Requiem

This has been a long week, woven with really high highs, and really low lows. I think I’ll talk about the highs and call it a day.

The weather has been as consistently wonderful lately as it was terrible when we first got here. This morning there’s a change in the weather, and I’m looking out into a solid grey dawn, the light too dim still for the shades of grey which usually mark the New Zealand sky in rainy weather.

The first real high point of the week was going to see the Durufle Requiem sung by the Bachoir on Tuesday night. Michael and I met after his plane landed (he’d been in Rotorua for a couple of days on a work trip), and we struggled to find a bite to eat in the early-shuttering downtown area where we worked and where the concert was held. So we were laughing and still slightly hungry when we walked into the little St. Mary of the Angels at 8 pm Tuesday night. I had ordered the tickets on line from a ticket place, fearing they’d sell out. This shows my total cultural incompetence—we were the only people who had ordered our tickets on line. Most of the 100 or so people there bought their tickets at the door, although some were clearly friends with some of the choir members.

The church is Catholic, so the choir loft was in the back. This meant that an audience member could sit in the pews and look at the empty altar, or could sit backwards (in a handful of chairs set up for that purpose or at the altar rail) and peer way up into the choir loft. I mostly sat forwards, and was amazed at the difference in just hearing the concert and not seeing it.

The Durufle moved me deeply. It is a piece of music I associate with my dad and Jamie, and it is a piece of music I’ve sung in a single transcendent concert many years ago—with several choirs and a guest conductor who brought us together to have the same voice. It is a difficult piece of music, and one I knew so deeply because I rehearsed it so so much. And it is a piece of music I have come to love but did not love at first—it is often discordant and has many different tones. So I have history with Mr Durufle.

Sitting in that church in Wellington, a lovely little church (everything in Wellington is scaled down) with high sloping ceiling and stained-glass windows, I wondered about what forces had moved me here. I thought about singing this piece with my father and Jamie and our Georgia friends in the huge Sacred Heart cultural center—a seriously magnificent vaulting space. I could almost see the bridge built—through me—from one church to the other. And, at the same time, I was moved that I couldn’t hear my father’s voice, shouldn’t be searching for it. I was struck by the clarity and beauty of the voices—all people I didn’t know—and by a tiny looseness in diction and tone and timing that Jamie would never have allowed. I realised (again) what a spectacular director she is, the way she pulls the very best out of each of us. I realised how amazing it is that in a little city like Augusta there would be such talent, and remembered that the city of Wellington is virtually the same size as Augusta. It was a powerful lesson in the transcending quality of music and also in how far away I am from the things I’ve known before. I wept through much of the piece, and heard the sniffles of others weeping along. We were connected through the music, and I was far from home. Both things were true.

I had a similar experience watching the assembly at Naomi and Aidan’s school yesterday. Naomi found out on Thursday night that she would be one of two students MCing the bi-weekly assembly. So Friday morning I joined the 200 students in the school and about 20 parents, to watch Naomi introduce the activities of the short assembly. I felt incredibly connected to this place and these students watching my daughter up at the front of the room, welcomed and a part of the group. And then we all stood to sing the New Zealand national anthem, and there was Naomi, words behind her on the screen at the front of the room, looking totally awkward and out of place with a song she didn’t know. We are a part of this place, and we are not.

Over the course of the assembly, Aidan showed his self-portrait to the school (along with his whole class), and Naomi won one of the two monthly awards for her class. Her teacher said that she had an excellent positive attitude, and that she was so fast at everything that you don’t worry about Naomi keeping up with the crowd—you worry about keeping up with her. My eyes filled with tears and I watched these two happy kids, completely at ease in a new home so far from their old one. Belonging and also not.

One of the regrets from this difficult week was that I had no camera, but I’ll take a picture of Naomi’s certificate (and Aidan’s self-portrait, when it comes home) and let you see those. Tonight we’re off to a rugby game with J and P and Rob. And soon soon, you’ll be reading letters from me on the other side of the Pacific. It’s an amazing ride.