Pachelbel’s Canon (as it pertains to me)

The car radio came on with the ignition and Pachelbel’s Canon (formally, Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel) came on with it. It wasn’t a classical music station; it was a commercial. For what, I do not remember because Johnny P.’s canon has been so overused for so long it fails to convey any message other than its own ubiquity.

It is, however, an ear worm, and so I was stuck with it for a few hours, humming it as I engaged in the kind of mindless, about-town errand driving that requires no more brain power than was required of the milk man’s horse a century ago.

I think it was the combination of the canon and the cool, wet spring weather that recalled me to the last day of winter, 1986. I was a police reporter and the scanner in my bedroom at midnight announced escaped prisoners from the county jail. I pulled on a pair of jeans and coat and grabbed my camera and was out the door. Thirty minutes later, I was at the county seat, in the command post set up in the Sheriff’s office.

Two college students arrested for open containers fled through an unlocked door at the jail and disappeared into the night. The Sheriff’s Department, the state police, officers from the small village forces around the county combed the roads for the pair.

(Canon – noun; Music. consistent, note-for-note imitation of one melodic line by another, in which the second line starts after the first.)

Police periodically run in and out of the station as reports and false leads come in. I run with them. The fugitives are spotted once, but get away. At one point, as the search fanned across back yards, I turn the corner of a garage and find the barrel of a shotgun in my face. A village cop with a reputation for recklessness had mistaken me for an escapee.

“Down! On the ground! Right now!”

“John, it’s me…” I put my hands up. “Floegel? From the Times Herald?” I waggle my camera.

John doesn’t hear, he’s shouting for backup. Sheriff’s deputies arrive and laugh at John for bagging a reporter and at me for being bagged. We all return to the command post and drink coffee.

One fugitive is captured around 5:30 in the morning, just as the horizon grows pale. I call my boss, Sue, to let her know I’d need space – maybe page one – in that afternoon’s edition and ask her to come pick up my film.

(The first recording of Pachelbel’s Canon was made in 1940, under the direction of Arthur Fiedler, who was famous to my generation for his performances with the Boston Pops.)

Sue came by an hour later, picked up my film and was pulled aside by a state police lieutenant. They stepped into the building’s foyer – where I could see, but not hear them – to talk. The conversation only lasted a minute and Sue walked away when it was done.

Around me, the command post still buzzed with the snarl of police radios and the bustle of exhausted cops running on caffeine and adrenaline. I too, was tired and had two pints of cop coffee burning a hole in my stomach lining, and now this.

What the hell is that about? I wonder. Is the lieutenant sharing a piece of information with Sue that he doesn’t trust with me? This is my story, goddamn it. If anyone’s getting choice quotes, it’s me. Or maybe he’s complaining about me. I’d had run-ins with cops, it’s true. I get up in their faces when I think they’re trying to prevent me from doing my job. I have to. I know if I show these guys weakness, I’ll lose what little respect they have for me and then I’m done.

(The canon’s contemporary popularity rises from its use in the score of the 1980 movie “Ordinary People,” directed by Robert Redford and starring Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton.)

I feel like getting in the lieutenant’s face, telling him that if he’s got something to say, he should say it to me, not my boss. At the same time, I need to stay focused on the story and deal with anything else later. Besides, calling out a state police lieutenant in front of his subordinates – not to mention cops from four other departments – would violate several unspoken protocols.

Get this story and get it good, I tell myself. Then check in with Sue and see what the lieutenant had to say. If needs be, I can head over to the barracks and have it out with him tomorrow, after we’ve both had some sleep.

By 7:30, my colleague Brian shows up to relieve me so I can get back to the office and write the story. The second prisoner is caught just before nine and Brian gets a good shot of the police taking him into custody. The picture’s his, but the story’s mine – and that’s what I care about.

Later, after deadline has passed and some of the coffee has worked out of my system, I ask Sue (trying to mask my anxiety with casualness), “So, what’d the lieutenant want this morning?”

“Oh, that,” she says. “He said his wife saw something in the TV section of the Saturday paper that told the name of the piece of classical music used in some commercial. He said he threw the paper out before she could write it down and now he’s in the doghouse. He wondered if I could look it up and tell him, so she’d know.”

What was the commercial in question? Memory says it was an ad for the wines of Ernest and Julio Gallo, but I know better than to trust a memory old enough to vote. The background music, however, was Canon in D Major, by Johann Pachelbel.

Sorry if I’ve caused it to stick in your head.

(Next week: United Airlines ruins Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” for us all.)

© Mark Floegel, 2010

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