Leavetaking preamble

4/1/07

I’m back in class at Malérargues and am having a good time. Everyone in this group has taken a class here before, so they are serious about learning. It’s also not as exhausting as the “intensive” I took in March. One of the fun things about this group is that every night they eat together, and then Jean-Jacques (a Chanter) gets out his guitar and we all sing. My favorite was a catchy song called “The Crickets,” which (I was told) is about how it’s not the crickets, but the French people who are always chirping.

The chateau is coming alive, as many of the Roy Hart Theatre Members are moving back in for the spring and summer. At one point in February there were only six of us here; now there are twenty-three, with more to come. Ivan has come back from South Africa, so I am now officially done with cat duty. The community here has been so welcoming to me, and the people so generous, it’s going to be hard to go back to my single life in Cleveland, where, I feel (and have had confirmed by others) that generosity is warmly appreciated by many, but does not result in the creation of community. Cleveland is a very “married” city, and if you don’t have a partner and kids, you’re out of the loop for invitations and coffee dates. If anyone even makes time for that anymore. I am going to truly miss the way people make time for one another in France.

I’m not ready to leave here and go back to the zealous and uncompromising American work ethic, but I am missing home. Singing Gershwin’s “Summertime” in class yesterday made me weepy for American culture. (My French colleagues just couldn’t get the “swing” of it.)

Today while working in class, I felt a very strong connection to the landscape of my childhood home in Indiana, between the Wabash and Tippecanoe Rivers. While singing in a group exercise, I had a sudden imagistic visitation from Tecumseh, the great Indian warrior-statesman. The Battle of Tippecanoe (a battle of the war of 1812) was waged very near where I grew up. Tecumseh was not present at the Battle and counseled the Indians not to fight, but the shaman of the tribe ("The Prophet") took them to battle after prophesizing that the bullets would not harm them and in consequence, they were slaughtered. The image of Tecumseh was very potent, and very surprising, as I am neither a scholar of Indiana history, nor have I ever thought much about Tecumseh. But suddenly he was with me, singing of the rivers, and mourning the loss of his land and countrymen. I was imagining the slow, muddy water and fields gold in August sunshine, loving their beauty as Tecumseh surely did, and mourning my own loss of a place that only resides in imagination and memory. What I pictured while I sang exists solely in my childhood experience; what I “remember” probably never truly existed in that way at all.

And so, I commence to get ready to go home. I have my train ticket and hotel reservations for Paris before my plane leaves to the States. I am beginning to pack boxes to send back to Cleveland, and contemplating all the things I have to do once I return. I am trying to focus on all the positives: seeing my cats, having a washer/dryer, watching spring arrive in Cleveland and the glorious summer there. But I am truly going to miss this place. It is unique in all the world, and I feel it to be at home in my heart.