I can't keep up with yesterday.
I didn't get much work done, except between 7am and around ten, when I suddenly had the need to write the opening words to a story that I had forgotten has been in my head for so many years.
The setting's changed, the words and streets and timing, but the story remains the same.
I managed that for all of four minutes until I got lost on a technicality, unable to remember the cross street to the entrance to the plage of the catacombs. Rue de la Voir...and what?
I don't even remember the right m�tro exit.
Singing lessons were an entirely new experience. Saturday the conservatory is mostly empty and Maja reserved a concert hall to practice in. With a stage. And chair. And the kind of accoustics that are really hard to fill.
And a grand piano, that I played my own damned scales on until Maja grew impatient with my speeding through them.
Too fast, too fast, no wonder you're not running out of wind...
She played a CD of a soprano singing the same Vaccaj and I heard what I SHOULD sound like, beyond just hitting the notes.
Like an elastic, pull on it, hard, harder, strengthen the note, fill it out, each one, don't let it just fade into the next one...
Then she made me do it on stage, and the empty room closed my throat until it squeaked.
When we began the Prevert song, I had my back to the room, singing to the wall of the stage.
But it's such a fun song. And to fill that high note, Maja had me walking in circles and swinging my arms and she was yelling for more strength and more this and more that and my abs were so sore that I collapsed on the floor and started stretching anything I could stretch. We took a gymnastic break and I spotted her through a walkover, then did half of one on my own, stretching my stomach the other way.
Then I got up and jumped around and took off my shoes and tried singing with one leg up in the air and then the other and by then it was all just SO MUCH FUN with the FFFFF FFFFF FFFFF throat-clearing excercises and the ZOOOOOO-OOOOOO where after a good night's sleep I passed Maja's range and went right up into the third octave before it started to sound really stupid.
By then I was facing the room and singing, and waving my arms and waving my butt and trying to stamp my leg to the beat, trying to get all the thirds right - what she accompagnied me with on the piano had NOTHING to do with what I was singing, except the beat.
Thirds.
I need a metronome. I have no sense of rythm. Steven? You did mention that you can buy one of those funky digital ones online, right?
I went looking for one in the march� after class yesterday, came home with a crystal vase instead.
To put the dried flowers that Cristal had brought me so long ago, in.
They are brilliant blue and spotted with white roses, and my kitchen table is a tiny but beautiful thing now.
And then I packed my bag with maple syrup and other gifts and booted my way back along the same m�tro lines but in the other direction, over to dinner with my cousins, abs still aching, and spirit just a little crushed by what I'd heard on my way out of the practice room.
Further down the corridor, a real soprano was practicing. Each note carried a tear or a spark of joy or an entire chunk of emotion in it.
Each note.
I'm still having trouble hitting all the right notes when that Prevert song switches cadences at the end of two couplets.
Wandering into Sarah's, all the faces were different except for Helene who is back from Japan, as brilliant as ever.
THere was Yael and Yuri and Dadi (David, apparently) and his wife Ilana, and Yael's fiance who's name I can't remember and "Moony" who asked me for help finding him work and and and...
I cowered at a corner of the table with little Nathan happily burbling in my lap and stealing food from my plate.
I told Helene that my abs were hurting and immediately, this girl with the hunger to learn each and every thing, wanted to know how to breathe right, how to use her stomach for singing.
The conversation drifted elsewhere after tea and seat-changes and we all ended up in a circle in the living room, the kids talking of beer and tattoos and travel and how to swear i n a hundred different languages - and when Yael's Fiance couldn't say it in english and Yuri couldn't say it in french, they said it in hebrew or asked Ilana who's explain it in polish, and I'd sit there in the midst of the conversation utterly unaware that I was switching langues in mid-sentence, until Helene and her brother sighed those big sighs and leaned back out of the conversation.
Yael's fiance was far too interested in every word of mine. He leaned forward far too close, his face the mirror image of the person who gave me the scar on my leg.
When they were getting up to leave, to wander paris for one last day before returning to Israel, Yuri showed me this or that Tai-Chi move to flatten me to the ground, Yael thanked me for the extra can of maple syrup I just happened to have on me, and her boy... Just wouldn't let go. He'd seen Helene and I waiting for everyone to leave and eyeing the piano, apparently he studied music for so many years that he was intent on asking me WHICH KIND of soprano I was, the termulous kind or the stacatto kind or the kind with the impossible range...
None of them. I'm not any kind of anything yet.
Yet.
They left, finally, and I put him out of my mind, entirely unclear on this boy's behaviour. Perhaps finding someone with something in common in a foreign land, and that's all, I was tired and sore and over-sensitive.
They left, and Helene and I and her mother sat and talked of everything, laughing and crying and before I knew it, we were six hours later, and I had to go home.
In those six hours I hadn't gotten up the courage to sing scales with Helene in front of her parents.
Helene accompagnied me to the metro, the third metro down, closest to her place, and we talked of music and I showed her the "Pppp-ttttt-kkkkk" excercise for pushing your diaphragm up and down.
She told me of when she'd sung "Lacrymosa" in the choir.
We sang it in the street. THe high, sweet, quiet part, I sang as she cued me "Laaaaacrimosa, diiies illa..." and she sang the harmonies, and I kept telling her I wouldn't be able to sing my melody because I'd end up losing it and following hers...
Only I didn't. This is mozart's requiem, my favourite piece of music in the world.
ANd so we sang it walking up l'avenue des Gobelins, people stopping to look at us, the white-blonde and tanned black-haired beauty, singing harmonies about tears.
High and sweet and soft and I was still singing it when I stumbled into the metro, and when this or that guy poked me to accompanny me home or to head out for beer with them...
I just kept on singing.
And singing.
Coming home, I looked at my machine and the thousand docs left to spruce up, the heavy e-mails that I owe important people, that I have one day left to write before the whirlwind picks up again for one last week.
The laptop's coming with me to the laundromat this morning, and by 10am tomorrow it'll be me and powerpoint in front of a roomful of suits again.
But in my head, it will be Lacrymosa...