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EDWARD L. ALBAN ARCHIVED BANG! PAGE

BANG!

BANG! authors are showcased individually here online. Each author installment is made up of three pieces in any combination: poetry shorts (20 lines or less) or fiction or nonfiction (500 words each or less) for a month or more. All work on must be previously unpublished. Submission period runs all year round. BANG! pieces are not published in The New Guard. Work should be very short: flash-short. Pieces on BANG! are meant to serve as a kind of calling card for the author. $22 submission fee. Edward L. Alban is a BANG! Selected Writer. :: Our next installment will be posted on January 30, 2024. ::

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT TO BANG!

Edward L. Alban (Eddie to friends and colleagues) was born in Ecuador in 1938. He settled in Savannah, Georgia in 1952, and married his wife JoAnn in 1965. They raised two children together. A professor of Economics, he has taught at Auburn University, SUNY Potsdam, Armstrong State University and Savannah State University. He retired in 2000 and has been writing poetry and fiction ever since.

In his retirement, he and JoAnn have traveled throughout Europe and South America, pursuing his new avocation for languages and literature and publishing poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

His three forthcoming books are Stealing Forbidden Dreams (an epic novel of literary fiction), Of Sleep and Dreams (poetry) and This Life is So Brief Between Eternities (poetry). Stay tuned for their release in 2023/24 from Alban Books.

Find out more at www.luiseduardoalban.com.

Edward L. Alban.

A flash essay in parts by Edward L. Alban

NARA

I

     Her angelic voice could make a tiger purr. It carried me on wings of gossamer to cloud nine every time. Every note mellifluous, intoned endearingly with a child-like purity. I first heard her in the 60s, when the Bossa Nova was just captivating the world. But it was later, in the 80s, when I got a couple of CDs of Brazilian music that I connected her glorious voice with her face and name, Nara Leão.  

      In the late 80s, one would have to travel to Brazil to learn about her. Google and Wikipedia did not exist. The world was not as connected as it is now and music from other countries was virtually inaccessible. But today, with YouTube and iTunes, we can reach music from around the world from the comfort of our homes. In the 80s we got music strictly through brick-and-mortar stores. Some avantgarde stores in big cities carried international music, which is how I became acquainted with Nara. By then, the LPs were becoming passe, tapes were in vogue, but their days were numbered since digital CDs were out. Unfortunately, CDs, being smaller, carried very little about the artists and I learned very little about Nara then.

       One day in 2018, thirty years later, I was in front of my computer, and I played one of my old CDs. Nara was singing Corcovado. Brazilian music, Sambas and Bossa Novas, always transport me to the 60s. And, invariably, to the summer and to the beach. This wintry day in 2018 again, I saw myself under a beach umbrella, in a trance, musing about Nara… wondering what became of her? How old would she be by now? While the music played, I Googled her.    

II

  In my reverie, I could see the ocean coming and going, a shore breeze blowing. Then I spotted something flashing on the ocean. It was a bottle bobbing on the waves with a message inside. Oh my God, where is it from? I ran to the sea and splashed into the frothy waters to rescue it. The bottle was from Brazil, of all places! And it was about Nara. I was so excited I danced and screamed. Then I read the message.

     It was an obituary note.  Suddenly, I was crestfallen. My bright and sunny reverie popped like a soap bubble and put me back in my drab and wintry room in front of my computer. I had just learned that Nara was long dead. My heart was up in my throat choking me and bringing me to tears. I searched some more and confirmed the ineluctable fact that she had died in 1989 at the age of 47, still young, in the prime of her career.

      For 30 years she’d been dead but living young and hale in my mind. I recriminated myself for being so far behind on the news. But if I had looked her up in the late 80s, I wouldn’t have liked the news. She had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in 1979. Her parents had emigrated to France and were roughing it. She was divorced and had two children. Her family needed her. She had to work. She must have told her tumor to hold it and give her ten more years because she had too much to do yet. And so, she toured, she recorded, and she filled her life and the world with song, as a dying swan aware that her end was near.           

III

To learn belatedly of the demise of someone whom you have loved from afar sinks you into a miasma of contradictions. The incredulity and sadness leaves you reeling disoriented in a time warp, fighting fate and reality. I turned off the music.  My thoughts took me to another mirage. Once, when looking at a starry sky, my eyes focused on a star that shone above the others. I started to address her and then an eerie wind blew by, chilling me with the thought that the star may have died eons ago. But so immense are the distances, that only now after thousands of years her last gasps of light were reaching me. I was witnessing her end. I could almost hear her saying: “Hello… and goodbye. By the time you see me I’ll be long dead.” 

      Nara’s voice, also, so mellifluous and sweet, was coming to me across a hiatus of space and time beyond the grave where I had to readjust the parallax of my new perception of her.  In the 60s they nicknamed her The Muse of Bossa Nova. If you’ve heard Desafinado, Insensatez, and Cantores do Radio, you probably heard her. She also recoded a CD of American favorites, but sung in her native Portuguese, songs like: Somewhere over the Rainbow, Moonlight Serenade, Misty and As Time Goes By. All so sweet.

Essay © Edward L. Alban, 2023.  All rights reserved by the author.