One-Armed Man at the Concert

ukposters.co.uk

I am a very fortunate man of 83, deeply indebted to American medicine, still in possession of the marbles I need even though two weeks ago I took a bad fall in a hotel room in Nevada, wrecking my left shoulder and becoming a one-armed man in need of assistance to pull on my socks and zip my jeans, and the beauty of this is: gratitude — profound gratitude for the lunch at Docks restaurant in Manhattan in 1992 with Jenny Lind Nilsson who is still with me 34 years later.

Gratitude is highly appropriate at 83. I’ve been to see an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery and he plans to replace the shoulder next week and promises that with therapy it’ll work better than the old one. But mainly I am grateful for the love of this woman. I am keenly aware of it every day as she hovers over me. I was aware of it last Wednesday evening as she guided me up the steps of Carnegie Hall to a concert of symphonies by Mozart and Shostakovich by the Cleveland Orchestra.

Jenny’s parents, Ray and Orrell, were serious pianists and brought up their four children to love classical music and play violin. And with cruel tyranny and vulgarity in power in Washington, D.C., and Minnesota, it feels like a moral duty to attend to great art. Though I must admit that I’m no fan of Shostakovich and parts of this Symphony, his 11th, feel like a composition for 50 power saws and 14 pneumatic hammers. But I yield to my love’s better judgment. 

A man walks up the steps with his left arm in a sling and a cane in his right hand and he feels the empathy of strangers, believe me. New York is a city of pedestrians and we pedestrians look out for each other. If I looked confused, someone would step up and offer to help. But we walk into the grand lobby and up to the hall and down the aisle, the musicians warming up on stage. Our seats are halfway down, on the right.

I remember a concert I did here in 1989 with Chet Atkins and Butch Thompson and the Hopeful Gospel Quartet. It was a dark time. Two years before, I had announced that I was ending my radio show, A Prairie Home Companion,and moving to Copenhagen to be a serious novelist, which Chet knew was a bad move — the show was at the peak of popularity — and he tried to tell me I could change my mind but I was too proud to back up. My son Jason played guitar on the show — he was 20, taking lessons from Chet — and he played a beautiful underscore under a poem I read by my teacher James Wright, about “the eyes of those two Indian ponies darken with kindness.” I sang bass in the Quartet, “The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow,” and did the News from Lake Wobegon and I remember thinking, I do not want to give this up. But I did, I walked off the cliff until two years later, I climbed back up.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, the “Jupiter,” was his last, a symphony he never heard, composed in the summer of 1788, three years before his death, along with two other symphonies, a piano sonata, other chamber works, by a 32-year-old genius deeply in debt, having lost the favor of his noble patrons, caring for his ailing wife, Constanze — it’s heartbreaking to hear the tenderness of the dances in the third movement, the inventiveness of the finale.

The audience adored the Shostakovich. They gave it a standing ovation and brought the maestro back for five bows and he gave bows to the brass, the English horn, the violas, the tympani, the cymbals, the strings, the winds, the harps. Shostakovich wrote it in honor of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 but during intermission Jenny had shown me videos she’d taken of New Yorkers sliding Cedar Hill in Central Park, sliding on plastic saucers, pieces of cardboard, baking trays, roasting pans, skis, going off a jump and flying in the air and landing in a cloud of snow. Tyranny is brutal and blind to the goodness and delight of life that Mozart found even in his summer of distress. We have a democracy here, my friend. The vintage of the grapes of wrath has been trampled out. The king cannot lie repeatedly and nakedly and demand to be believed.

Garrison Keillor © 01.26.26