Yesterday Ron and I and Lynn's friend McKenna went to a nearby high school to hear Lynn perform in the Pennsylvania Music Educators' Association District 7 festival chorus concert. The group comprised more than 200 voices from 64 schools. Participation is by audition, an all-day event held in the fall. Lynn was one of only four from her school selected. This is a significant achievement, especially for a kid who does not take private voice lessons. 

I loved such events when I was in school. You leave on Thursday, spend all day Thursday and Friday and part of Saturday rehearsing, and then give a concert. You stay in someone's home, typically that of a family from the host school, meet lots of interesting people, learn a lot about music performance, and have loads of fun at the instructional sessions and the recreational events the host school offers. 

The guest director is always someone with impressive credentials. When I was in tenth grade the guest conductor for district orchestra was renowned violinist and maestro Mehli Mehta, father of Zubin Mehta, now a renowned conductor in his own right. Lynn's guest director was Dr. Anthony Leach, a teacher, choir director, recitalist, and church organist of international acclaim. An event like this is one of the few things that is exactly the way it was when I was Lynn's age, and I was delighted that she wanted to try out, and that she was successful.

The program was an intensified version of the kind of repertoire Lynn learns in school. They sang (some of them from memory) in Russian, German, Latin, Yoruba, Spanish, Kraho (a language of native Brazilian Indians), and English. The music ranged from the classically formal (Haydn, Handel, Rachmaninoff) to the playful (arrangements of "Camptown Races" and "Bile Them Cabbage Down").

One of the songs was "In Remembrance" from the Requiem by Eleanor Daley, a contemporary Canadian composer. The text is an anonymous lyric that is widely distributed in memorial booklets, internet tribute sites, obituaries, and the like. It begins:

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glint on snow....

To tell you the truth, I am not a big fan of this poem. It's all right, I guess, and I do feel sorry that this particular Anonymous, who is, after all, somebody, hasn't gotten credit for it. But it's just a tad sentimental for my taste, a little on the trite side in its poetics (okay, if you're a regular reader you know I'm a literary snob), and it's so widely used now that it's become a cliché.

But the moment they began to sing, I knew that this piece, chosen months ago, was exactly what Lynn needed to be singing right now. And it was something I needed to hear. I caught Lynn's eye, and knew that she felt that too. I felt my own tears well up as the song continued, and at the end I saw Lynn take a deep breath, shudder once, and wipe her cheek.

We took the girls out for an early supper, and then Lynn came home long enough to change her clothes and go out again. After she left I sat in the kitchen for a while as darkness fell. The cardinals that feed at dusk darted back and forth between the forsythia where they live and the seed bin that pokes up out of the daffodil patch. Through the bare branches I could see a few stars.

I am the sweet uplifting rush 
Of quiet birds in circled flight. 
I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Two years ago I heard Donald Hall give a reading. It had been five years since his wife Jane Kenyon died, and he said that night that he thought he'd written the last of his grief poems about her.

And I think I've written the last of these grief essays, at least for Mr. Rosenthal. Lynn meets her new teacher tomorrow. The kids are comfortable with the steps the school has taken to smooth this transition. They know they must expect change, that this teacher (a veteran of the district who retired about the same time I did) will have her own style. They're resilient, adaptable, eager to honor their beloved teacher's memory by accepting the new one.

May God be with them all.