Austria

A piece of where I'm from.  As a fourth generation American, she's a small piece, but a piece none the less.

Milwaukee, where I was supposed to be tonight, didn't happen; PTO is an impossibility these days.  Rather than sit at home feeling angry and disappointed, I bought a ticket to see the Vienna Boys Choir at the Basilica.

There, tonight, I found myself thinking of my maternal great-grandmother, Mary Julia, my ancestor from Austria.  I don't know the full details of the story, but before she came to America, by herself, as a teen, she sang for royalty on the banks of a river in Germany or Austria...somewhere around there.

I can only think of one distant aunt who might still know the full story, which I should really like to know in its entirety.  I sat there, in this space that is to me so reminiscent of Europe, carrying with me a voice - her voice - that has found a welcome home here, and wished deeply that I'd known her.  She is where this piece of me comes from; am I like her in any other way?  How I wish I could have heard her sing; how I wish I could have heard her daughter, my grandmother Avis, sing.  I wish I could see, in my lifetime, that place so far away where she sang.  As I watched the choir I kept thinking, "Home. They are from home."

I don't know what this home looks like, and I don't know what they sound, smell, or taste like.

Maybe they would feel no different; once you have traveled far in your soul, home is inside you, not out there, right?  But I want to feel it, there.

I surveyed these beautiful young men.  I wondered if I could be looking at family.  I felt like I was looking at children that could be my own, and I wondered which would be mine.  The confident, dark-haired soloist?  The dutiful, be-speckled blonde who also served as page turner to the pianist?  The also-instrumentalist who picked up the drums for several pieces?

I was sandwiched between couples tonight.  Fittingly, there was one empty seat in my row - the one right beside me.  (It was better than being sandwiched between the two hugely pregnant women during last week's Magnum Chorum concert.)  I feel this often, but tonight I felt so achingly and acutely the absence of my imagined family.  I felt so closely the absence of a partner, one with whom to share the beauty of this music, one with whom to bring this long-imagined child into being.

What does he look like?  What is his story?  Which child would be ours?  Would my son also carry forward Mary Julia's voice?  Or perhaps a trait of his father's ancestors?

I couldn't bring myself to approach St. Anne tonight; I didn't want to mar another evening with my tears.  Perhaps she could hear my heart.