With Vreni

With Vreni. Somebody in the México class must have sent this--wish I remembered who, I'm indebted! It's very much the way I'd like to remember all those evenings--and who knew that this may very well have been the last of them! (Mark Anderson very generously wants me to keep a cubby hole in his office, so maybe I'll still find ways to continue to connect with Wurster...)

Vreni, so like her, appearing out of no where. It was the song night at the end of the semester, Spring 2018. (VS185X: Songs & Places: México.) I'd invited her, of course--hoping that we'd get to sing together (see Vreni post)--always truly special, in part because I think we accepted each so totally. And with our own history of the songs (Fallaste Corazón, Paloma Negra, En el último trago), starting years back with her stories of her abuela in Guanajuato, and how she'd learned them herself--it was always a return in the fullest sense. Which we both understood...

Valdemar joined us, too (always a great pleasure to see Valde!) so there was one mutual friend, but the group otherwise was all new--and only Vreni had a sense of where we might take the evening together. (She's a wonderful musician, so this confidence comes naturally, but she needed to help me convince the new group--that holding back in the school mode just wouldn't cut it... We needed to sing!)

There was a certain amount of drink, yes, that was true of those evenings--but what's important was what Vreni had to tell them. She started in--I don't even knew if she knew where she was going--becoming more and more animated, until finally, she got to the very top, looking out across the room--all the faces just like hers, kids from the families from México, and she cried out to them-- !Nos están borrando!  (They are erasing us!) her passionate Vreni voice, urging--demanding--that we remember where we come from--and that we fight for that memory...

Fight, struggle, resist--persist--sing, contemplate, embrace--all those qualities of being, mixed together, towards some beautiful unknown--but together, yes,  as in the songs...

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