You, Too?

Before I even left the house this morning, Beautiful Day was pulsing through my mind. It's a song that'll curse through my veins and bubble out my lips in spontaneous song any time I'm confronted with a day too wonderful to resist. Even a little ray of sunshine, in these gloomy parts, can start the tune.

This morning it was snow. Beautiful, fresh snow. It was snowing when I went to bed, and by morning, Heves was the proud recipient of 4-6 inches of snowfall, and the town was wearing it as proudly as a fine new suit. I walked to school early, at 7, before most people had shovelled, or swept, their sidewalks. It was delightfully wintery, just the way I like it back home.

And on my morning Internet check -- a favorite activity now that the school decided on two computers in the teachers' office -- I saw that U2 had won big at the previous night's Grammy Awards. I smiled. I like U2. I kind of wish I was Bono.

One of the favorite questions in these parts, asked right after "Have you got a girlfriend," "What do you think of the Hungarian girls," and "When should the territorial integrity of the pre-Trianon Big Hungary be restored?" is "What's your favorite kind of music?" It's a preferred prompt presumably for the introductory level of vocabulary, rather than its ability to start a real conversation abroad.

Before coming to Hungary, I'd never really known what to say. When I realized, sometime back in high school, that it probably wasn't cool that I dug oldies, I learned to hide my tastes behind the shrouds available to one when they work around a question. In college, as all my friends turned to Tupac and other rappers, I wasn't so sure that pop music, the contemporary boy bands notwithstanding, wasn't so bad. The answer to the music question became longer, and less meaningful.

But here in Europe, far from WIXX, I've learned that I do have musical preferences: it must be in English (although Die Toten Hosen and Juli are working their way into my heart) and it must be some sort of rock and roll. Within that range, I'll take just about anything!

To make it easier for the audience, palpable to the introductory language user, I usually boil down my response to something along the lines, "I like English rock and roll like U2 and Green Day." End of sentence, end of story. I'm content in the answer. It conveys that I don't like the darn technoey-housey-Euroey-discoey-dance music they insist on playing around here and it is a good end point in a conversation I don't want to continue.

So I took great pleasure when my music (rather than anything else, even if Eurodance hits weren't up for the awards), won at the Grammys. And apparently, the school was excited too.

About twice a week, during the 30-minute lunch break between the fourth and fifth lessons, loud music pulsates through the entire school. I have no idea who starts it, who controls it, or who approves this madness, but the music ricochetes (rikoshays, ricosheyes, ricoshetes, ricocheyes...?) off of every hard surface. The school moves to its pulsation. Often times its in English. I smile. I know that the sorry half of the students who do not pay attention in my class will never know what the songs mean.

And today, as if to celebrate and commemorate the triumph of my music over anything else that these kids might love, it was "With or Without You." U2 wins the best album Grammy and Heves High marks the occasion with a song from 1987's Joshua Tree. Right on, kids.

This song is from the same time period as Seconds! It from the same compilation disc as New Years Day! Seconds sings of nuclear war. Seconds sings of east and west, I am in that east! Unlike dismantling atomic bombs, Bono and friends were singing of the dangers of those relics. And New Year's Day was inspired in part by the Polish communist regime's crackdown in December 1981 on the freedom-fighting Solidarity trade union. My school, my apartment, my life would have been controlled by a communist regime in this same place back then!

The irrelevant tribute, though, is a song that has haunted -- a vaguely bittersweet brand of haunting -- me for almost as long.

m.t.c.