MacGougan at Large

A Quick Trip North - 1

First Stop: Concord

My name for the weekend in question is “The Mooch-Off-Our-Friends Tour.” I use the term “mooch” teasingly. Staying with friends is a very sociable way to travel. The highlight is talking: catching up on lives and families; making silly jokes; and diagnosing, if not quite solving, all the problems of the world.

First we visited dear and generously hospitable friends in Concord, Massachusetts. Then we visited dear and generously hospitable friends in Woodstock, Vermont. We’d be lucky to have such friends wherever they lived, but the icing on the cake is that Concord and Woodstock are two pretty wonderful New England locations.

It regularly amazes my west-of-the-Mississippi friends and family members how close things are out here. I live in Connecticut, so we’re talking about a long weekend split between three different states. (Four if you count New Hampshire, where we had lunch on our way from Massachusetts to Vermont.) That’s not a problem in New England. Each side of our triangle was a scenic three-hour drive.

Our Concord friends fed us wonderfully and took us into Boston for a concert at Jordan Hall, the principal performance space at the New England Conservatory. It’s a beautiful space with terrific acoustics and sightlines.

The concert was the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes playing Schumann, Kurtág, and Janáček. My wife, Linda, is the pianist and piano expert in our family. I’d never heard of Andsnes, Kurtág, or Janáček - and my only familiarity with Schumann is that I confuse him with Schubert. Still, I’m a sentient human being who is able to recognize magic when it’s conjured before my eyes and ears. It was quite a concert.

Afterwards, we all noted the beautiful full moon in the winter sky. The weekend was off to a good start.