Lisa Federer
Dallas, TexasWhen you’re five thousand miles away from home, away from all your friends and family, in a country where you can barely speak the language, you look for something to hold on to. During the semester I spent living in France in 2004, that something was the music of Vienna Teng. When I set out on my adventure, I had to whittle down from my collection of more than 300 CDs the twenty that I could fit in my suitcase. When I ran out of room, I had to narrow that collection down to ten—and of those ten, two of them were Waking Hour and Warm Strangers, which I’d recently fallen in love with.
The first weeks I spent in France were bewildering, filled with memories of embarrassing encounters with French speakers I couldn’t understand, with forty-five minute walks to school at seven in the morning in a half-foot of snow (a strange sight for a girl from Texas). But I found my relief from it in Vienna Teng’s music. While I walked to school in the dark, the cold didn’t seem as harsh as I listened to “Homecoming.” When I doubted my choice to come to France, “Mission Street” reminded me that fate can work in mysterious ways. “Eric’s Song” helped to ease the distance between me and my friends. Soon enough, I had made some friends in France, I’d started actually thinking in French, and the cold gave way to a temperate French spring, and slowly, the worst time of my life became the best time.
There are very few memories in my life that I don’t associate with a particular song. Most of the songs that are attached to my France memories are songs from those two CDs. But the one that always stands out to me most is “Green Island Serenade.” I remember a morning during the second week of my trip when it had been snowing for days. I had some time to kill and started wandering around the campus of my school with no real destination in mind, listening to Warm Strangers. As snowflakes the size of quarters started to float down from a soft gray sky, I found myself at the gate of a tiny cemetery that was, oddly enough, tucked at the edge of campus. I saw graves that were hundreds of years old, and I knew that the campus must have grown up around the cemetery, that it was all but forgotten, passed by on a daily basis by hundreds of students unaware of its existence. “Green Island Serenade” started to play, and I found a bench to sit on. I stared up at the sky, mesmerized by the swirling snow that lately had been something I detested but that I now recognized as perhaps the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
It was a moment that was magical in a way that I can never hope to explain. But there, surrounded by hundred-year old graves, listening to this song whose lyrics I couldn’t understand but that touched me deeply nonetheless, with snow in my hair, I suddenly knew that I was where I was supposed to be. I stopped questioning my choice to come to France, because I understood then that I had been meant to be here in this very moment, and that great things would happen for me here in France. It was the first time during my trip that I really felt comfortable. Though I knew it would be a long time before I got back to America to do it, I vowed then to meet Vienna so that I could thank her for the song that was the catalyst. I got my chance more than a year later, when she came to Dallas to give a show. In my nervousness, I don’t know if I really made my appreciation clear to her that night. But I hope that this essay will convey the depth of my gratitude for the remarkable music that served as my soundtrack to what became the most extraordinary six months of my life—if not earn me the chance to come to Philadelphia so that I can say it for myself!