'I Thought I Left You' couldn't be blunter.
You're like the measles, you're like the whooping cough
I've already had you, so why in heaven's name can't you just get lost?
The song is on the fairly new release of a Willie Nelson CD. And there's more, in case that set of words isn't enough to make someone understand they are no longer wanted in any shape, or form.
I thought I left you
What part of "it's all over" don't you understand?
The song's meaning is quite specific: Get lost.
When I first heard the song and its reference to measles and whooping cough I was hooked on the lyrics. Yeah, I had that, and I want no part of it again.
So when I read the recent obituary for Burt Shavitz, a founder of Burt's Bees who has passed away at 80, I was reminded of Willie's song.
Burt and I had one thing in common: we both grew up in Flushing, New York. After that, Burt's life didn't resemble mine in the least.
His life was more than colorful: it was lucrative. And greatly lucrative for the hitchhiker he once picked up. Together they started Burt's Bees in 1984, a line of natural skin care products that was eventually sold to Clorox for $925 million dollars in 2007.
In 1984, the 49-year-old Mr. Shavitz picked up 33-year-old Roxanne Quimby who, as Sam Roberts describes in his NYT obituary for Mr. Shavitz, was a "would-be graphic artist who was working as a waitress and was hitchhiking from her cabin to the local post office."
She coupled his interest in bees and beekeeping into an organic lip balm that initially brought in $3,000 a year. But the story climbs from there, and reaches a point where Ms. Quimby, with her two-thirds interest, buys out Mr. Shavitz's one-third interest for $130,000 after Mr. Shavitz has an affair with a company employee. This really is a Burt's and the bees story.
Ms. Quimby later gives Mr. Shavitz $4 million dollars after the company is sold. (It is not clear if Ms. Quimby sold the company to Clorox directly, or she sold the company to someone who later sold it to Clorox, but the numbers get large no matter what.)
Apparently Mr. Shavitz is quite happy with his $4 million and lives the life you might expect of a man who is pictured on the product with a full head of woolly hair, a full bushy beard, all underneath a striped engineer's cap, living shoe-horned in a converted turkey coop on 40 acres in Parkham, Maine.
This past Monday, Ms. Quimby expressed that she and Burt shared "a long and unique journey through many years and probably many lifetimes together and apart. I don't assume that his passing marks the end of that journey."
Did Mr. Shavitz have any regrets about Ms. Quimby? Well, in a 2013 documentary titled "Burt's Buzz," Mr. Shavitz does say, "I'd like never to see her again."
No wonder Willie's CD is titled 'Band of Brothers.'
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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