This week I took the train to town alone, and felt finally ready to go on automatic pilot and walk from the train station to my office with my i-pod playing. I put the earbuds in my ears and stepped out of the station, and two things happened: I was blasted by full-on, chillier than expected Wellington wind, and I heard the St. John Choir singing “What wondrous love is this” close in my ears. As I moved along with the thick crowd heading up the hill, I heard the blended voices of people I love—my father, my Augusta friends. I saw Jamie’s arms powering the choir, could almost see the look on her face as the tenors started smooth like honey and built to a rich chocolate crescendo. I wondered whether this was the first time the St. John Choir had sung in anyone’s ears in Wellington.
Having those voices with me as I walked up the hill to Willis Street somehow changed my whole sense of the place. Now it was my father walking beside me, Jamie conducting, familiar faces all around. I crossed one city street and then another and then another, finally realising that I hadn’t been killed crossing any of them, even though I’d just been going on reflex. My reflex is now to look right first and then left. That’s what I do automatically after just three months in this country where people drive on the wrong side of the road.
And somehow the combination of St. John in my ears and Wellington in my eyes made me both happy and homesick at the same time. Homesick comes in these weird waves and I never know what will set it off—an email from my dad, a shop window advertising both the coming of Easter and the coming of fall, the ring on a phone when I call the US. Music, which I’ve now begun to listen to outside my house, close in my ears as I move through the landscape, brings up a whole different set of associations. There are songs I associate with wandering around Sydney that make me miss Australia. There are songs I associate with particular seasons which make me feel quite strongly the other-side-of-the-world-ness of my experience here. And of course there are songs I associate with walking across the Calvert Street bridge in DC, or Harvard Yard in Cambridge. Tonight on the train trip home, music from Wicked shuffles up. I'm back at the first time I heard a song from Wicked—in an IET faculty meeting on a hot August day. I hear Naomi practising and practising in the living room at Belmont Road. I can almost feel the wet of a cold Manhattan fall night when Michael and I saw it on Broadway while Trish and Keith watched the kids in DC.
Music brings me closer to the things I’ve left behind, and also magnifies the differences between what I have here and what I had there. I’ll walk through a hardware store and hear Air Supply singing songs I sang in middle school; I’ll walk down the street and hear the Dixie Chicks bemoaning the current US policy situation blaring from a coffee shop. I’m home and away at the same time, and I feel my dual nature. And I’m also aware that now my music is filled with these images, that when I hear James Taylor or the Indigo Girls, located so firmly in US culture, they also describe some of my NZ experience, also touch on these hills, this sea, this sky. The familiar and the strange mixing together, the familiar becoming strange, the strange becoming familiar. The train ride each Wellington day is imbued with my music; tonight a mournful Mary Chapen Carpenter is singing “10,000 miles” as I catch my first sight of Kapiti, mysteriously draped in cloud in an otherwise blue sky. “Fare thee well/ My own true love / Farewell for a while / I’m going away /But I’ll be back / Though I go 10,000 miles…” Beautiful and bittersweet, like so many things for me on this side of the world.
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