Alabama,  Lawyerin',  New Orleans

Sunday Morn

It is Palm Sunday.  Each Palm Sunday and Sunday-before-Christmas, our church hires a huge orchestra and they accompany our choir in a service-long musical extravaganza.  No sermon, no Bible readings, nothing but the classical piece.  We’re doing Mozart’s Grand Mass today.  I sit in the very front of the stage, inches from a three-foot drop-off.  Should I lose my balance and tip forward, I would land in a forest of woodwinds and music stands.  It’s not such a danger now, but the year that I was heavily pregnant with Liam, weeks from his birth, it was a distinct possibility.

It will be glorious.  It will be very hot.  Now that Jack is Almost Four he goes to big church instead of the nursery.  I hope he has the stamina to stay well-behaved for a full hour.

It’s my last one with this choir.

As a prelude, the orchestra will play Pomp and Circumstance while all of the children walk up the aisle waving palms.  Yesterday, during our one practice with the orchestra, I teared up when they played it, thinking of my graduation in just a few weeks, thinking of how everything’s about to change.  I also wept earlier in the day, when I realized that our Audubon Zoo membership expired that day and I could not go to the zoo with the boys, who were taking one last visit on the beginning of our Farewell to New Orleans Tour.  I wept that afternoon, when I took the boys to a New Orleans street fair (Fete Francaise, at the French school here).  Next year I will be – SUBURBAN.  Shudder.  No more trotting down the street to fairs for us.

I am happy about this move.  But this protracted good-bye to our fair city is brutal.  If I don’t stop weeping at every turn, people are going to stop taking me seriously.

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