good mornin', america

how are you?

say don't you know me, 

i'm your native son

i'm the train they call

the city of new orleans

i'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done

Sometimes, you forget to listen to the music.  You make your lists, you tend to your people, and you do your daily scramble, however it may look.  Since we have moved to Geneva, I have quite forgotten to listen to the music.  

Last night, we were graciously invited to dine at the home of Vera and Charles, friends of the Murrays, with Pat and Christine (who are in town!).  At the night's onset, the very last thing I expected to do was to blast the music.  Now, these people are artists of atmosphere and entertaining, and Christine was involved in the cooking, so you know it was good.  If we needed convincing, Charles and Vera certainly convinced us that Geneva is full of hidden treasures, if one is willing to scratch at its surface, and that its small size can provide an at once village-like and cosmopolitan lifestyle that is hard to find elsewhere.  

The evening surprised us by ending with the unplanned blasting of the music.  By the music, I mean the songs you know enough to fudge knowing by heart, the songs you love simply because you know them, the ones you cannot bear to simply listen to without outsinging the vocals with your own sorry voice, or the ones you need to play loudly so as to make someone else understand just how good they are.  

I am supposed to be writing about Geneva and the international chapter, and you are wondering why I am opening the post with Arlo Guthrie lyrics and carrying on about music.  Don't you see?  This is part of the far away from home experience.  It occurred to me late last night, as Tim and I made our way down the slippery cobblestones of the Old City's hill back home in the drizzly dark, feeling revived after this wonderful dining memory (returning to our sleeping children now broken in by a babysitter!) that sounds, sights, people, and so on from before will now have a little film over them, a romantic sheen...because they're a bit more precious.  Leonard Cohen, Roberta Flack, Van Morrison, even Toumani Diabaté...we crooned, we swayed, we belted out...and they sounded so good in Geneva, those songs from layers of our past.  It made me think of the non-Swiss of this town, the 40% of the city that has been replanted from other countries, bringing pieces of their previous homes with them, and, at times, blasting their songs.  

Friends and family, you've got that sheen on you, too, and you look fantastic from here.  I leave you today with a new favorite that Charles passed on to us, Malaika, sung by Angélique Kidjo.  

Don't forget to blast the music this week; it'll do you some good.