Carl Vigeland is the best-selling author of 17 books, including Holy Ground, Symmetry, Walking Trane, Ricochet, October Calf (with Archibald MacLeish), French Lessons (with Joseph C. French Jr.), Dear President Trump: An Open Letter on Greatness, A Symphony for Shelbie, The Great Romance, The Breathless Present, Jonathan Sternbeg, The Mostly Mozart Guide to Mozart, Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life (with Wynton Marsalis), Letters to a Young Golfer (with Bob Duval), Stalking the Shark, In Concert, and Great Good Fortune. Vigeland has also written about many different subjects for a wide variety of magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Country Journal, DoubleTake, Downbeat, Fast Company, Golf Digest, Harper's, Harvard, New England Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and Yankee. An amateur pianist and trumpet player, he is also an avid skier and excellent golfer--activities about which he has often written. Vigeland is a graduate of Harvard, and he was for many years a lecturer in journalism at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he was cited for excellence in teaching. Among other awards, his book In Concert (about the Boston Symphony) received a New York Public Library commendation, and his Mozart research and writing was aided by a residency at Yaddo.

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COVID BLUES

 

Sleepless on an early spring night in the great Covid-19 silence, not wanting to wake anyone, Peter tiptoes through the hallway of his home and walks downstairs to his basement office. Barefoot, he opens the rear door and enters a large, unfinished storage space, at the far end of which a sliding door opens to a small patio underneath the rear portion of a deck.

The temperature is in the low 50s. With nearly a full moon, Peter can clearly see his way out from the back of the house, beyond which a thick grove of trees borders a small, college golf course. Closing the door behind him, he walks onto the grass, stops to pee, and continues walking across the lawn to a short path that leads to the course. He stops again and stares at an expanse of fairway and rough, finally green again after a long, mostly snowless winter, though in the moonlight it simply seems "there," as in present, the good earth, as a long dead novelist entitled her best-known book. 

Peter looks up at the maze of leafless branches, crisscrossed against the night sky in an arrangement that might represent the assemblage of great musicians in a jazz band he knows or the young men on the university hockey team in his town, each branch a soloist or player within an ensemble or team that also plays together. Or they could be the people in his life, living and dead, whom he loves.

One is his mother, gone now 14 years. Several trees over is her husband, Peter's father, who died nearly a quarter of a century before her. Their other two children, Peter's brother in New York and his sister in Maine, occupy the space in between. Elsewhere but within their periphery are the branches of his wife, their three adult children—one nearby, one in Canada, and the oldest in California—and the soon-to-leaf buds of their three granddaughters, each person individually distinct but also commingling, and all within their own matrix of friends and family, an ever over-arching expansion of people near and far, their hovering spirits, fleeting like musical notes yet indelible within the form—of a tree, of a song…

…across the earth as it turns a blues-born song that swings from stage to stage, venue to venue, city to town to state to country, crossing borders and cultures, resounding in schools and prisons, restaurants and homes, farms, tall buildings…

…over mountains and deserts, oceans and lakes, by rivers and streams, through fields and down dusty lonely streets and along wide, once bustling highways…in places of famine and war, poverty and wealth, danger and sanctuary…and the song keeps changing but it is all one song…

…and the song is about all the  people who have heard it as they drove in their cars on the 110 in LA or fixed a jib in St. Croix or ate a croissant in Nice…who are making love in Hiroshima, Honolulu, Hilton Head...holding a newborn in Croatia; saying prayers in Jerusalem, Jersey City, Johannesburg; once upon a vanished time flying the redeye from Portland, Oregon to Boston; saying goodbye in Paris, Puerto Rico, Poland; working an oil rig in Iran; stanching a wound in Palmyra; drinking beer in Oslo or coffee in Shreveport or wine in Rome, Athens, and Sofia; taking the hand of a friend, looking in the eyes of an enemy, standing down fear in Tibet, running from the law in Palm Springs, dodging a bullet in Chicago, riding the rails in Lancashire, England…

…a song that nourishes life within the immensity and complexity of an endangered world and affirms the wonder of each single person's breathing body, a song that Peter prays will be heard again at both a wedding and a funeral, a parade, a hunt, a long slow walk down a verdant hill, through a meadow, by the sea, near a forest, in a fortress, under a willow or an oak or next to a garden of rainbow-colored flowers, while a father  comforts his child, a teacher meets her class, a preacher prepares her Sunday morning sermon, a hockey player practices his slapshot…

…a song that comforts the sick and thanks the men and women who care for them…a song that resounds in emergency rooms and hospitals, in nursing homes and homeless shelters, in burial grounds and funeral homes, nurturing the living, soothing the grief-stricken, and honoring the dead…

…a song Peter once heard many springs ago after he rode past homes with their roofs gone, stopped briefly at a university where the main courtyard was grown over with weeds, the entire campus empty, abandoned cars piled up on a nearby road more than half a year since the day the levees broke and in the lower Ninth Ward where a friend took him saw whole blocks of homes gone, saw houses unmoored from their foundations, saw an uprooted tree in someone's living room, saw a boat in someone else's front yard, saw a weeping woman walking by another destroyed house as if she were looking in her grief for something she would never find in this city where already tourists were back in the old quarter drinking Margaritas and eating oysters and watching topless dancing girls in clubs along Bourbon Street, and he drove with another friend the next morning to his friend's mother's home near the city's largest park, drove by her brick ranch on an oak-lined street of single-story homes and every house was empty, windows blown out, doorways boarded up, refuse along the walks, and not a single person on the street nor the next, and then in east New Orleans whole neighborhoods gone, an entire shopping mall boarded up and empty stores closed, gas stations closed, sidewalks piled high with people's possessions, and that afternoon they went back to the old quarter in the Treme section and there was a parade, men in golden shirts carrying golden parasols leading a second line of musicians from the Salvation Army and a kid who played the trumpet and several older musicians and hundreds of other people, old people young people black people white people male people female people trans people following, filling the sidewalks, filling the streets, turning the corner finally onto North Rampart Street to a police escort, and some of the musicians playing When the Saints Go Marching In as they marched into Armstrong Park onto a stage next to the site of Congo Square, the only place in pre-Civil War America where slaves were allowed to sing and dance on Sunday afternoons…

…and one of the musicians sang peace in the morning...…and he kept singing...now for a brother to come from across the way…singing loud, singing clear……when we play our drums we say un-na-nay…singing still…I said peace in the morning…singing. --from OCTOBER CALF