I had hard time with my high school government teacher. I found him overly sarcastic, and was put off by (among other things) his habit of imagining he'd told us things that he had mentioned only in other classes. But on the second Thursday of school that year, after we filed in, he got us quiet and asked us just to listen. I remember I'd been dreading that day and the flag-waving that would come with it - it had only been two years, it was only about six months after the start of the war, and I was prickly about what seemed to me the exploitation of an essentially private grief. I remember trying (and failing) to get across why it so upset me that people who had watched on TV from far away should feel entitled to just as much grief as people who had actually lost someone they knew and cared about, as if the abstraction was worth just as much as the actual lives. There's a debate to be had there, I know, but I still fall squarely on that side of it. What I'm saying, I suppose, is that I was waiting to be upset by whatever came out when my teacher turned the cd player on.

What he played couldn't have been further from my expectation: Pie Jesu, from Fauré's Requiem. It's a fairly quiet piece, and high, a soprano without much to back her. In that moment it was the perfect gesture to make, marking the day with solemnity and respect and stillness and the beauty of her voice. When it was finished he moved on with class without a word about it, letting the music speak for itself.

A week ago I returned from a beautiful and blissfully email-free vacation to find a message waiting from the mother of a childhood friend. He had missed a bend driving in the middle of the New England night, gone off the road, and died instantly. It had been a dozen years since we'd seen each other and at least a year since last we spoke, but somehow he was never entirely out of my thoughts - a light in the back of my mind that I knew was shining somewhere in the world, if not near me. My twelve-year-old self was so sure that we were supposed to be in each others' lives that in the face of all evidence, I never shook off the assumption that we would find ourselves in the same place again and pick our friendship up where it left off. And now he's buried in Massachusetts and I'm in France, trying to figure out how to believe in finality.

A few days ago Michael mentioned offhand that there was a Belgian orchestra visiting Lyon to play the Requiem, so last night the two of us and Hannah went to see it. I guess it's not cool to just openly like things now, so even the program was full of self-deprecating notes about famous people who hated Fauré and swore they would turn over in their graves if his music were to be played for their funerals. I don't care, particularly; I don't need to have sophisticated taste. To my ear they played well, and the Irish soprano had a lovely voice.

When the concert was finished, we went down to the berges du Rhône to celebrate Hannah's last night in Lyon. While we were in the auditorium, half of Lyon had been watching their soccer team go down in utter defeat before Bayern. Much to our confusion, the remnants of the crowd were nonetheless in perfectly good spirits, drinking and chatting and even singing in the streets. We spent the rest of the evening just enjoying each others' company, laughing (particularly at Hannah's fake-indignant opinion that all these happy people should rightfully be going home to cry over their defeat) and talking about what happens next. Then Hannah and I velov'd home together for the last time and said goodbye.

It's a shame that the first entry in a while that I write all the way through is such a low one; it really has been a very happy several months for me. I have a folder full of half-written blog entries that I put aside and then don't get back to until they seem irrelevant, but I'll try to make something of them soon.