Then the music begins

On its own, there was nothing special about the room. In fact, it was the antithesis of special: Generic and drab, it looked like hundreds of other tired, 1960s-era college dorm lobbies, furnished to withstand the antics of students whose parents weren’t on hand to tell them to keep their sneakers and snacks off the furniture.

But in that room, tucked around the corner, was a piano. And when China played that piano, everything about the room changed.

*    *    *    *    *

It was June 2012, and I was on the campus of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts for a weeklong of Glen writing workshop with Lauren Winner. Staying in a dorm for the first time in 20 years made me feel a bit like a teen again, brimming with that same sense of nervous excitement. Who were all of the people I caught glimpses of as they came and went from their rooms down the hall? Which ones would I be hugging fiercely by the end of the week, as we said goodbye?

That first evening—after dinner, the opening talk, and a welcome reception—many retreated to their rooms to recover from a long day of travel. But the extrovert in me knew that going to my room would lead to nothing more than a predictable evening: checking email, doing some reading, then falling asleep. If I wanted to open up my evening to surprise and possibility, I needed to venture into a public space: the dorm lobby.

Those who had been to the Glen before and understood how things “worked” had already started to gather. Plastic cups and bottles of wine were set out on the marred coffee table, and several institutional couches had been pulled up close. Bags of pretzels and popcorn were opened, and much talking and introducing ensued. I introduced myself to people, but mostly observed, holding back—waiting to feel myself soften into this new space.

It wasn’t until a few people began begging a woman named China to play the piano, and she finally agreed, that I felt at home. China’s music filled the room—not just with sound, but with energy, each particle of air vibrating in a way that reminded me “I’m alive, I’m a creative being, and it is good.”

*    *    *    *    *

pianomovingNow it is four years later, and China—China who is from Denver, who I met in Massachusetts then spent another Glen Workshop week with in Santa Fe last summer—is in my living room in Central Illinois, moving a piano. (To be accurate, she is supervising the moving of a piano.)

The piano had belonged to my grandmother. During my childhood, the piano’s home was a cabin in the woods of Northern Michigan, where my grandma’s expert playing inspired many sing-alongs. Tonight, China will play that piano, at a house concert we’re hosting for her band Alright Alright.

Life has been scooting along so frantically as of late that it takes my mind a moment to accept the wonderful reality: China and I are together again, this time in my home, with our husbands and children. Now we know one another as mothers and wives, and also as creative women who labor with the words and stories we must tell. As we hug and laugh and both talk at once, rushing around to prepare the space for this new joint venture, I sense our understandings of one another rounding out. But our friendship also feels the same—full of goofiness and grace, with flashes of depth that root us over breadths of geography and time.

We move the piano from its place by the front stairwell across the living room to the fireplace. The Danish modern armchair my husband likes to sit in after work is moved to the living room’s opposite corner, making room for a variety of guitars and China’s husband Seth, who will play them. Katelin, the band’s third member, sets up a small drum set and a ukelele and guitar to the left of the piano, near our tall bookshelf. I arrange dining room chairs on the rug and on the stage’s “wings”—the sunroom that opens to the east of the piano and the dining room to the west. Extension cords are run from outlets, power strips and amps are plugged in, spot lights are directed. The room has been transformed.

Soon, friends begin to arrive. Wine is poured. Introductions are made. Then China begins playing the piano. The space is complete.

houseshow

Alone in the City Again

In one of the final moments my Chicago community gathered together, I knelt on a swiveling armchair and squeezed my shoulders in next to Caitlyn and Ben’s.  We peered out the window in the boys’ Logan Square apartment; its angle pointed to the intersection of Kedzie and Schubert Ave where rain fell on the aftermath of a car crash.

Alone in the City AgainThe crash had thrown a cooler from the back of a truck, and now, the contents of a summer picnic spilled on the pavement. The doors of the truck remained open, the driver long since run away.

As sirens bent around buildings toward the scene, the sky opened to sheets of water and timpani thunder. Spectators hurried inside, looking back over their shoulders, hoping to catch a last glimpse of the action. Maybe like me, they found it easier to look on the wreckage of someone else’s life than to face their own.

Lord, I don’t want to be alone in the city again.

There were eight of us, expatriates of our college suburb in some stopgap Alone in the City Again 2time between college and the rest of life: six boys who lived together in Logan Square, their around the block neighbor Caitlyn, and myself.

My first year in Chicago, I fell into the trap of urban loneliness; it is easy to remain anonymous in a city—wake up, go to work, return to your little compartment, and shut the door behind you, waiting for an invitation to join the bustle. I was a first year teacher, falling asleep to episodes of “Mad Men” at 7:30 p.m., clinging to perceptions that I could not “fit in” with the cool kids.

By my second year in the city, my unhappiness persuaded me to try something different; I resolved to fashion Chicago into a home. I began to invite people over, rationalizing that perhaps others wanted someone to organize togetherness as much as I did.

With fluttering heart beats and shallow breath, I pushed all the chairs in my apartment into the living room and rigged up a digital antenna to broadcast the 2012 summer Olympics. Amidst my good intentions were less noble feelings of desperation: “like me,” “love me,” “stay with me.”

Talking myself into courage, I clung to a Field Of Dreams like promise that if I built the parties, meals, and traditions, the community would gather. And it did.

In summer, friends propped themselves on pillows that leaned against the rails of the back porch. We watched movies on a wobbly projector screen, and I served bowls filled with stove-popped popcorn drizzled with browned butter and rosemary. The boys came over to my apartment with ravenous appetites and cases of PBR. They recited compliments and “mmmms” around the table, sons of polite mothers.

We lived a sitcom city life, but I soon realized I had built a foundation of cement for a shantytown. The others talked about leaving, about futures beyond the walls of the city. I began to panic. What was wrong with Chicago? What was wrong with me?

On one afternoon, we draped a picnic blanket over the boys’ front steps. I sliced Brie and apples, arranging them on a plate to eat with a baguette and glasses of red wine. The conversation drifted towards careers and futures. Tim mentioned moving to Denver and my heart lurched.

Caitlyn suggested an exodus to her home state of California. Ben proposed working in his cousin’s bookstore in Portland. I tried not to scream, “Why not here?” Instead, I cried on the car ride home.

I felt like a little girl begging her parents not to leave her with a babysitter; if I could have clung to their legs as they tried to drag their feet out of the city, I would have.

At one of our three 1920s parties, I hung my head back, warm with gin, and listened to the lullaby of our conversation. Marty argued with another friend about the Meyers Briggs of Jesus, and Caitlyn and Andrew made the floor moan and creak with their dancing. I knew that we had become something together. With such bounty, maybe no one would ever leave.

Please God, let no one ever leave.

But tonight with the news that Tim had an interview in Washington D.C., I finally gave myself permission to take inventory of our dwindling social circle. Tonight we were together for Caitlyn’s farewell. Andrew left in May for another continent, and Ben would leave by the end of the month for Grand Rapids. Others cast their lines towards new horizons, waiting for any tug towards something different. Already there had been garage sales and exchanges of items that couldn’t fit in moving trucks.

I strung my problems together, making them into one giant demon that tormented me with questions and fears. Suddenly the boys leaving meant I shouldn’t take risks, that all my prospects for marriage would be over, that I could not discern the whispers of God’s will, that I had proved unworthy of love and ended up a failure. I grafted each of these things to the paths my friends took away from the city, away from me.

Daniel played Beethoven’s seventh symphony as two tow trucks pulled the wreckage of the crash away in different directions. The thunderstorm, the car crash, and then a silent ride home with Tim—signs and wonders denoting the end. I wanted the city to swallow me into its dark belly.

I forgot how lonely the city could feel at night.

*****

Meredith Bazzoli“Alone in the City Again” was written by Meredith Bazzoli. Meredith has spent her whole life orbiting around Chicago and its suburbs. She currently resides just west of the city with her husband Drew, who grew up a hoosier. She never thought she could marry one of those. Meredith writes, performs improv comedy, and teaches in West Garfield Park (all stories for another day). She seeks to start conversations about the life we stuff under the bed and keep off our Instagram feeds.

You can connect with her at www.veryrevealing.com

Black and white photos from the night in the essay by Daniel Saunders.

Physically Alone, Digitally Connected

I replaced my favorite clock within the first year after the move. The ticking was driving me mad.

Life after college was quiet.

Except for the ticking.

I moved to Alabama four years ago, several states away from all I knew and loved. For the first time in my life, I truly lived alone. I went entire weekends without speaking. I flipped television channels for something, anything, to capture my attention. To take away the gnawing emptiness. The longer I went without a phone call, a chance visit, a video chat hangout, the sicker I felt. As if all the energy in me had been sucked out by the great, hovering loneliness.

This is when I discovered I was an extrovert, thanks to online personality tests.

Physically Alone, Digitally ConnectedA year later, I found bloggers who wrote about their anxiety. It rocked me to the core how well I could relate. How much their advice helped. How it changed everything to know I wasn’t what I thought I was: Alone.

I’m only half-joking when I say the internet saved my sanity.

We can rant about technology all we like, the evils, the privacy violations, the addiction. But I know I owe my ability to live this pioneer girl life to the digital age. It’s true that I’m still often alone, but I’m no longer so lonely. I have learned peace and coping strategies, hope and communication skills, joy in the moment and accepting me. Just me. Without having anyone to entertain or impress. From that freedom, I can connect with an open heart.

Facebook is known for causing comparison and envy, but for me it’s a lifeline. Twitter is more than “what I had for breakfast” and news updates. It’s how I find other bloggers to exchange “me too”s with. Through Pinterest, my fellow bridesmaids and I help plan our friends and families’ weddings. Skype connects me to my friend in China. Through texts, I am with my sister whenever she needs a smile or encouragement. Our family dreams of vacations through our wanderlust-filled emails. Sometimes my friends and I phone in for a minute; some nights it’s three hours. Through Instagram, I have a window into the lives of my mom-friends, busy with the lives of their small ones. Through Tumblr, I find other fangirls, and we share about how much we love characters, how storylines should have gone, how to improve our own writing, how a line of dialog hit home… and how we have survived our own real-life battles.

Four years later, I have my “Alabama family” here around me physically, but I am also surrounded by a digital family – some my blood relations, some friends from past lives, some I will never meet.

When I move on to a new place, a new apartment that is quiet enough to hear the clock tick, I will take these people with me. My digital family grows every day. It makes the fear smaller, the hope bigger and uncertainty exciting.

Perhaps it is ironic that the very technological development the media decries as causing the isolation and loneliness in our society is the very thing that made all the difference for a girl living so very alone in a foreign state, in a quiet apartment, scared in the dark as the clock ticks too loud, but I always know, no matter where I am in the world, my digital family is there for me in one form or another. Everyone moves on with their lives, of course, but that is what is beautiful about it. Far from feeling left out or hurt, I smile to see photos of college friends having new adventures, their weddings and babies, their path pulled further from mine. Because I know, thanks to the digital age, they are only a comment away, an email, a chat or a text.

And I know, here in the digital age, I am not alone.

*****

Jenna“Physically Alone, Digitally Connected” was written by Jenna DeWitt. Jenna is the managing editor of MORF Magazine, a resource for youth ministers, mentors and parents of teenagers. She has a bachelor’s in journalism from Baylor University, where she edited a bunch of student publications, became a fan of C.S. Lewis and drank Dr Pepper floats with Blue Bell ice cream like a true Texan. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she has been adopted-in-spirit by a lovely group of folks whom she calls her “Alabama family.” You can find her on Twitter @jenna_dewitt and on her website at http://jennadewitt.com.

Choose Your Own Isolation

It was January in London. The damp hung in the air, seeping into my lungs and up the legs of my flared jeans, as I walked the streets each day for hours, along with the rest of my contingent, students on a month-long study abroad.

I’d always loved the idea of studying abroad, and I’d always wanted to return to England after living there for a few short months as a four-year-old. My memories were hazy, but they were present. I wanted to return to a place I’d been happy, feeding cows in the afternoons at a nearby dairy, watching them slowly envelop my small handfuls of grass, looking at me with large, soulful eyes.

Our professor was very tall, and I found my five-foot-two self falling further and further behind as he gestured to the objects and sites of interest as we passed. I couldn’t hear a word. Frequently, I would break into a run, so that I didn’t start to panic about losing sight of the last member of the group and truly being as alone as I felt.

At the end of each long day, we would return to our hotel, a few blocks from Queen’s Way. My roommate was often ready to go out to a show on the West End, but I was usually spent, my feet aching from all of the walking, feeling so far away from everyone I loved. I had signed up for the trip without knowing anyone well, and I found it difficult to break into the groups which had formed long before the trip had started.

Choose Your Own IsolationAlthough I didn’t venture out on my own at first, soon I grew a bit more brave (or perhaps just desperate). Although I worried about getting lost, I walked the blocks to Queen’s Way, slipping into a Spar I’d visited earlier in the trip with fellow students. I purchased a samosa, some decaf PG Tips (the tea my mother drank at home on special occasions) and a single piece of baklava.

I walked back to the hotel with my simple meal, and waited until the kettle had come to a boil. Slowly, I poured the hot water over the tea bag in my cup, watching the deep brown fingers curl into the water. I added some powdered soy milk, brought from home, and a swizzle of honey, before taking my first sip. To this day, when I drink PG tips in the evening, I am back in that spare hotel room, and I start to crave baklava.

This ritual became my sanity. My feet learned the way to the Spar, and I slowly stopped shaking on the way. Sometimes I even ventured away from my usual samosa, and tried one of the other interesting Indian delicacies in the hot case.

But I always got baklava. It was soggy, and left my fingers sticky, but it comforted me still, a sweet spot in a winter evening, the perfect companion to a cup of tea. It was the last thing I ate, and I waited as long as I could before consuming it, not wanting the experience to end, to be left alone in the hotel.

I’ve always been frugal, and this trip was no exception. I tried to avoid eating out, buying cress sandwiches at Tesco as I passed by, and storing packaged pasta salad on my hotel windowsill to keep it cool, hoping that housekeeping wouldn’t see it and throw it away.

I’m sure that this was a large part of the isolation I felt. Instead of bonding with my traveling companions over hot bowls of soup, I snuck into tiny grocery stores and ate on the run. During one such transaction, I must have betrayed something of my loneliness. “Are you happy?” the cashier asked me. She looked concerned, and genuine. I was surprised by the directness of the question, and by being seen in that anonymous place, so far from home. I can’t remember what I said, but I couldn’t forget it.

I started looking over my finances, gradually loosening my grip on my money. One day I found an Indian buffet with two other girls. I ate hot chicken soup at Stonehenge. I purchased greasy fish and chips in Canterbury and mushroom risotto at the Eagle and Child, while toasting C.S. Lewis and all that his words had meant to me.

The knot in my chest finally started to untangle. My phone calls home became less desperate. I started to reach out, just a little. I stood closer to the group, and chatted with some of them. I joined them for shopping trips to H&M (which seemed so exotic in those days). I’d written off these people in the early days of the trip, but as I made slow steps in their direction, they responded. I didn’t meet a lifelong best friend on that trip, but I did learn that I wasn’t as alone as I felt. I was the instigator of my own isolation. I had the power to connect all along.