At the end of the musical “West Side Story,” after the guy who was supposed to be the hero has been slain and those who love him are left struggling to make sense of the world, composer Leonard Bernstein tunes his orchestra to the confusion and uncertainty of the moment.
As the curtain slowly closes, the flutes, horns and strings call out with ascending notes of hope, only to be answered with a low, dissonant, despairing thud from the piano and timpani. They try again and are met with the same dread response. Once more, then silence.
When the house lights come up, it’s hard to know how to feel.
Not all stories end on notes of hope.
• • •
As a kid growing up in rural northern Lancaster County, our remote village of Penryn had a 4H chapter, and one of the most popular clubs with the boys was the fishing club, run by a guy everyone simply knew as Chuck. A single guy in his 30s, eminently likable with an impish sense of humor, Chuck was a magnet for boys who were too old to bother with childish things but too young to be seriously interested in girls. He’d take us camping, teach us to dig for nightcrawlers and how to bait a hook with a crawfish. He’d take groups of us to Speedwell Forge and spend much of the time untangling our lines — all the things our blue-collar working parents didn’t have time to do.
Everyone loved Chuck.
He had a cabin with a pond up in Potter County where he’d take us to fish, spot deer and target shoot with his handguns. He once took my dad along to his cabin and taught him to fly fish. My dad had done plenty of traditional fishing, but the look on his face that weekend was that of a little kid who’d been handed a fishing pole for the first time. I’ll never forget how excited Dad looked.
Chuck excelled at giving people opportunities and experiences.
Personally, Chuck probably meant more to me than most of the neighborhood kids. He paid me to mow his yard (poorly) every week, he taught me the basics of gardening, and we would sit around and talk and solve the world’s problems. His friendship changed my life.
As much as Chuck embraced the rural, outdoor ethos that defines many a rugged individual in this county, he also was a man of culture and curiosity. He watched educational programs on public television and listened to WITF-FM back when the radio station still played classical music. He seemed to be forever filling his public radio travel mug with coffee.
Intellectual curiosity had strict limits in my hometown, and Chuck seemed to not care about those limits.
• • •
Because he was single and had a good job at Alumax, Chuck could afford top-shelf stereo equipment with ground-rattling speakers. I was maybe 12 years old when he sat me down on the carpet in his living room and turned me toward those speakers.
I didn’t know what was coming, but I trusted Chuck and was prepared to open myself to whatever he wanted me to hear.
He put a record on the turntable, cranked the volume and dropped the needle a little past the 3-minute mark of “Mars” from Gustav Holst’s orchestral cycle “The Planets.”
What I heard then — what I felt pulsing inside me for the first time in my young life — was musical energy. The relentless cycling of Holst’s strings charged my brain and body with a sort of primal electricity.
Then Chuck moved the needle to the soaring “Jupiter” movement, whose triumphant French horn melody and sweeping strings broke my heart wide open. It’s not an exaggeration to describe what I felt in that moment as love.
When you discover a thing outside yourself that you realize had been part of you all along, that’s love.
I have remained wedded to classical music in all of its forms ever since. It is my first language, my forever refuge, my drug of choice, a true companion. It is oxygen when I cannot breathe. The list of apt, overblown metaphors is long and inadequate.
Classical music means so much to me that I don’t write about it. Some things shouldn’t be spoiled with words.
Always a steady read on what makes people tick, Chuck had to have known how Holst would affect me, how it would resonate to my core. As I’ve said, he had a knack for connecting people with new experiences.
I never thanked Chuck for unlocking classical music for me, and I never will.
• • •
Every year or so, I log on to the Megan’s Law sex offender database to check up on Chuck.
In 2014, Charles Cowart — Chuck — was charged with molesting two boys in his Penn Township home and at his Potter County cabin. He confessed to his crimes, which took place over a five-year period between 2009 and 2013, and spent some time in prison.
The boys were ages 13 and 14 when the assaults began. They would have been about the same age as me and my friends when we hung out at his house and cabin in the mid-1980s.
For the record, Chuck never touched me inappropriately. I cannot speak for others.
When I logged on to the Megan’s Law site to prepare to write this column, Chuck’s file was gone. Concerned he had somehow found a way off the sex offender registry, I dug through our recent archives.
According to the August 2021 coroner’s report published in this paper, Chuck died of natural causes last summer. He was 69.
I could find no obituary for Chuck.
Folks are probably glad he’s dead.
Lots of people like Chuck live in the world today — people who commit heinous acts who have nonetheless shaped the lives of others in unmistakably positive ways.
Their existence is vexing. How do we measure a demonstrable good against an act of horror? How do we reconcile gratitude with contempt? How can one person be the source of both?
Looking back, it would be easy to view my relationship with Chuck through the lens of his crimes. What appeared to me to be expressions of genuine friendship could easily be construed as grooming behavior. It makes me sick to think about it.
But those feelings do not diminish my gratitude. People do good works for bad reasons. In the end, intentions usually remain a mystery and we can judge only their actions. Chuck did wonderful and horrible things, and I can speak only to the former.
Classical music enriches my life every day. For that, I will be forever grateful to a wretched human being.
Michael Long is the Government Watchdog deputy team leader for LNP | LancasterOnline. He welcomes email at mlong@lnpnews.com. “Unscripted” is a weekly entertainment column produced by a rotating team of writers.
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