Latin

Jordan is heading out on tour with the boychoir this week. They will sing seven concerts in two weeks, in various locations around SF and LA. It's a ton of work, but they also get a lot of playtime. He did a similar tour two years ago and had a total blast.

Before leaving, they have a lot of homework, memorizing complex Latin lyrics. One of Jordan's more challenging songs is a Latin translation of the Song of Songs.

Nigra sum sed formosa, filiae Jerusalem.
Ideo dilexit me Dominus et introduxit in cubiculum suum et dixit mihi:
Surge, amica mea et veni.
Jam hiems transiit, imber abiit et recessit,
Flores apparuerunt in terra nostra, tempus putationis advenit.

I am black and beautiful, daughters of Jerusalem.

So my lord loved me and brought me to the bedroom and said to me:

Rise, my love, and come.

For the winter is past, the rain is over and gone,

Flowers appear in our country, the time for pruning has arrived. 

These are boys who can be fully professional about almost any content, but it's probably just as well they're singing it in Latin and not English. I could wish for Hebrew, but never mind; I've made peace with the fact that the vast majority of Western choral music has taken place in a Christian context. And the fact that it was in Latin caused me to learn that the Hebrew word zamir, which I thought meant "singing," can apparently also mean "pruning"; since both songbirds and vineyards are appropriate to the setting, scholars have evidently made various interpretations. How about that?

It has been hard for Jordan to apply himself to his Latin memorization. This would be a slog for most people, and besides that it's summer, and this weekend was his birthday. He resisted. But he found that if he actually gave it his serious attention, he could totally do it -- in a lot less time than he had spent procrastinating about it. As in, after putting it off for eight hours, he put his back into it for all of fifteen minutes and was done. And who among us has not been there? We all have put off important tasks for weeks, or months, or years, only to find that when we finally faced the music (so to speak), it was only a couple hours of effort. Am I right? 

After one such session I asked him to write himself a note that he could read the next time he got frustrated. Here is what he said:

"Dear Jordan, this is Jordan. I am here to remind you that it is easier than it looks and that you should take it BIRD by BIRD. ps: Only look for 1 BIRD at a time. vps: Just keep trying, don't stop for anything."

The bird thing is from Anne Lamott, who told the story this way:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'

Regarding "vps": Jordan thought "ps" stood for "personal sentence," and "vps" indicated a "very personal sentence." I explained to him that it means "after the signature" - yet more Latin.