Right time, right place: Piermont, NH — by Paul Goundrey
Welcome to “Dear Daybreak”, a weekly Daybreak column. It features short vignettes about life in the Upper Valley: an encounter, a wry exchange, a poem or anecdote or reflection… Anything that happened in this region or relates to it and that might strike us all as interesting or funny or poignant.
Want to submit your own Dear Daybreak item? Just go here!
Dear Daybreak:
I’m a piano tuner. I know my way around pianos.
I know my way around the Adirondacks too, in a canoe, solo, packed into a wilderness pond so far in the woods, as they might say up in Canada, that you have to come OUT to go hunting. Where the silence, as they say also, is deafening, where each loon call is like a roar. It’s my happy place. For a few days the only agenda is my heartbeat and some beef jerky. No humans, no Netflix, (almost) no cellphone signal.
Which is when the phone rings. A Boston number, a Boston voice. Dripping wet from a morning swim, sitting on a log, almost no signal, but I get it. I’m needed. A surprise party, the Woodstock Inn, next month. Elvis Costello.
Elvis Costello. At the Woodstock Inn. The loons are unimpressed, the pine trees sigh. Barely a signal, but I get it.
A month later it’s sound check and The Man is there, and I’m there, because it’s my job. And I’m no fool, I just do my job. No handshake, no begging for a selfie. I do my job and leave, and The Man leaves too, slinks back to his room because all of this is a surprise for someone and it doesn’t really matter who, you don’t need to know.
But no, when I ask the sound engineer. It’s NOT a surprise for the wedding of a rich billionaire’s grand-daughter named Alison.
— Danny Dover, Bethel
Dear Daybreak:
This shorebird is not recognized by the Merlin bird app. Added to my life list anyway. Cute, distinctive fellow!
— Joel Teenyanoff, Thetford
Did you catch Dear Daybreak last week? If not, here it is!