what is the language of home?

I’m not sure how many languages were spoken in the village that would become Waco, Texas at the time of its founding in 1849. There’s documentation of what the newly arrived European landowners spoke: English, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew. The tongues of the enslaved laborers on those properties were not similarly recorded, and the speech of the lands’ indigenous inhabitants had disappeared with them decades before. Last week, a group of Baylor singers got together on stage with songs in those five documented languages, and sang about home - wanting and not wanting to stay, the thrill and peril of leaving, the longing to return and how the journey changes everything.

The singers prepared the songs with teachers and coaches, and worked with music faculty who are also native speakers of the program’s languages. It was moving to see the results of that mentorship in the evening’s music-making. Singers would caress or emphasize a certain word not just because they’d looked up and learned the translation, but because a person had given them context.

We called the concert “The Second Soul” after part of a quote attributed to Charlemagne:

To speak a second language is to possess a second soul.

I played the piano with the singers, one soul among many come together for the evening, home on stage in the music with them for that sweet hour.

Right now I’m in Arizona, an invited guest on the campus where I studied forty years ago, so I guess you could say it’s old home week. This is the place that opened up the world to me, where I found garlic and jalapeños and Mormons and Baptists and the Fulbright office, where traveling started and still hasn’t stopped.

It’s extraordinary to walk the halls of the music school as myself, remembering myself. On the second day of this tour, I taught a class for a group of excellent young singers and pianists in the room where I played my first college opera rehearsals, having lied about my level of experience to get the gig. A bright bridge joined me to the uncertain young woman I was in this building, learning how to learn in practice rooms stinking of cigarettes, rushing stressed and blissed between choir concerts and piano juries and song recitals and new music readings, forming fleeting, firm alliances in library study groups and sectional rehearsals and post-concert celebrations.

But outside in the jasmine-scented air, the city gleamed with money, utterly changed from its down-at-heel days. When I was in college in the smaller, poorer version of this place, the US attacked the Middle East, the governor thought the newspaper was spying on him with radio waves, students on campus reported teachers for liberal bias, professors and lovers retaliated when refused, and economic gain was constantly offered as justification for it all. Everything changed, but nothing changes.

That’s a cliché, except when it’s not.

There’s no home place quite like the human body.

We had an ice storm in Texas about two weeks ago (where it’s ninety degrees today, I’m sure that’s fine) and I slipped on our slick driveway. The resulting injury seemed to heal in time for this trip; maybe I can blame my resulting overzealous walking on the college nostalgia. The morning after my class, I could hardly move. Practicing recital music that afternoon, I took breaks on the floor with a CVS ice pack shoved under my elevated knee. I stared at the ceiling of the black box, my body all at once obeying and denying me, time no longer magically elastic.

Fortunately, my opera contact is a friend and a Crossfit freak, which means he knows injury and recovery. “Movement is medicine,” he reassured me. Inspired and also a little careless, I bought capsaicin cream instead of ibuprofen and went home for an evening of PT swiped from the internet. The pain subsided, and then yielded to the incredible burning sensation that capsaicin is apparently famous for. I went back to the internet for solutions and ended up limping down to the hotel’s front desk at midnight to take all of the tiny half-and-half containers from the coffee bar back up to my room, empty them onto a washcloth, and finally fall asleep with that cold, wet, milky godsend on the back of my leg.

The evening was a farce for sure, but by the end of today I could walk without pain. Home improvement.

Tomorrow, Jamie teaches her own class on campus, having just arrived from performing a bunch of German music in Texas including an aria that was the first one I ever heard her sing. I’ll watch this woman I once mentored as she mentors others - it’s hard to describe how wonderful that is. After that comes our dress rehearsal, almost exactly eighteen years after our first performance together (this partnership is old enough to go to college). Another day on another stage will bring another collection of words and the music flowing from them to another gathering of souls. Together for a sweet hour, we’ll call that fleeting, firm foundation home.

Thanks to BSOM, the Second Soul cast, ASU, Arizona Opera, Dave, Brian, David, Sam, Stephanie, Michael, and of course Bart above all.