A Plowman’s Thanks

For a time I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.
~Wendell Berry

It is a Wednesday night in downtown Concord. I am sitting in Josh LoPresti’s plow truck in front of the Colonial Inn, sipping Cumberland Farm coffee and killing time. I drove to the DPW lot and logged in at eight o’clock. It is now almost ten o’clock. The first flakes drop lazily. Soon enough, the lazy snow will morph into the expected blizzard. Tim Jones will call me and say “It’s time to head out.” I drop my blade and start plowing the roads of Concord—sixty-plus years of roads I know too well. I’ll hit all the side roads while Tim scrapes the mains. It’s a dance we’ve danced together many times—and Tim many more times than me. We will, no doubt, plow all night. And probably all the next day, too.

The downtown is eerily quiet—like the opening scene of some Steven King movie. Occasionally, a car drives around the disappearing green. The inn, still locked in the pandemic, is stoic, still and silent, save for a few dimly lit windows and a sign banging and blowing in the increasing wind. There is no music at the inn tonight. There has not been music since I last sang there in mid-March of 2020. ‘A few weeks’ I thought back then, but here we are, almost a year later, with no end in sight. I sang at this inn every Thursday night since a March night in 1983, when I hobbled in with a gimp knee, a battered guitar, and friends who drank a lot of beer. A good place, I thought, to start my life as a folksinger—a stepping stone to lead me to a greater stage.

That greater stage never came to pass. Instead, singing in this old New England inn is my stage and, it seems, my only stage. It is the only concert hall I need. My crowds are small; my dreams are tame, but my joy is immeasurable and immutable. I don’t need anything more. I have what few performers can ever have or hope for—a place that is uniquely my own, a place that consoles and energizes me with equal portions of grace and magnanimity. It lives with me and has grown with me from my restless and often reckless youth to an older man waiting out a storm  in a plow truck. It has blessed, widened and humbled me. It has been a second home to me, Denise and our kids, and it gives me infinite hope in a future not yet diminished, cheapened or forgetful.

This dalliance with time shall pass. The stage is still there. The livestreams Denise and I started so many months ago have filled the gaping hole of the empty inn. I can’t really find words to measure my thankfulness to all the folks who have stuck with me, an aging, unapologetic folksinger, and with Denise, my perfect, beautiful and energized wife who manages, leads and makes the connections in this brave new world of internet concerts. This diaspora of an audience from around the world lifts our souls as they listen, watch and cavort with us throughout this monstrous thing that has hobbled our collective normality—but has not defeated our collective community.

Tomorrow night, once the streets are plowed, sanded and salted, I will be a tired, unkempt mess of sorts. I will forget the words to familiar songs and laugh off the physical weariness in the joy of the moment. I will attach myself to the kinship of the tangible, the ephemeral and the eternal. I will sing to the distant and familiar you. I am nothing without “you.”

As if preordained, the snow swirls in a chaos of white. It is time to drop the plow and strip-clean the waiting streets of Concord. My coffee shakes in the cup. The hydraulics whine in obedience. The truck rumbles and bellows like Old-Man Kenney’s draft horses, who plowed the sidewalks and raked the sewer pits when I was a kid.

This is my town. This ain’t a town for no old losers.This town ain’t no town for old clowns … This town is now a town for pick-and-choosers…

Every street tells me some old story.

Damn, it is snowing hard.

It is time to start remembering…