incidents and accidents

Pondering ...

Is there a polite way to indicate to the obviously distraught woman shouting on her mobile phone in Russian, to her mother in Russia, that she SHOULD CLOSE HER OFFICE DOOR so the rest of the floor can get some work done without listening in on this anguished, and to most of us unintelligible, conversation ?

Nyet.

Unplugged (and rebranchée)

27 November 2002 : "I had all kinds of thoughts yesterday and swore I didn't need to write them down because I'd remember the important stuff when the website finally accepted my attempts to create a blog. Let this be a lesson to you. Write things down. And don't swear. It's bad manners."

*

I can't believe it's been THREE YEARS since I started writing here, certain I had nothing to say. In the very beginning I was inspired daily by Greg, and his was the only blog I read. Then I clicked on a few of his links and came across Patricia, and Dan, and Jules, and CW, and Julia ; then I got daring and clicked on a link somewhere besides Greg's page, and found Jane and Lizzy, and then Zadok, ... and the encounters have just kept multiplying, quite richly. (See blogroll on left.)

Both life and blog have changed a lot in three years, even if certain things have remained constant. Having a place to write has taught me much about writing, and about living. Watching as the words take shape has helped me understand something absolutely invaluable, absolutely central - well, two things, really. First, I do have something to say. I have kind of a lot to say, it turns out. And being able to say it has been a true gift. (And there are people willing to read it - and not because they're on my dissertation committee. This still baffles my mind.) Second, wow, there are a lot of us out here on the Internet, sharing our wit and our wisdom (thanks for the phrase, CW), our insights and oversights, our histories and hopes. And that is a very, very grand thing indeed, being able to connect across time zones and unimaginable distances and creeds and languages and modem speeds. Tis good, 'tis very good, 'tis most excellent good. Yay, us. Thank you, Internet(s).

*

27 November 2005 : I had all kinds of thoughts this weekend but couldn't find the words to write them down. It may take a while to transcribe them into moveable type. Or even, you know, language. But I promise updates and photographs soon.

Happy Birthday, little blog. I'm glad to know you.

Thanks. Giving.

The life-oriented updates I haven't been posting, lately, include certain things that are too big to post about - portentous thoughts, momentous possibilities.

They also include other things that end with "entous" but whose names escape me at the moment, because this afternoon I met Shari and had two margaritas on a stomach lined only with the tortilla chips that came when the alcohol did. Those of you who have met fellow bloggers in real life know ... what a pleasure it is to meet someone for the first time and know already how much you like her, how articulate she is and how thoughtful. And then to have the luxury of discovering what the shape of words on a screen can't show you - the way her whole face curves into her smile, which is a delightful thing to watch, and somehow a surprise every single time it happens, and it happens all evening. You might also know the experience of learning your new and virtual friend can match you margarita for margarita and leave you feeling dumb and a teensy bit jealous because after two drinks she still speaks with perfectly enunciated anchorwoman English, while you are running your tongue around in your mouth because all your teeth have gone numb. You know that feeling? Welcome to my life tonight. Drink up ! Where are my teeth?

One of the highlights of the evening came in the following exchange :

Shari : Our table is wobbly. I hope I don't spill the drinks.

Me : I think it's a sign. We have to drink faster.

[Later]

Shari's husband, Mr. Eclectic : Wow, you guys have a wobbly table.

Shari : Yes, I've been trying not to spill the drinks.

Mr. Eclectic : Well, you just have to drink faster.

Me : That's what I said !

Except I was halfway through the second margarita, and so excited at hearing my own thought voiced by a very cool virtual stranger, that it came out something like "Nannr-shrna-OI-traod!"

Still, I think he understood.

Among the things I haven't been mentioning is the fact that, between a full-time admin-and-teaching position at one university, a lectureship at another, and a quarter-time teaching assistanceship at a third, this has been a very busy fall semester. Aside from the classroom (and yes, I am remembering there is life outside the classroom), I've been putting together dossiers for the academic job market. I've applied for 19 positions. That means 19 CVs, 19 hand-tailored letters of motivation, 19 official copies of my graduate transcripts (and by the way, why the transcripts? I want to know. By the time you're applying to be an assistant professor, should the grades you got a decade ago still matter, really?), 19 copies of 4 letters of recommendation, ordered in terms of the kind of position (research-heavy vs teaching-heavy, cultural studies vs literature of the métropole), and 19 painstakingly revised writing samples. By mid-December I should know if I'll have interviews at this year's MLA, or if I need to brush up on my busking and bartending techniques. Any spare good thoughts or prayers you feel like sending in my direction will be most welcome. Really, most. I've got two new research projects going and two articles to write for the spring. And I've got administrative projects going, too, which mostly involve learning how to use Excel and perfecting my fluency in placing catering orders online. There is a lot of stuff in the works, too much to blog or even talk about all of it.

It has all been very exciting and enriching. I wouldn't change a single detail of it (except perhaps that one time I double-ordered lunch on a limited budget. I would change that detail) - but it has been very exhausting. To the point where, and people, I know you will understand the gravity when I tell you this, I haven't had time to taste this year's Beaujolais Nouveau, OR EVEN SEE A BOTTLE. I believe this serves as a thorough indication of my being over-committed. I may design a bumper-sticker for the over-busy : MAKE TIME FOR WINE. (I'll add that to the list of projects for the spring.)

So, this weekend, I am escaping the brick-and-ivy city and heading north to Westfield. I won't be blogging for the next few days at least, and can't make any promises for the week following that, which is already booked pretty solidly 7h30-6 pm every day. In the meantime, I want to wish you all a very joyous and very blessed Thanksgiving. May you spend the holiday with people you love, and who love you. May you eat too much turkey and have to undo the top button on your pants. May you feel competitive toward your siblings during that traditional game of family football. May you find yourself hugged by the latest niece or nephew, the one whose chubby arms reach up only as far as the crease behind your knees, so the hug threatens to cave you backwards without warning. May you see your breath in the first truly cold morning, and smile a sudden smile out of nowhere when you smell the baking pies and hear the voices that, no matter how old you grow or how far away your life manages to take you, always mean home.

This Thursday, as I kneel in the silence and continue to do battle against the cold that has been menacing and retreating (and menacing and retreating) since early October, I will say an extra action de grâces, and give thanks for all of you. For these Internets that have brought us together, and for the things you have taught me here. For the friends and family who come and read, and for all you have seen me through and helped me discover as I've written this place. Thank you for stepping into my heart. Thank you for being part of my home.

Cheers.

And Brandon, dear Brandon, we've decided to blame this evening's tequila consumption on you. And so I am compelled to ask : Where are my teeth ?

Down in Adoration Falling

The church is hushed, silent except for the unhushable which rustles from row to row, pew to pew. A handful of people kneel, eight, maybe ten, up front and on the left arm of the cruciform-after-all nave. We have come to kneel for one hour at a time, sometimes two "one hour at a time"s in a row, here before the side altar with the daily, hourly miracle it houses. The tabernacle doors are closed, the curtain drawn, the red altar candle flickering steadily with life, and before it all the monstrance like a sun ray, its beams dazzling, beckons us inward through the silence, through the unsilent hush.

*

I growl at the alarm when it shrills its insistent electronic beep at 4h16 (why 16 ? because it's a multiple. I like things neat). I hit its oblong button twice then moan to myself and shuffle out of bed for good. Imagine getting up this hour every day, Deo gratias ! ringing quietly, cheerily down the whitewashed hall. I heat leftover instant coffee, double strength, and drink half the scalding cup while standing in the kitchen, one shoe off, hair in a sleepy knot. By the time I have wiped away enough fatigue to be able to figure out my hair situation, the kitchen has taken on light and I open the frigo to grab some apples, a can of soup, a hunk of cheese : lunch. I turn back to the coffee, blow on the steam curling gently from the coffee mug and find myself reciting, dorkily I admit, "Dirigatur, Domine, oratio mea sicut incensum in conspectu tuo" as I watch the steam climb upward into eternal invisibility. Let my prayers find their way to You, Lord - just like the steam from this Nescafé. Modern liturgy? This is how my mind works at 4h54. My eyes still dazed with dreams and darkness. Then I pack the apples, zip the backpack, grab the bus pass, swig from a recycled bottle of tap water, caress the cat goodbye for the day, and head down the stairs and into the pre-dawn world.

It is a long time since I was last in Harvard Square at 5h30, maybe in my former lifetime, on the way to the airport, driving someone or being driven. I'm not sure I ever walked here at this hour. The brick-lined streets are quiet and touched with the belated vestiges of October myths - whispers of dried and burnished leaves fallen in the night, dying streetlamps, the muted sound of the river, traffic a whim of the imagination. The trees outside Au Bon Pain twinkle with tiny white lights. A pale light in the east, tinged rose-blue, has started creeping in to stain the night-black sky - already, itself, no longer black, exactly, but violet, violet-tinted grey, a color you might find in a painting of a storm, or else a woman's hair, just a hidden detail that makes you look closer and wonder what name to give it. At this hour headlamps have faded. You can see the green in the Au Bon Pain trees' leaves. I feel myself think the actual words of the thought : If I were a Cistercian I would see this moment every day, and marvel, and then complete it with But I'd have to leave the city - and the second pang, for beauty and stillness in bustle, leaves me as stunned as the first, for austerity and reverence in silence.

Then I am at the corner of Bow and Arrow, and the tall brick belltower rises formidable as always into the strangely colored sky, and the door is heavy as it always is, and the quiet inside has a weight as it always does, like opening the door of a train's sleeper compartment, all those people breathing. And in the vestibule before I enter I shrug off my backpack, shrug off my down jacket - it is too warm, this early November, even at this hour - and press my phone to "Silent," and tiptoe in, forward toward the beckoning red light. Call and answer : Benedicite. - Deo gratias.

*

Tantum ergo Sacrame-e-e-e-e-entum,
the monks sing, the Version Mozarabe,
Veneremur cernui.
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui-i-i-i-i.
Praestet fides suppleme-e-e-e-e-entum,
Sensuum defectui.

Someone is supposed to intone the English version of the Eucharistic prayer, these final verses of the Pange Lingua hymn, but none of the seven people kneeling has taken that initiative. Yesterday morning the friendly Spanish professor who is a Third-Order Franciscan sang the Latin words with fervor in the nearly empty nave, his voice melodious with fearless vibrato, and I thought I could close my eyes and follow his example today, but when the moment came courage failed me - so I am singing it in my head. I get stuck on the second verse. I am missing a line. I try prompting myself with the Bach setting, the Bruckner setting, the regular plainchant setting. I try what I can remember of the melody from the traditional English translation - but I have never known that version, and remain stuck. When the Mozarabe setting finally pops into my brain (thanks to the monks of Fontgombault, who I have been listening to sing this version nearly every night for nearly five years), the line pops itself into place as well. I almost wonder if the memory has made a sound, like a very minor bone coming into alignment.

*

A few minutes before seven a.m., a young woman is standing at the edge of the front pew, staring down at the wooden seat and the kneeler below it. She stands there for a long minute, perhaps ninety seconds, and I wonder if she has dropped something or left something behind. An I.D. card? A paper? A prayer? She shrugs out of her jacket and Timbuk2 bag, bends herself into the pew, shoves her stuff to the side and kneels.

My hour is officially over at seven, but I find myself reluctant to leave. I could go across the street to Dunkin' Donuts, but the idea of a Dunkin' Donut does not especially appeal : its greasy solidity contrasts too sharply with the hazy mystery of this solemn morning. Plus, if I eat now, I can't take Communion at Mass, which is at eight. I keep talking myself into getting up and leaving, and talking myself back into another decade of the Rosary. I have some very fervent things on my mind and it won't hurt anything to stay in a place where I can offer them directly to God. I know that outside, the Square will have soaked up the day already, its hush fractured by traffic and the ambient noise of the city, its matinal calm snapped, the diffuse silvery light of the minute before dawn sharpened and lost. The city in the morning is a place to hurry through. This chapel has held onto some of the night's stillness, a child stretching for the tips of his mother's fingers just above his reach. Day will slip in here, too, but more slowly. And in the meantime the monks' eternal prayer runs again through my mind, and the monstrance holds the gleaming white eternal body.

Genitori genitoque-e-e-e-e
Laus et jubilatio.
Salus, honor, virtus quoque,
Sit et benedictio-o-o-o-o.
Procedenti ab utroque-e-e-e-e,
Compar sit laudatio.

I close my eyes. Stay.

A-a-a-me-en.

*

I feel her move - and later it registers that I have heard her, the disturbing sound of a suddenly intruding memory - before I look up. My St Georges training may have done me a disservice in one sense - prayer is more important than taking notice of those around me. And I am deep in prayer when the girl half-rises, and I feel myself make an extra effort of concentration to tune her out, and then there is the noise and I look up despite my concentration, and then it is as if a finger draws me to my feet and pushes me forward into her pew. Still, I am only at the corner when she pitches forward. Before I can reach her she has smacked her head into the foot of the folded-up kneeler next to her. Her muscles are rigid, her forehead hot - she is seizing. I feel other people gather behind me and hear myself ask for a packet of tissue, a paperback missalette, anything, to put in her mouth. The man closest to us hands me his wallet instead ; I nudge it carefully between her teeth, feeling her throat work against the heel of my hand. A gag reflex. It's okay, I murmur to her : better to gag than choke. It's okay, I repeat. As much for myself as for her.

I don't know where this instinct comes from. I have never been a nurse or even completed a CPR course, including that week-long unit in tenth-grade Health class. But I hear my father's voice, incongruous in this Catholic chapel, saying that you should shove a wallet into someone's mouth. A wallet? I remember asking. Keeps 'em from swallowing their tongue, he explains, circa 1978, and so I reach up and take the man's wallet, part the girl's rigid jaw as gently as possible and wait. Has anyone called 911? I ask, and a woman in the back raises her hand, speaking on her cell phone. I give her a quick thumbs-up sign and turn my attention back to the girl, whose seems to be calming. I brush the hair off her forehead, feel her skin sticky and warm beneath my fingers. It seems cooler than a minute ago. I tuck her hair behind her ears and rest one hand on her forehead. Her limbs stop convulsing, her clenched hands go slack.

*

I wake up for one bleary moment and Emma is there, holding my hand, stroking the skin. The room is mid-afternoon dark. I feel her fingers first, then my own, curled around them. As if she were the rope pulling me to the surface of a lake and all I knew, unconscious, was that I had to hold on to that. The room is indigo, walls the color of dyed paper, thick with the almost-absence of light. Shapes blur into each other, into the color of time. The word "doux" floats across my consciousness, fat curving calligraphy, dark blue. The needle in my vein, the plastic tubing flooding my bloodstream with an antidote, the black bruise of charcoal around my mouth, the absence of light - these come to me much, much later. If I make my eyes function, focus enough to see Emma there it will seem a dream in my next life. (She swears I slept through the whole hour she was at my side.) For the moment there is only the feel of her hand and the sound of her voice, gentle and rhythmic in the dimness. Her thumb across my hand. Papery skin and pliant, a kind of song.

*

I turn my palm over on the girl's forehead, give her the cool side. The thought crosses my mind for a second that it might seem strange for me to continue touching her, now that her seizure is over - and then I remember what it is like to wake up from your own body. How your limbs become a prison and you try to swim free of them. How the stupidest things bring shaming clarity later, peeing in a bin in front of strangers. And how, even if you don't register it in the moment, it makes a world of difference to feel a presence there beside you. I want to give this anonymous girl what my friend gave me, three years ago, a gift of comfort. I reposition my hand and look down at her - her head is bleeding, just a little, where she hit it when she fell - and see her open her eyes. They do not hesitate. She looks straight up and into me.

Hi, I whisper. She blinks.

*

They're sending an ambulance, the woman with the cell-phone calls from the back of the chapel. All around us is bustle - day intruding on the hush - as people come forward to the pew to check on her, and retreat again. A man emerges from the Sacristy with a Dixie cup and a plastic bottle of water. I shake my head at him : she shouldn't drink or eat anything, after a seizure. For her head, the man mimes, and I realize he is deaf. To pour on her head, he repeats, his voice a blunted buzz.

Would you like us to pour water on your head? I ask the girl, keeping a straight face for about four seconds. We smile at the same time. Her wry smile reassures me : she is conscious. She's come back from wherever she went during the 90 seconds or so she left us. I ask her major, which house she lives in. I ask how old she is and what year it is and what her name is. Laura. I ask if she has courses this morning : she has Shakespeare at 10. I ask if she knows someone in the class who can talk to the professor or take notes for her if necessary. She tries to nod and winces. Don't move, I remind her.

Do you think they'll take me to the hospital? Laura asks, voice lower than a whisper. For the first time since coming to, her eyes flit away from mine.

I think they'll just want to make sure you're ok. It is a lame answer, a non-answer, but I can't bring myself to say "YES, you had a seizure in church, they're taking you to the hospital, DUH." Do you want me to call your roommate, or your parents? She tries to shake her head and winces again. Oh, honey, my heart says. Stay still. I smooth her hair again and her eyes flutter closed. Somehow I know I can't let them stay closed, and I take my hand away. So, where are you from? I ask her, raising my voice a notch, the sound nasal and jarring in this nub of the nave. Her eyes edge slowly back open.

Laura says she grew up in Boston. What day is it? I ask, giving her a wink of explanation. It is a wink that says, I know you know this, just show me you know this. It occurs to me what a teacher I've become. This is the catechism of the conscious. She smiles. All Saints', she says. It is a strange answer but true. It is the reason for the Adoration - forty hours, the Sacrament exposed, to honor the end of the Eucharistic Year pronounced by the late Pope Jean-Paul II. The date is 1 November. A new year. A new intention.

From outside in the terrifying clarity of morning comes the siren's whine. The church doors thud open to the street and a puff of city rushes in. Then they thud closed. Heavy boots approach. Uniform boots. A Walkie-Talkie beeps in the darkness. The parishioners gather, then disperse, and I remove myself quietly as the paramedics come into the chapel and crowd into the pew and ask indiscreet questions in overloud voices and carry Laura out on a guerney and since there is nothing more to do go back to my pew and kneel on the red-padded kneeler and try to find words to pray. At 7h48 she is gone. Silence, banished during the half-hour of need, returns - but it is broken. The chapel has admitted the day.

Dear God, I start saying, then have to press my hands hard into my eyes because I am cold, it is cold, I am shaking. Take care of Laura, I manage, finally. Let her be safe. Throughout the day I function like an automaton, explaining verb conjugations and tenses and the agreement between participle and direct-object pronoun in the past tense with avoir. And I am thinking about Laura.

*

By noon I wonder if it happened. The morning has been full of language students and their grammar questions. I have a five-minute break around eleven, call the hospital emergency room - of course they can't release information to me. I am not family, I am nobody, I am a disembodied voice on the telephone. Thank you anyway, I say, hang up frustrated and, strangely, shaking, and turn around to smile at the next student. Entrez, I tell him, entrez.

*

By three o'clock I wonder if I imagined it. In the university directory, Laura is not listed. I call the department she said she was majoring in : they have no trace of her. I check the online Facebook : there are no records.

*

Emma tells me, once I am out of the hospital that June and can be trusted to keep appointments made in person, that I didn't look like myself.

Thank God, I say, only half under my breath. Emma smiles.

*

A friend asks me, later when I am telling her the story of the seizing girl and my own eerie search for her after, if I would feel the same if it hadn't happened in church. Would I doubt the evidence of my eyes. It isn't what she means, but I start asking, would I care as much. Would I feel shaken to my core.

The young woman turns and freezes in a pose for one long moment. My mind processes her like an image first. She looks like a painting, a saint in ecstasy. The torture and the passion of it, pupils expanding to the rims of her irises, muscles taut, face turned upwards. The monstrance gleams gold behind her, the crucifix is dark scarred wood, the Host is pure, matte white encircled in gold. She looks over her shoulder for a frozen moment, as though someone has called her name. Looking beyond. I rise when I understand she needs me - it takes longer than it should. And then she falls.

I have to answer : I don't know. It is the only way I can be honest. The question - and my answer - shames me. I should care this much, no matter where it happened, happens. I should be as quick to fall to my knees to help any convulsing stranger - not just the clean ones who obviously share my faith. Starting with the homeless people in the brick pit by the T. The ones I pass every morning and evening. With the blindered eyes. I should try to find them later in the day. To see what they need. Make sure they're safe. Offer to call someone. Hold their heads, smooth the hair. Chat with them. And not just the obviously damaged and needy, either, but the people who are invisibly, secretly so. I see suddenly what I should have found the words to pray for, in the unquiet chapel in the echo of the receding paramedic boots and siren. The courage to offer love despite the repulsion I am ashamed of. With or without prayer. Because that's what God is, where He lives in the city. It's where we take Him, wherever we walk, in the hazy light and the crystalline dark, knowing we don't cross these roads alone.

I type my abashed reply into the chat dialogue box. At the end of the day I close the office windows and walk home through dark Cambridge streets, lifting a hand - no, I don't have any spare change takes the same tonality as no, I don't want to learn about Dianetics - to fend off strangers, listening to Sixpence None the Richer sing "Alleluia" until the river rises on my left and I crave silence over music. I arrive home filled with the sounds of water and evening traffic, the rush and whir of city life on one side, and on the other, the banks of elsewhere.

*

Faith for all defects supplying,
Where the feeble senses fail.

Epistolarity again.

1. Dear Gmail,

What I mean WHAT is the deal? All of a sudden I'm getting 65 spam emails every hour, and about half of them are filtering directly into my Inbox. Oh, for those bygone days of my protected Gmail account ! Oh, for the famed Gmail spam filter ! Are you suffering spam fatigue? SO AM I. I do not need (a) a reduced-rate mortage, (2) penis enhancement or (thirdly) mysteriously-available-again-in-America-but-probably-only-for-a-limited-time-so-buy-this-80-dollar-bottle-of-miracle-pills-NOW-hallelujah-praise-the-Lord Ephedra, thankyouverymuch. Also, I don't want to join any online dating services, especially as advertised by "Krystle" who keeps saying things like "R U hot cuz I am horny" ; and I remain unclear on how "Christian debt consolidation" might differ from regular debt consolidation. On second thought, I might need the Ephedra. But please, do not let the spam artists decide that for me. Gmail, your faithful count on you to keep up the filtering work. I'm getting a cramp from hitting the "report spam" button. Please remedy.

Your friend,
Romy

*

2. Dear pieces of spider floating in the tub tonight,

You weren't there when I turned the water on. Then, I found your legs stuck to my thumb after I rinsed my hair.

This freaks me out.

Creeped out in Cambridge,
Romy

*

3. Dear SNL,

Generally, these days, you suck. The sad fact is that you don't even see the irony in your self-mocking retrospective (NBC Sundays). All these former writers and producers stare earnestly into a camera saying, "Wow, we sure sucked back then. I mean, we were all amazed we lasted the season !" I want to echo another of your own sketches, the funky "Deep-House Dish" guy who reviews bad dance music - "Please be less boring soon, ok?" However, that sketch about the "Spammies" tonight? Well done. (See # 1 above.) Well. It wasn't actually well done. But not excruciating. And that is a distinct improvement over the skit about monkeys flinging poo - which was, nonetheless, the funniest part of the show the night it aired.

So, to recap, you suck, but tonight you sucked a little bit less. And do please take your own advice. "Make sure when you move your lips, something interesting comes out! Oo-wee, you are tedious !"

Love and memories,
Romy

*

4. Dear hair salons in Harvard Square which I went into hoping for a walk-in appointment because Great Cuts had a 45-minute waiting list,

I wish I was a Mystery Shopper so I could officially grade you with an F. I honestly wanted to give you my money. I wanted you to take scissors and reduce my 18 inches of hair to, oh I don't know, 6. This is dramatic for me. It was a momentous thought. But I walked in, and in the first place I was ignored while the girl who sits behind the desk blew on her (wet, shiny) nails and fussed about the credit-card machine. Because it didn't want to print two copies of the receipt of the woman in front of me. And nails-girl didn't even raise her head to acknowledge my presence, or offer an apologetic "just a sec" while she figured out the technological mystery that is the Zon machine. Then a supervisor came out from a back room, wearing a pink t-shirt that read "M is for MILKSHAKE" (I wish I was kidding), and stared at me as if I'd thrown a wrench into the fact that all customers must show up in her mental Facebook. I said, "I was hoping for a walk-in appointment, but it looks like you're kind of busy," and I was being sarcastic, and she took me literally and said "Yeah, and we're not open tomorrow, either, do you want a card?" And I took it and walked out, and threw left it on the stairs on my way down. In the second salon a flamboyant hairdresser said "we're all booked up through the end of next week." And TURNED HIS BACK and flouced out of the room. Hello? Forgive my assumption, I've never been a receptionist in a salon, but ... Isn't it sort of standard practice to ask if the unkempt person on the other side of your desk wants an appointment for another day? Granted, I was a walk-in and your energies are concentrated on your nails current customers. I try to be understanding about these things. But I'm curious. Do you just have enough business as it is? Your stylists don't want a new client who tips them? You actually want bad press?

Giving you what you desire,
Romy

*

5. Dear Sam Robbins,

Where do I begin? You seemed so genuine, Sam Robbins, so concerned for my welfare. And you caught me in a weak moment. I was probably PMSing and feeling very fat. I had tried on my favorite trousers that day and watched my belly roll down over the waistband - and let's face it, Sam Robbins, nobody gets through THAT experience with a smile. And so you had me, for the space of one bottle. You didn't force me to participate in some automatic enrollment in some autoship program which I could cancel within the first 15 days - only of course the miracle drug wouldn't be sent to me until day 14 - and you flattered me on the bottle itself, saying "People under 150 pounds should start with one pill then increase to two after three days." We both know, Sam Robbins, that means you think two pills would have some adverse effect on my delicate system. Because I am a delicate flower with body-image issues. So, yes, Sam Robbins, I succombed. I bought your weight-loss pill, and I didn't even complain that its name sounds like something from a Lord of the Rings spinoff. But then, you ruined our relationship, Sam Robbins. You sent me an email saying that wearing a bra causes breast cancer. "Brand-new scientific proof," you claimed, proves the danger of this insidious undergarment. Then you sent an email saying that excessive exposure to the sun could prevent skin cancer. And then you sent an email about how if I take your supplements I can stop the process of aging, and I got right off your bus, Sam Robbins.

Tomorrow I will suit up in my bra and sunscreen, and carry my thirty-six years out into the world. At the end of the day I may be one pound heavier and one wrinkle older, but I will know I am no longer denying or artificially reprogramming my body : I am allowing it to walk me through this world, letting it be heavy where it is heavy and light where it is light, without subjecting those qualities to the arbitrary standards of an airbrushed stranger with an overly familiar marketing tone in his emails.

Oh. Also? NORMAL PEOPLE SIGN THEIR 'FAMILIAR' EMAILS WITH ONE NAME.

Cheers,
Romy

*

6. Dear Nair,

Thank you. Got anything for armpits?

Smoothly yours,
Romy

*

7. Dear running,

I have MISSED you. You rock.

Love and happily sore muscles,
Romy

Varia.

Some things heard, read, and - unfortunately - spoken aloud during the past week.

*

Me (pulling unexpected innards from a chicken's ... intimate cavity) : Oh man, gross ! Well, Brontë will eat it.

My dinner guests (relaxing in the living room, out of sight but clearly within earshot) : That's nice. You know, to hear that from the chef.

Me : Oh.

*

Taking the language literally.

*

Student : I mean, what do I have to say? Who cares what I think about this weird novel about a gay guy in prison in Argentina?

Me : That's just part of the writing process. Listen. Did you read the campus paper yesterday morning? Don't you think William Wright asked himself the same questions? After all, who cares what happened to a few students a long time ago?

Student : I don't think I get your point.

Me : I mean, who cares what happens at Harvard?

[pause]

Student : Um, everybody?

Me : Oh.

*

And so it's official. I am no longer allowed to speak.

Mother Tongue

Cette langue m'est marâtre, I read. I have been given a text to translate ; this is its first line. And I am stuck on the fourth word, or is it the fifth, since there's a contraction - the third - the second. At least the first is safe. Cette. This. Ah. But it is a trick after all, because - as Dr Byrd taught me, in English 127, back in 1991 - you should never begin a sentence with "this." The word (definite article? relative pronoun?) is vague and undetermined, ambivalent down to its grammatical function. Of course Dr Byrd would not approve of the number of forms of "to be" I have written in just three lines, so his opinion of my use of the definite article-slash-relative pronoun in my role as translator might be (there's another one) (and another, like a hall of mirrors) secondary to his overall assessment of the strength and efficacity of my writing. Weak. Sloppy. And of course I cannot live with Dr Byrd in my head, it is 2005 not 1991 and I have to be (another mirror) my own editor. Move ahead. Langue. Tongue? Language? Dialect? The author of this sentence, Assia Djebar, a writer from the Maghreb. How would she think of French?

I stare at the four - or five - words and think : This should be simpler.

*

Ma langue me trahit, I write. My tongue betrays me. But it is not my tongue. What is the name of that place at the back of the mouth, where muscle meets cartilage? That is where I have made the first cut, with my precise stainless-steel scissors. A snip and the horrible sound of human connective tissue ripping, see how it bleeds, the whole race and history, learn from that, what is the structure, how does that wound speak. Open it wider, listen. Snip. Voilà comment fonctionne la langue. This is how the tongue works, it is just this visceral and ingrained, you have to analyze its platelets and the patterns of its cells, how they spatter when they fall from the mouth as you rip the tongue out and transplant it into your own, the taste of another's words, the taste of a different history of blood and morphemes, and why is blood a nasal, well pronounce it as you snip again and tear the muscle and feel the sound at the back of your mouth at the top of your palate, sang, a sound that stops because the tongue has cut off the air passage and the consonant must pass through the nasal cavity. Tug on the slippery end and listen. I started cutting at age 6 with a story by my mother called Jacques - no, my mother is not called Jacques, that was the story, and the mouse of the story, my mother wrote it and illustrated it and the story of Jacques remains one of my lifetime favorite books. Jacques the mouse wore a waistcoat and shoes. Jacques est un souris, my mother wrote, and my traitorous translating tongue flaps at one edge and says, une.

*

My new Italian colleague walks into the office we share two days a week. I am kneeling on the floor with my forehead pressed into the edge of the utilitarian metal desk, right arm stretched impossibly back behind, into the space under the bookshelf where the desk doesn't quite meet the wall. I hold the mouse in one hand and pull on its cable with the other. There is a problem with the mouse. When I hear him come in I freeze for an instant then look up and try to smile, nonchalant.

Che successe ? he asks, staring, laughing. What on earth ...?

C'è un problema con il ... con la ... souris, I answer, gesturing with the mouse-hand. I am certain the computer's mouse is not "topolino" like Mickey, and since the colleague speaks French I use that word and its feminine article, to solicit the vocabulary from him in Italian.

Con il mouse, he tells me. Si dice "mouse."

Che peccato, I answer, what a shame, looking wistfully at the black creature in my hand, which has been denuded of its possibility for native music and regional lilts.

*

Ma langue me trahit. Ce n'est pas ma langue. If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out. If thy right arm offend thee, cut it off. My tongue betrays me, and so I will sever it at the root and substitute one of which I can only ever hope to be a partial master. My Frankenstein tongue, sewn in tightly over the years, bits patched together as a sound falls into place or a position of the jaw. I understand but cannot make the words come to me. I sit before a blank paper bleeding from the gills and cannot find the words to speak what I need to say. If thy tongue offend thee ... I take a pen and let the ink traduce my blood into language. Barely legible, but a start. And then I find the keyboard and begin to type. How can a tongue betray you when it is not yours? Cette langue m'est marâtre. It keeps coming back to this. Marâtre - the cruel mother. The fairy-tale substitute for the dead maternal favorite, a beast of burden who must feed the children and know they cannot love her, it is not in them to love her. Marâtre mulatresse - the cruel half-breed mother, a tongue of darkness licking the edges of the light, the sound of pans slamming onto iron burners in a freezing kitchen in the morning before dawn, a cupboard left unlatched, the box marked poison. And you have to drink it or she'll know you know she is feeding you poison. Danger in the corners and the swallowed syllabes, the "ce" in est-ce que, the "de" in tout de suite, the things we say without saying them, the sound is there but the word itself a stow-away, a pill you can't afford not to take but can't afford to swallow, dissolving glueily underneath a corner of your torn tongue. Spit it out and you call attention to your betrayal. Let it lie and it might knock you out. And why would I be master of this tongue, I, impostor, I don't even have a proper adjectival form with that description. Imposteur. I am travestie in someone else's grammar, trying to buckle a swash with fingers made stubby and maladroit from trembling. This is not my tongue. And tongues should not obey masters, but the other way around. And I am not a master, either. At best I am the mistress here, illicit and flushed in a borrowed big shirt, letting the syllables take me with no thought of self-respect, because I am not desperate but never did learn how to play hard to get, and this tongue on my tongue gives me wholeness I never found before the betrayal. Mulaîtresse - the cruel half-blood mistress. I beg her for correction. I am rarely disappointed.

*

Jean-Baptiste came to rehearsal and, at the end, said goodbye. "Je pars," he told us, I'm leaving. We crowded around and asked questions but he would answer nothing. Finally he lifted a hand, a bit weakly, and "S'il vous plaît, plus de questions" he said, "vous saurez bientôt." No more questions. You'll know soon enough. If you please.

I received a letter three or four weeks later, postmarked Flavigny. Je te demande pardon pour le secret, he wrote. Pour moi cette discrétion était la meilleure façon d'agir. I, too, was sorry for the secret, and wrote him to tell him so. Cher frère Jean-Baptiste, I started, then stopped. If he was "frère" already he was almost certainly no longer Jean-Baptiste. I didn't know how to address him, so settled for "Cher ami."

Dear friend, what delightful news your letter brought me. Thank you for writing and letting me know where you are. Please forgive our [the choir's] awkward questions - you know your friends love you and were concerned, and sorry to see you go. I want to understand your discretion, as you put it, but I admit it gives me problems. This secret meant your friends who love you could not pray for you as you decided to accept God's call. It saddens me to think what a marvel was happening in you while you were in our midst, and that we were so little present for you as it happened. That said, I know it is written that you must pray to your Father in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will answer you. And now know we will pray for you together.

I missed Jean-Baptiste. He was a diligent, talented tenor, and a good friend to my godfather. After his departure for the monastery we never sang quite the same way again. But despite my slight indignation I understood his silence. Certain things, you just can't say to other people. Thus the mystery of the unspeakable. Unspeakable itself such a heavily connotative word, a crow, its wingtips laden with meaning. But what if it was beautiful instead? A mystery of unutterable beauty. And grace. It takes you to a place beyond the purview of speech, which suddenly seems flimsy and inadequate.

*

I have been trying to write this letter for weeks, I write, then cross out, the black bars from my fountain pen soaking through to the next sheet down. Start over. It is inexact. I have been meaning to write this letter for months. Closer.

But I have been afraid of what I might say. Cette langue me trahit. This tongue betrays me. (Which tongue? I hear Dr Byrd asking, his voice wry and sonorous from the lectern.) Which tongue? Yours. Mine. The one I try to borrow. How does it betray me? (A bit of ratiocination.) It shows my weaknesses. And when writing I need you to see me as just strong enough. I am always dancing around the words, never sure if I've chosen poorly and exposed my unlearned imposture, or chosen too carefully and not expressed myself at all. Which would be worse? Most of all I know I should just write my heart and not concern myself with your reaction. That way you will read my truest self, in your tongue. And I dare to hope my truest self is not barbaric, that the cutting and suturing I have performed on myself in order to speak this language, in order to bleed French blood, has scarred over by now, become as near to seamless as possible. And yet before you I am anxious, and trip over those old scars. My "r"s are all wrong. My nasals are all wrong. The intonation falters and then stops. I reposition my mandibles and palate for a second try but you have raised a hand. I will never forget the discretion in your refusal, as long as I live. I blame myself for speaking poorly, it doesn't matter that you praise my accent, this is not about an accent but a phonemic construction at the cellular level. That is where I am lacking. I am trying too hard. I am all wrong, from the inside out. I can't say any of this, can't write it either, it is too bitter, amère, the third mother, hidden.

Chère Mère, I finally type. I have been wanting to write to you for two years. Forgive my silence.

It is her name alone : I have no other for her. It is a name I have never used within my family. There is no confusion, just the poignant sense of saying everything all wrong.

It takes me nine days to finish the letter. It is three pages long, and incomplete.

*

Cette langue m'est marâtre, I read on the white page. This tongue is a cruel mother. To me. For in French, the cruel mother tongue, I am built into the sentence, nearly invisible, not a subject. I am an object pronoun, contracted into a weak descriptive verb. I am too close to cruelty, indistinguishable from "is." My presence turns the verb into a homonym of "but," or the fifth month of the year, I change its aural nature and it changes me into a participant in the act of maternal cruelty. And thus the tongue betrays me, not just the one I have stitched into my mouth but the one I have ripped out. I have two tongues, two mothers, and they do not speak. Neither understands the other's idiom. They sit across the barren living room on Sunday afternoons, wood planks gleaming at their feet, staring black-eyed as the hours pass, so busy trying to see each other up that they don't see me, which is just as well. I am pouring desperate poison into their bitter tea, hoping they will drink. They have made me cruel, taken my inability to choose between them as betrayal. They don't understand. My real cruelty lies in building this bridge : I force them to cross it, day by day by day, and hide from them my tears. C'est un pont à mères. A bitter bridge. A bridge for mothers. They stumble on its splinters, blood at their feet. On the other side they find : their own reflection. And must start across again. Cette langue me trahit. This tongue betrays me. Cette langue je trahis. I betray this tongue. I make it exist outside itself, in the body of its adversary.

*

Mais toi, quand tu veux prier, va dans ta pièce la plus retirée, verrouille ta porte et adresse ta prière à ton Père qui est là dans le lieu secret. Et ton Père, qui voit dans le secret, te le rendra. (Matthieu 6:6)

An orgiastic follow-up

So, last week when the orgy was in full 1980s swing, Anthony mentioned his Goody comb, which he had lost somewhere in the comments. (Personally, I think it was hiding with Jenny's grandma's boobs, but I'll save the speculation for another time ...)

Anyway, he has apparently found it. Now, if only I could locate my A-ha concert t-shirt from that night at Irvine Meadows ...

Expulsion des étrangers condamnés pour violences urbaines

Nicolas Sarkozy a annoncé l'expulsion "sans délai" des étrangers en situation régulière ou irrégulière condamnés pour leur participation aux violences urbaines.

Nicolas Sarkozy [French Minister of the Interior] has announced the immediate expulsion of those foreigners in regular or irregular situations [vis-à-vis their French immigration status] who have been indicted for their participation in the recent wave of urban violence.*

One hundred twenty foreigners, not all in an irregular situation, have been indicted on such counts, the Minister of the Interior specified while addressing recent events before the National Assembly.

"I have asked the Prefects to ensure that any strangers, whether in irregular situations or regular, who have been indicted, be expelled without delay from our territory, including those who have a titre de séjour,"** he continued.

[Emphasis added]

"When a person has been given the honor of a titre de séjour, the least we can expect is that he will not get himself arrested in the process of inciting to riot," the Minister added.

Nearly thirty associations and political parties spoke Wednesday to denounce the Minister of the Interior's decision to expel foreigners indicted for having participated in the tide of urban violence.

"Beyond the manifest inequality of this procedure, Monsieur Sarkozy continues to target foreigners and to make scapegoats of them. He admits that, far from abolished, double punishment is still a current reality," reads a communiqué signed by these parties and associations ...

I have to say I disagree with the last statement. Anyone who has lived in France ad dealt with official paperwork knows how difficult it is to get, and how precarious an administrative and immigration situation it is to live with. If you are, forgive me, stupid enough to put that at risk by burning cars, dousing public transportation with kerosene and throwing bricks at the riot police, then you deserve what you get. And it doesn't seem to me that Monsieur Sarkozy is unjustly targeting foreigners. How "justly" have the riot instigators and participants been targeting the cars, buildings, buses, police and news crews with their bottles and stones? If you're arrested for a crime in a country where you don't have citizenship, you shouldn't expect to benefit from the rights and protections a citizen would. That seems logical to me.

Here's another account.

And on a slightly lighter grim note :

And so it continues.

*My (unauthorized, I should add) translations.

**document that gives permission to reside and work in France

January 2001 (The Smell of Lavender)

When we leave the highway that winds along the wide bank of the Rhône, and begin to climb small numbered roads over the Mont Ventoux and its picturesquely monikered surrounding Dentelles du Montmirail, I lean back and close my eyes, and breathe.

*

The morning began at 4, when I shoved myself from sleep and into a shower I hissed at to make it seem less loud. I'd made strong coffee the day before and poured some into a saucepan to heat it. I dressed nervously, unsure what to wear. There had been talk of robes, and instinctively I knew whatever clothes I chose would make me feel out of place - most of my clothes did that, anyway, in this country of thin and elegant women and color-coordinated men. I remembered, briefly, mocking my husband and his brother for their insistence on white socks. The blinding flash between jeans cuff and sneaker top as they climbed the stairs ; the jarring Oreo-cookie effect with dress slacks and shirts with buttons. As I stared at my small closet, trying to decide (black jeans stained with photo chemicals, or blue jeans far too big around the waist, or beige canvas trousers with a button fly), I felt ridiculous. I blew on my coffee for distraction. Steam crept across its surface, still boiling, the color of a char. And then rose into the air, lithe fists climbing ropes, and dissolved.

Finally I chose black slacks and a hunter-green fleece jacket, colors that wouldn't make me stand out too much (no red-and-black spats-styled Docs), a dark earth-toned woolen scarf from the puces, argyle patterned socks, black shoes with silver lace-holes. I sipped my coffee and leaned my head briefly against the wall. I contemplated getting back into bed, despite the danger of missing my 7 am rendez-vous across town. The temptation was great. Instead I sighed, pulled my missel from a stack of books, gave my computer a mildly despairing glance and a cursory apology that grew less apologetic as the words penetrated my fatigue, no research writing today, I'm going to Provence, I'm going to a monastery in Provence. I poured my boiling coffee into a white travel mug and pulled the picnic lunch in its plastic bag from the frigo, shoved arms into heavy grey wool peacoat sleeves and left, trying to close the front door quietly. I took the first métro, the blue line at Debourg.

*

We gathered at the row of slanting parking slots before the Eglise Sainte Blandine. Some men were missing. Eleven of us were going altogether : Véronique, Maykie, Madame Marion, Marthe, Nadia, and me ; René, Eric, Marcel, Matthieu and l'abbé. Madame Marion would drive and we would split the cost of gas and tolls on the Autoroute du Sud. It should be 80 francs per person, Véronique predicted, the voice of experience, she had made this drive so many times. We waited at the Place de l'Eglise until Eric drove up in a rush, There was an accident, don't take the Tunnel de Fourvière, -But of course we won't take the Tunnel de Fourvière, the Autoroute entrance is just two streets ahead, he said by way of explanation for lateness and Maykie answered him.

On y va alors ?
-Attends, on attend René.

Véronique was impatient to get moving, she wanted Madame Marion to start driving. We had to be at the top of the mountain road by 9h30 or we would miss Tierce, possibly even the beginning of the Mass. And it was cold. But we waited for René, gone during the wait for Eric in search of a restroom, and while waiting we climbed into our places in Madame Marion's car and Véronique folded her coat into a pillow she leaned against the window. Vous m'excuserez si je ronfle, she said, with a droll voice.

I sat in the backseat, travel mug from Columbus Café propped between my feet so it wouldn't tip over. The French had marveled at this invention - you bring coffee with you into the street ? you can take it in the car ? you drink that much coffee ? - and mocked it a little bit (Didn't you wake up early enough to have breakfast ?), even though Columbus Café was a Paris chain and had opened two cafés already in Lyon, one in the Fnac at Bellecour. I'd bought my travel mug while living in Paris, which seemed to justify bringing it with me instead of its American cousins from Finagle a Bagel or The Coffee Connection, a pang for that lost Harvard Square haven with its always steam-covered windows, resolutely anti-gentrified, now a Starbucks, pay and get out, no long chats over lattés as the winter presses up against the glass, my mind was wandering back across a country and a sea and into a city I was sure I'd left, for good if not forever, and then a man walked past outside the car, Madame Marion and Maykie standing in the early-morning dark talking with Eric and Marcel, I thought it was René come back from his last-minute wee but no, it was a strange man, staring in at the car windows, fingers curled around his penis which stood out from him at a perfect perpendicular, and once I'd seen him I couldn't look away, my eyes were stuck, a lost coffee house playing out remembered scenes behind them, and before them this man, whom the others did not seem to see. His curled fingers stroked, stroked, stroked, in rhythm. Oh ! I exclaimed when I realized what I was seeing, and could not think of anything to say. Bonjour ! I meant it sarcastically but the word tumbled out quite at random, and the other choir members gave me strange looks as the man turned and walked away from the car. And to this day I see that morning scene - the white church ungleaming in pre-dawn fog behind our cars, the dark air and the shapes of Madame Marion's and Maykie's and Eric's shoulders as they spoke, the sound of Véronique's deepening breath, and the masturbating man, his penis perfectly round. And then René returned and Nadia and Maykie climbed into the back seat with me and Madame Marion started her car and headed for the Autoroute entrance, two streets ahead, and we headed south for Le Barroux.

Sept heures trente-huit, Véronique roused herself to say. On va râter Tierce.

*

If you've been to an active monastery - by "active," I mean still functioning, as opposed to a historical landmark (though even there something sacred lingers in the stones of the cloister) - then you know the experience. The Monastère Sainte Madeleine in Le Barroux is a functioning monastery of contemplative Benedictine monks. When I went there the first time, I knew nothing of contemplation in its Catholic sense, I knew nothing of monks. It was the first time, besides a dollar-bin CD of Santo Domingo do Silos, that I'd heard Gregorian chant - not as some cool post-modern fusion backdrop for lyrics about Sade, not as a concert piece swiftly replaced by the multi-layered voices of Renaissance polyphony, but as living prayer, a series of small organic units of sound all addressed to God.

I tried to think about it through the lens of my academic training. I knew a little something about semiology - though, granted, from a post-modern literary, and not a medieval musicological, perspective. But certain rules of interpretation are universal. Each text of Gregorian chant is semiological - a system of signs, obeying the rules of a larger system. The voices of the cantors participate in constructing a semiotic unit that carries meaning specific to and dependent on the texts proper to the day (and in some cases more specifically one Mass during that day) on which it is sung. Each Mass or solemn Office is therefore unique within the subset of Offices to which it belongs. Paradoxically, perhaps, the system of signs depends as much on repetition as it does individuality. Certain elements of the chant come back with greater frequency - the psalms for Matines, Laudes, Prime, Tierce, Sexte, None, Vêpres, and Complies, are repeated according to the day of the week. Saturdays are Marial days, so the Introït "Salve Sancta Parens" recurs weekly as well, unless a saint's feast exists to supplant the Saturday liturgy. Other elements recur monthly (the Mass du Sacré Coeur, for example : the first Friday of the month) or according to a flexible periodicity (the Introït "Gaudeamus" is sung for several feasts throughout the year, including la Toussaint on 1 November, the Feast of Saint Benoît celebrated in some places on 11 July, and also for the Feasts of Sainte Anne on 26 July, Sainte Agathe on 5 February and until recently for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 15 August.

The Gregorian antiphon, introït, offertory, gradual, alleluia, tract, sequence, or hymn exists on several levels at once. It signifies as a total system in and of itself, a whole unit of meaning within its own lines. It is specific to the Mass during which it is sung, and then to the day on which that Mass occurs. Sometimes it is repeated for the length of an octave (for certain major feasts, celebrated throughout the following week). Beyond the feast day and/or octave, the Gregorian piece holds significance within the frame of the liturgical season (Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost) and then within the liturgical year (time of penitence, Ordinary time). And beyond that, it serves as a placemarker, an anchor in the endless cycle that begins each year with the first Sunday of Advent. Each unit is a temporal representative of eternity that simultaneously marks a specifically delimited space and participates in a larger wholeness beyond its own staves. Each unit of chant stands whole for its own moment and day, and also for the great mystery of that day's place in the universal cycle. Like the ripples reaching out from where you might throw a pebble into a pond. The Alleluia reaches, first, the people at the Mass at that moment, between Gradual and Gospel. Then it speaks to the feast day on a greater scale. Then it reaches to the universal Church - everyone everywhere in the world will hear that Alleluia on that day, and celebrate the saint or feast around whom/which that Mass centers. And finally, and foremost, it reaches upward to God.

But the greatest mystery is that this all happens not just on the level of the structure of the Church, or the structure of the Mass, but within the core of the infinitesimal structure of the piece itself, with each note and neume. Take the Alleluia for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, for example :

Even before the verset, the patterns of signification are visible in the chant. Let's look at a couple small details first. The piece begins on a Sol (in a lowered Do clef because the shape of the piece goes so high afterward), which represents the earth, the place from which the voices of men (humans) begin to sing the praises of the Lord. "Sol," European/Gregorian solfege for the note Americans call "G," is the fifth in the Gregorian scale and thus automatically a point of reference because of the note's Dominant status in the degrees of a scale that starts on Do ("C"). (Guido d'Arezzo's hymn in the honor of John the Baptist gives us the names for each tone of the scale.) "Sol," just past the musical halfway point on Fa, has resonances with the Latin noun for "Sun" (solis) as well as that for foundation or base (solum) - and these dual poles of etymological possibility suspend the note in the scale, holding and drawing it upward, lending it equilibrium.

This Alleluia's first notes are simple puncti, which "ground" the chant in a mode and a specific stability (solum, foundation). The mode (the arabic numeral 7, above the large initial "A") is one of eight that characterize the patterns of chant pieces. The modes give certain tonalities and motifs to the chant, and also give it certain "moods," indications of nuance and expression written into the tenor of the piece and into which the piece is written. This seventh mode is also known as angelicus (angelic), and is characterized by "a lofty joy," a certain weightlessness, "an uncomplicated youthfulness," "a persuasive and natural enthusiasm." (These descriptions are my own translations from Dom Daniel Saulnier's book Les modes grégoriens, now available in English from the Solesmes website.) It is a transparent mode, easily recognizable because of its armatures and ornamentations, resolutely and simply joyful. Seven is to Gregorian chant what 99 is to the decimal system - an "almost there" kind of place, but without the sense of incompletion or lack. Singing the seventh mode, you can feel your voice longing toward the resolution of the upper Do, the eighth tone (whose mode is called perfectus), yet content and unconstrained, dancing around the elaborately developed neumes that effortlessly climb the scale and unsorrowfully redescend. Like the angels themselves, this is a mode of pure spirit, an energy that surpasses the confines of the corporeal and yet communicates to them its sheer joyfulness.

The Alleluia starts on a Sol for "Al-" and "le-," the first two syllables, then climbs (think solis, sun). The third note develops on the repetition of the initial Sol, with a podatus, a two-note neume that provides (musically and literally) a "foot" to ground the piece in this tonality. Then the syllable of "lu-" is drawn out and given élan, as it lilts between notes in first the minor third of La and Do, then the major third between Do and Mi, with a temporary resting point on Ré for the first note of the long ornamented syllable "-ia." Those lilting thirds are playful, joyous, and light, and it has taken longer to describe them than it would to sing them properly. The "-ia" syllable soars up to the superior Sol, an octave above the starting note and the pinnacle of this acclamation (the verset actually goes all the way up to La), then comes down bit by bit in graduated cadences, its final note a return to the initial Sol. Plainly put, the Alleluia begins on Earth (solum), takes the human voice singing praises upward to Heaven (solis), and brings it back down so that the verset can develop the central idea of all the texts for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost - God's importance, His supremacy over Thrones and the concerns of this earthly life, His great mercy and kindness to which we must appeal as we give Him praise. Thus in the note on which the Alleluia begins and ends - Sol - a syllable which is not pronounced nonetheless positions us perfectly within both the individual unit of signification and the greater liturgical system we perform as we sing it, and allies us as firmly with the angels as it does remind us of our present place of inferiority. As my former choir director used to say, "God is in the details." Nothing makes that knowledge clearer than singing Gregorian chant and being ourselves present in its details.

This is a beginning attempt at expressing the merest outline sketch of what I started to learn, on that first visit to Le Barroux. It is an anachronistic, or perhaps achronological, example : in January, the monks did not sing the Alleluia from the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost. But this Alleluia illustrates most perfectly the marriage of music and semiology that suddenly opened before me that Saturday morning during the Mass.

*

During the monks' sung Mass, I noted on a slip of paper I happened to have in my missel the things I didn't understand. I wrote :

hair
hoods
hand on arm - encensement

On the other side of the paper, which still marks a particular Sunday after Pentecost in that same missel : a typed quotation from Lucretius. "None of the things therefore which seem to be lost is utterly lost, since nature replenishes one thing out of another and does not suffer anything to be begotten, before she has been recruited by the death of another." (If you changed "nature" to "God," the quotation would be an apt description of my own fumbling beginnings in faith, those few long months before my baptism, and then the longer and more numerous months before faith became a real foundation within me, rather than a practice.) Beneath the words I noted as questions, a Latin line jotted later, which I don't remember where I read or when. Sero te amavi, jam solum te quaero. Years later, the Latin remains confusing. "Late I came to love you, now I search for you alone"? Or "I learned to love you late, now I only search for you"? Or "Too late I loved you, and now only do I search for you"? Is it an expression of entire, though belated, devotion ; or rather, one of desolate, bewildered regret? I prefer the first.

Over the years I have learned the answers to my questions. I know about tonsures and hoods, and have seen enough incensing of altars to realize the acolyte's hand on the celebrant's arm is a traditional gesture both practical and tender. But the cryptic Latin line lingers, to remind me of that first Saturday in the monastery when so many things were unfamiliar and bewildering.

*

I remember many things about that day. The hours of music theory for staves that still were unfamiliar (four lines instead of five !) ; the kindness of the monk who taught us, and treated us like family, and who became for me a touchstone ; the breathless silence in the nave when an office had ended, and the humming silence in the mid-afternoon when prayer alone filled the space between stones ; the olive trees and enclosure paths still glimpsable from a little clearing I found to walk in ; the way faces relaxed into smiles and the women's hands into automatic movements as we took our picnic and combined the dishes. The fragrance of baking bread. The jars of honey and preserves, tin boxes of shortbread, rosaries and holy cards and editions of Vie et Règle de Saint Benoît in the gift shop. And most of all, the way a pocket opened in me, like a stained-glass window in a sudden ray of sunlight, and I felt myself come alive to a completely different world, hidden and within reach and waiting and calling, like the throaty bells of the Angelus. That's what I remember, as crazy as it sounds : feeling somehow home here, turning around in the car as we drove away that evening to watch the abbey disappear beneath a rising crescent moon. A pang of homesickness, to leave this place behind. And a knowledge I would return. Would have to return.

*

There comes a point in the road, a turning, where the city disappears behind you as if you'd never seen it, and the hilly rural route is one you've driven all your life and never were afraid of, and then there's a clearing with a small shrine in the arms of a dead tree, and then the hand-lettered brown-and-white directional signs : Malaucène 1,7, La Barroux 0,8, Notre-Dame de l'Annonciation 0,3. The car slows of its own accord and the curves in the road smooth themselves out, become gentler, and there you are, a letting go, and then gold-rose sandstone rises just where you'd thought it couldn't be, you must have made a mistake, except you didn't because there beyond the turning faces of tournesols and the sloping road and the place where monks sometimes set out pots of honey and apricot preserves and artisanal strappy leather sandals, on a sun-warped rain-bleached table, there behind the climb and the white netted hives of hillside bees and the olive trees and finally the purple waving stalks and fronds, there rises the curving stone of the Roman sacristy, and the blue-and-rose-glass windows that you know turn the nave to jewel light inside, and you grip the wheel then release and close your eyes for just a second, breathing, because you have forgotten how to in your city of ancient stone you have to walk on, you have forgotten the silent center of the stone and how it pulses in the stillness and how each inhalation brings the scent of lavender into your lungs, gentle and eternal as a prayer or a name you can't pronounce, the scent of light itself. It is a color and a song, a delicate taste against the cold tang of air, a timbre of summer in a minor chord.

This comment, over chez The Recovering Choir Director, says much of what I was trying to say about Chant and its slow, deep graces and gentle mysteries.

The Orgy Continues ...

... over at The Last Five Pages. She's got monks, she's got links, she's got Salma Hayek's boobs. Go, go now, and read Patricia's fabulousness, and then over the next day or so leave her five or ten comments. Comment early, comment often. (Yes, it's a motto.)

Paris brûle-t-il ?

Those fucking people. You let them into a country, pay them welfare and give them a place to live, and this is how they behave.

I am standing on the decorative brick sidewalk outside the Church Street T exit in Harvard Square when I get the phone call. To my right, Massachusetts Avenue heading south and east, a narrow concrete divider, Mass Ave heading north and west, and then the wrought-iron gates surrounding Harvard Yard. To my left, The Body Shop, the T-Mobile store, and C'est Bon. A fragrance from some perfumed candle fills the air on this corner. Every day, The Body Shop pumps some scent or other into the air - today it's warm and autumnal, caramelized. I pace as I listen and try to explain. I fall silent when I realize : the angry voice at the other end of the phone line doesn't want explanations. It wants anger.

*

I stand in front of a class in France. Nine businessmen from the company Alstom, which built the electric generators that power the TGV. On n'a pas de banlieues aux Etats-Unis, I tell them. We don't have suburbs in America. They frown and peer at me. It doesn't mean the same thing, I explain.

The Alstom group is my first teaching assignment for the private English-lessons company that has hired me and guaranteed, at least temporarily, that I can stay in the country and work. My work permit specifies : Formation langue anglaise. I do not have the right to answer telephones for a roadside-assistance organization, or accept assignments from an interim agency. I do not have the right to teach music in an elementary school that does not pay me, or even to serve kebabs and chips from a tiny glass window with a rotating upright spit of meat for less than the SMIC*. I may teach English or not work at all. Because I am the newest employee in the language-lessons institute, I get 6 hours per week. I am paid 15€ per hour. After taxes, my paycheck for the month of November will be 340€. My rent is 400€. I do not qualify for subsidized public housing in an HLM**. I am lucky : I can work. I have a carte de séjour, a Visa, a passport, and a green paper with an "approuvé" stamp on it. Even if they don't say what I would like them to say - Toutes activités, meaning I can get a job anywhere doing anything (read : doing anything besides teaching English to businessmen) - I am grateful for these papers. I carry them with me at all times, show them at the supermarket and the train station and the library when asked for my pièce d'identité. Beyond paperwork, I have a family I can go back to, a country not torn by civil unrest, a community that supports me. I am not a refugee or a displaced person seeking political asylum. My life is not unbearable, and most importantly would not be unbearable even if I didn't have these papers, if I had to leave France. I am lucky. And poor. And happy.

And I am explaining to nine grumpy businessmen that in America, the "suburbs" are called "inner cities." That the issues that affect suburbs in France do not affect the suburbs in America, that the most troubled and turbulent areas lie at the heart of each city rather than on its outskirts, the urban cartography is reversed.

One of the businessmen raises his hand. "But why?" he asks.

"Why?"

"Why don't you put the problems outside?"

I ponder the question. I picture the 1992 riots in Los Angeles lifted up and set down in Orange County, Rossmoor Bowl and the Parasol pock-marked with bullet-streaks, the residue of riot gear. I picture the gangs of Dorchester relocated gently to Lexington and Belmont, the sloping lawns of Brahmin New English homes transformed into housing projects that rise ten unhygienic stories into the sky. I shake my head.

"You can't just 'put the problems outside'," I suggest.

"America," the businessman pronounces, stentorious, "has no pride in its cities."

"It is because you have no history," another one adds.

"Si, si, you have history," the first one takes back. "But you have no pride. Such gratte-ciels [skyscrapers] would never exist on the Presqu'île. It is a storm in a glass of water."

I should be glad they are speaking. Usually they stare at me with a closed gaze just short of animosity. I should use this as a lesson and not want to argue with them about urban planning and demographics and national mindsets. I decide to let them talk, and bite the insides of each cheek as they neatly categorize "the problem with America." They are not wrong.

"France, she loves the beauty of her center cities," comes the soft voice of the group's one woman. "We have the Tour Eiffel, in Paris, Fourvière in Lyon, the landmarks, they are important. We are proud of our beautiful cities."

*

These immigrants, they come in from countries where they would be shot just for looking the wrong way at someone. They take up national resources and they get money from the State. They don't have to work. They get their housing paid for. They get paid just to stay at home. And they have the gall to complain about "respect."

I think of my neighbor Khaled, the eldest son of an immigrant family from Algeria. I think of the night he tells me about his parents' escape to France, during the war. How they fled their home in the suddenly hostile desert with nothing but their clothes, ripped up the father's shirt to disguise themselves as Bedouins when a sparse tribe came through, got to the port city, hid on a produce boat, and arrived in Marseille two days later. They lived in a sort of encampment with other hollow-eyed refugees, a city made of cardboard boxes and dirty flapping copies of Le Monde. A shifty-eyed white man offered him a job unloading produce from the boats. It was backbreaking work and paid ten francs per week. Abusive, ridiculous pay. The father said no.

My father looked for work for weeks. He stole food from the garbage bins behind restaurants. Nobody wanted to hire him. He was a dirty Arab, he'd been a builder in the desert but he didn't have the papers to be a builder in the city. And nobody was hiring Algerians. When my mother's clothes fell apart he taped newspapers together to cover her. Finally he went back to the dock and accepted the unloading job. Ten francs was still ten francs.

Eventually, of course, the war in Algeria ended and things calmed down somewhat. Khaled's parents hitchhiked their way north from Marseille, to Saint Etienne, where they were lodged in a grim room in a grim building on the edge of the city, behind the train station, with dozens of other immigrant families. After two years and two children they were allotted a two-room apartment. Khaled's father worked wherever he could find work, by the week. His mother cleaned offices in town. They had three children. His father stayed until the boys had finished high school. Then he went back to Algeria. He still lives there, now, with his parents, in a bleached house in the desert. Khaled hasn't seen him in ten years.

It took five years, Khaled tells me. I made my application three times. The office didn't believe my papers were real. I had to send to Algeria for affidavits that I was not born there. Then the administration didn't want to give me a real work permit because I didn't have the Bac.*** Then there was some question about my mother and a translation. Finally I got my nationality. I am French. I have been French for one year.

In 2002, Khaled was kicked out of helicopter-pilot school because of his last name, too almond-eyed and guttural after September 11th, he tells me. He bears no malice, he understands the mentality of fear in the world. Two weeks following his dismissal from pilot training, he voted for the first time. The choices on the ballot : Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen. He is thirty-four years old. It is the only time I see him weep.

*

[R]ather than be embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities, I read on foxnews.com. Not my primary (or even usual) choice for news about France, but the source of this image, since reproduced on various francophone blogs :

And as I stand on one side of the street, phone to my ear and the brick and wrought-iron enclosure of American tradition on the other, I realize that is precisely the problem. Paris is not burning : Clichy-sous-Bois is. The inner city is intact. It has been the problem for twenty years, thirty, fifty, two hundred. Balzac, in 1825, knew the Arabs had their own neighborhood and that he should never go there. Trouble, like the truth, is "out there," ailleurs, pushed out into neighboring departments where rents are lower and buildings are taller and the garbage on the streets is picked up once per week and cathedrals are defaced and métro seats sport graphic tags with violent slogans. France, she has no pride in her unbeautiful outer cities.

*

I just can't believe this attitude. I mean, what a crappy way to repay the country that has given them everything. These people are given free health care, free homes, and everything else. Thank God you don't live there anymore.

I have given up. I can't tell the story of Khaled's father to this voice of rage. The voice of rage itself comes from a background of poverty and deprivation, its own hardships of immigration generations in the past. Nobody has ever given this voice anything, certainly not welfare. It does not believe in handouts. The voice has no love for those who do not work hard, nothing but scorn for those who do not appreciate what they are given freely. I can't tell the voice how absurd is the equation of these riots with my own life in France. I lived in the centre-ville, the safe and beautiful place, a historic quarter preserved by the National Heritage Ministry. Harvard sent me there. When I left France, I came back to Harvard. My experience in the Parisian banlieues, or any banlieues for that matter, is limited to the rich sections in the south, where walled-off schools with digicode-protected entryways and catered dining halls adorn the wide streets, occasionally festooned with tricolore crèpe.

It doesn't matter what I say. They can't work, and without work there is no respect, first of all not self-respect, I have tried. And : Imagine raising five children in one room. You are given a monthly check that covers half your rent. You can't vote, because even though your parents were born there, even though you were born there, you're not a full citizen. And you have to accept living in that room because the only other place for you in the world is ripped apart by civil war, or else you might be stoned for walking out the door without covering your body from head to toe.

Good, the voice returns. Send them back there.

We end the call as the sun sets, leaving a chill aureole around the streetlamps of Harvard Square. The air has just turned crisp here, the evening feels like autumn for the first time. I close my mobile phone and breathe in deeply, trying to clear my head, and get a lungful of scented candle from The Body Shop. The perfume seems to have grown stronger with the cold, and I identify cinnamon and pumpkin in the heady smell. I move quickly away from the window, crimson and orange with lotions and creams in fall colors. It seems awkward, suddenly, to inhale the fragrance of sugar from something burning, just behind a window, two meters away.

*SMIC : Salaire Minimum Interprofessionnel de Croissance (Minimum wage)

**HLM : Habitation à Loyer Modéré (Rent-Controlled Housing)

***Baccalauréat : high-school diploma

Orgied Out.

Thanks, all. That was fun.

I'm working on passing the baton. I'll put up a new link once the next "taggee" has her/his post up. Cheers !

No Comment.

Brandon has passed me the baton for the Comment Orgy, so here goes.

There are two distinct kinds of cool people in ninth grade. The popular if overly made-up Student Body/Drama Club/Cheerleading crowd who spend their weeks planning pep assemblies and blood drives and who will hook up at Homecoming, and the wholly (and deliberately) different Anarchist/Hessian/Gothic Punk crowd - who basically spend first through fourth periods planning who to kill behind the Amphitheatre at lunch. I didn't fit in with either of those groups. I wasn't either of those kinds of cool. Or any other kind of cool. I am, by the way, totally at peace with this now. Yes, really. No, YOU shut up.

I have this friend I've known since high school. If you ask him what year we met, he'll tell you 1983. If you ask me, I'll tell you 1984. He will mention this discrepancy to me occasionally, say something like : "How do you figure? We had English together with Mrs F, ALL FRESHMAN YEAR ! Fourth period ! Have you forgotten everything?" (To which I answer, um, yeah, pretty much, and good damn riddance too. That teacher only had eyes for her gymnasts, who she coached five other periods of the day. And why the woman hired as the tumbling coach ended up teaching ninth-grade honors English is a mystery worthy of modern educational budget cuts. Why not put her in the Geometry classes too ! After all, it's just a bunch of triangles, right? I'm surprised we never had to act out Romeo and Juliet on the uneven parallel bars. Rotten cow.) But I am generally slower than this friend, and far less generous, and far more frequently wrong. It could have been 1983 after all.*

We did act out Romeo and Juliet in class, by the way. Right before we spent the entire last week of freshman year watching West Side Story on Betamax. No uneven parallel bars were harmed in our re-enactment of the Shakespeare tragedy. Mrs F herself read the part of Juliet.

Anyway. I was saying. This friend started a blog a few months ago. Since then, the Internet has made us better acquainted with each other than probably most other things since the time we saw each other every day could - even commiserating over the casting choice of a Juliet-who-should-have-been-Nurse doesn't compare to reading his daily updates on the state of the nation we share, his careful analyses of media representation, and his educational presentations of various legal and economic things I never thought I'd find interesting (and which, sometimes, I actually do find interesting). We don't agree on everything, but I like the challenge of reading his viewpoint. And I like the memories that viewpoint brings up - his voice, with wisdom culled from nearly 20 years of experience past high school, holds the same constancy and integrity it did when we were fourteen and the current White House scandal involved a whole different third world. He always makes me think - nothing less, I sometimes imagine he might say, is worthy of the time he has spent writing something. Nothing less would be worthy of my own time reading, my duty as an educated person and an educator. That is sometimes maddening, especially when all I really want are updates about the reality shows I don't let myself watch, or commiseration about the fact that CSI and e.r. conflict in this time zone (bastard network execs). He writes weighty political and intellectual commentary - I write poetry and personal memoirs. So, reading each other's blogs is kind of like high school all over again.

In a way, the Internet is like ninth grade. You show up certain your foundation is on perfectly, only to learn two hours later that there's a huge tan smear on the neck of your white fuzzy sweater and everyone in World History snickered about it and passed some note with a sketch of you looking like a minstrel. Your proudest self-presentation can get so quickly shot down.

Wow. Remember foundation?

I just wrote a whole paragraph using the general "you" and then realized this might not be as universal as I'd originally thought. I'd lay bets, for example, that Zadok and Bryan never had to deal with the whole foundation problem. (Though I could be wrong. Maybe they just BLEND better than I.) But just to be safe, coming back to first-person singular, here : watch this miniature train-wreck with me, won't you, like a movie. The kind you want to turn away from yet keep spreading your fingers to peep through and see if it really is as excruciating as you thought.

As I was saying. For me, the Internet, having a blog on it, is a little kind of a lot like ninth grade. Everybody else looks cooler than me. Despite careful wardrobe and make-up decisions, in the beginning I eat lunch alone. A few disappointments and I'm convinced I have nothing to say, nothing to contribute. I'll copy off my neighbor post Googlisms ! I sneak looks around when I should be concentrating, and end up tagging along with an older crowd who talk about sex and drinking, teach me to swear and smoke, then when I cough on my cigarette tell me to get back to my little friends, making it clear I'll never be cool as they are, thin as they are, stoned as they are, will never have the best response in reasonable time : I will never be tall.

They may even pronounce it "widow fwends."

I eat lunch alone again for a while. I learn things. I learn high school blogs come in all shapes and sizes, that I may never be tall but I am MY height, and in this one place in the world that is absolutely the right height to be. And I learn, through reading and commenting and shoving both feet ankle-deep into my throat more than once, that the people I was intimidated by that first little while were intimidated too. Maybe not by me. But they had their own shit going on. I see people say mean things to each other just because they can under the gossamer cover of anonymity. And I see incredible kindness and generosity and guidance. I see vicious political attacks and lukewarm endorsements, haphazard beginnings and half-hearted endings like an unfinishe

(... I've always wanted to do that.)

It takes a while, but once I get a grip on what I have to say and why it's worth saying, once I am at peace with being uncool and untall and unthin and all the other things I am NOT, I start being better able to write about all the things I am. Things I've lived. Places I've seen. What I believe and how much it means to me. And how much being able to put it into words means, too. And how it is an absolute gift to know someone out there is reading a thought I have been quaking at the thought of anyone else reading. I start to take better notice of the other people around me - not in distracted intimidation, but in admiring appreciation of what they have to offer and how well they do it. The ways they make me laugh and cry. And how fearlessly and fiercely and compassionately they represent their beliefs and their passions, and share life events, and write about sacred things dear to their hearts.

Sometimes we chat online or speak on the phone. A few of them I meet in person.

Ninth grade does a lot of things for a person, finally. You meet some friends who will stay with you through high school - sometimes, college and life, too. Even if you have to reconnect a great while later. You eventually get over the shyness and find yourself branching out and meeting people you wouldn't have looked at in 8th grade - and who wouldn't have looked at you. You learn you can be good friends with someone you see once a day for a very little while indeed, just the time to open a window and throw one leg over the sill. Fourth period, maybe. Act Two, Scene Three. "Benedicite !"

My Kajagoogoo-era friend updates his blog all the time. He doesn't get a whole lot of comments. And when I say he updates all the time, what I mean is HE POSTS FIVE OR SIX TIMES PER DAY. And when I say he doesn't get a whole lot of comments, I mean he may get one comment per day. Most of the posts are followed by a notice I would personally find tragic : the dreaded "Comments (0)." You know what? HE DOESN'T CARE. This requires capital letters on my part because such a mindset is unthinkable to me. Who doesn't want comments? GOOD GRIEF, MAN, DO YOU THINK WE'RE ALL OUT HERE BLOGGING FOR OUR HEALTH?

I have toned down my feedback-hunger somewhat over time. I don't have Brandon's trigger-finger-prowess on the F5 button. (I'm not proud of that, just so you know. When Brandon wrote that bit about hitting F5 to refresh the page, I was like, you can hit F5? You mean I've been staring at the lightbulb in my monitor, ALL THIS TIME, FOR NOTHING ?!) And of course, we are just out here blogging for our health. (Except, of course, the people making money off their sites. You guys totally suck rock.) My own health has vastly improved since I started blogging. And I get a pang whenever I think that at some future time I might not do this anymore. Might have moved on, or had to give it up. Might have even less time than now, and more job restrictions that make it too delicate to write about things like God and music and French culture and boobs.

(I promised there would be boobs.)

Every now and then I think about turning off the comments. There's usually some self-purifying reason behind the thought. Something like : Romy, grow up. You don't need feedback from virtual strangers to tell you if that writing was good or not. A commentsless post : my new mortification. It's no hair shirt, but the mere thought gives me goosebumps. So far I haven't been strong enough for it. The maddening thing is that that voice is right : I know where my blogging strengths and weakness are, and that the longer I spend on a post the better it will be. But sometimes the longer I spend with these ideas and images in my mind, the more I need someone else to see them. Your words and perspective give me new eyes.

And stats. I like being a Flappy Bird and all, but I'm aiming higher here. I'd really like to achieve Adorable Little Rodent status, if not Marauding Marsupial. Hey. It's good to have goals, right? This, my friends, is where you come in. My high-school friend? the one with the blog with no comments? HE's a Marauding Marsupial.

Please, people, make me a Marauding Marsupial.

Of course the same voice - the one that tells me things like "turn off your comments" and "don't eat that cookie" and "first pants, THEN shoes" - is also wrong about the whole "virtual strangers" bit. I may not recognize yall on the street, but in here, within these white-and-yellow walls, you're more like virtual family. (Famill-e. Go ahead - pronounce it. No, don't feel stupid.) A friend's voice - the surprising voice of a friend you've never met in person - is a not-so-tiny grace in this wearying world. This is where the cool people are.

Now, my brothers and sisters, give me some lovin'.

*It was totally 1984.