store knew her and why she was there.

I got a call from her that the truck had finally arrived. A few minutes after I got to the store the manager gave her the “hi sign”. She said this was the best present Santa had ever brought her. As I wrote the check to pay for it and with tears of joy in her eyes she turned to me and said, “Thank you Daddy”. That’s as good as the best presents Santa has ever brought me.

I’m not going to ask you if it was Santa or not. I’m going to just say that the kid that wanted the X-Box is 17 and he still believes in Santa. All of my kids, and all of their kids still believe in Santa. That’s five kids and (OMG) twelve grandkids from 5 to 21 that believe in Santa.

This year Santa came through for me. I wanted to go on a cruise with a bunch of my cruise friends right after Christmas… over New Years. I was saving my money for a grand adventure next year. Well… Santa couldn’t contain her excitement and spilled the beans early that she is taking me with her family on that cruise. Yipeeeeeeeeeeee!

But that’s not the end…

I’m spending this Christmas with my daughter, Jodi, that lives in San Antonio. Her husband is in the Army and deployed to Afghanistan. So we are having the family Christmas here at her house.

Tonight I asked their 5 year old son, Nathan, what he wanted Santa to bring him for Christmas. He said an X-box… and then for the first time he said he wanted Santa to bring him his daddy. I had to cry… but… they are happy tears. Nathan, his brother and two sisters don’t know it yet, but we just found out today that Major Tony Bradway will be home from Afghanistan Friday morning.

Yes Nathan… there is a Santa Claus

I was fifteen… not a worry in the world. It was a care-free, go lucky time. The world was a wonderful place… the birds sang, and the music of our time was the best there had ever been. Everything was just perfect. Well, I did have one worry… would my secret love would really “like me”. I had known her since eighth grade. I wasn’t ready to make my move yet but that was OK because we were both in the marching band.

The band practiced marching every day. There was always a parade in some town we were getting ready for. We were right in the middle of the band completion season. Each day instead of going to class during the band period we would meet up, instruments in hand, at the edge of the school grounds. Then we would go marching through the housing area right next to the school.

We were having sort of an Indian summer. The band period started at 10:30 and it was good to be out of the classroom on such a nice day. I was a drummer… ummmm… sorta. Since I was only a freshman, I was relegated to cymbals. Drums were the domain of the juniors and seniors. Oh well… it didn’t matter, I would get my turn soon enough.

The drum major at the head of the band started us off and we headed down the street. With the ratt-a-tatt-tatt of the drums we headed down Sycamore Avenue. After about five minutes of marching, the drum major tooted his whistle and whirled his baton to signal us to start playing music… or in my case to start banging the cymbals together at the right time.

We were pretty good. Our rows and colums were straight… everyone was in step, and the music sounded good. We were playing some sort of John Philips Souza kind of marching band music. Then suddenly the drum major tooted his whistle and whirled his baton signaling us to stop. It was weird… we stopped right in the middle of the music. We had never done anything like that before.

Some woman had come out of her house and got the drum major to stop us. She talked to him for a few seconds. Then he turned to us, and I’ll never forget his words. He said,

“Turn around and walk slowly back to school… the President has been shot”

When we got back to the school grounds there was a news broadcast on loud speaker system. There seemed to be sort of a non-belief that this had happened. No one went back to class… and no one talked much. We just sat around the lunch area listening to the broadcasts.

Then came the announcement… the president was dead. No! It couldn’t be… something is wrong… this is not possible. We waited for the news on the loudspeaker to tell us it was some kind of mistake. But that news never came. It was true. John F. Kennedy was dead.

As teenagers we had seen the world through rose colored glasses. Suddenly we were no longer teenagers. It didn’t matter how many years we had been on earth, we weren’t teenagers any more. And the world wasn’t rosy any more. We had believed we lived in almost a fantasy world. We knew that our valiant prince the president could slay any dragon that might threaten us. But the prince was no more. Camelot was over.

As I post this it has been fifty years, almost exactly to the minute, when those shots rang out in Dallas. Yet, it is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday. I still get something in my eye any time I see those scenes of a little boy saluting a caisson as it goes by in front of him.

For those of that remember it, we all know that the world changed forever that day. Our innocence was over. Don McLean wrote “American Pie” a few years later. He has always avoided giving an answer to what the words mean leaving each individual to their own interpretation.

Although most say that McLean’s words, “the day the music died” are about Buddy Holly’s untimely death. For me… it has a completely different meaning. It was the day we were marching down that street and the blue sky turned grey… our music was stopped mid note and our world changed. Indeed, for me November 22, 1963 was the day the music died.

In the past I’ve always been a little sad this time of year… sad at the passing of summer. I’ve always been a summer person. Maybe that’s why I love Florida and the Caribbean… it’s almost always summer there. Even in North Florida or areas of Southern California the warm days of summer pass. We take out our sweatshirts, jackets and put away our shorts and flip-flops. A sad time indeed

But I’ve started something of a tradition. Each year about the time the pumpkins start appearing all over town, Jimmy Buffett ends his tour with two weekend concerts in Sin City. For me, it’s kind of a wake for the passing of summer. One last hurrah before the bleak cold days of winter set in.

The weather in Sin City is still warm enough to go out to the pool and ogle all the sweet young things displaying their things for ogling. During the day on the Saturday of the concert, the official pre-concert party is held poolside at the Flamingo Hotel. Thousands… literally thousands of Parrotheads descend upon the pool for a day long last hurrah of summer. They come from all over to help me celebrate the passing of summer.

The parrotheads all wear their hats and garb to celebrate. Anyone that has seen me on a cruise thinks that I wear some… ummmm… unusual tropical clothes. Well, that’s nothing compared to the true parrotheads. A live band and a DJ playing island music start in the morning and go till 6 PM. All day long the parrotheads sing, dance, and have frozen concoctions to help them hang on. The accompanying pics will give you the flavor of what I’m talking about.

This year the actual concert was held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. After the hours of partying back at the Flamingo, the concert itself is almost anti-climatic. Just the same, I and nearly seventeen-thousand of my best friends descended upon the venue. And we were not disappointed. Jimmy played all the favorites and a handful of brand new songs from the new album, “Songs from St. Somewhere”. The tour was also the “Songs from St. Somewhere Tour”.

I had nose-bleed tickets with seats almost as high up in the arena as you can get. I would like to say these were the “cheap seats” but at nearly $80 each, they are not cheap. It didn’t matter. This is not a place where being down close makes much difference. We were all friends there just singing and dancin’ in the isles. It was a celebration of Cheeseburgers in Paradise… changing your latitude & attitude… and finding that One Particular Harbor. It didn’t matter where you sat; all of us parrotheads were taken to Margaritaville. Summer was extended for at least one more night.

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Enough of that stuff… let the adventures begin.