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.