Tag Archives: friendship

The Bride and the Maid of Honor

Posted on by under Finding Place

I watched from a few feet away, holding her bouquet of gray lavender roses, as she gazed into his eyes and said those sacred words of promise, “I do.”

It was the destination wedding that we had daydreamed about years earlier, laughing and letting thoughts run wild. I had trouble going too far into my hopes for the future, but she was clear: a refined wedding, intimate with only a small group of friends and family. Now, in the glorious splendor of the Colorado mountains, her dream had just come true.

In our first days of college, she turned to me and extended her hand, “Hi, I’m Sheri.” Her eyes sparkled with confidence and energy.  

Mass was over and people were in small groups chatting. I had been trying to shyly sneak out the side door when she caught my eye. “Hey,” I replied, fumbling a bit, ”I’m Mary.”  

“Oh!!!” she replied with a small squeal, “Sheri! Mary! They rhyme! We should do dinner!”

“Hmmmm, yah, okay.”

And so it began.  

In the dark basement of the student union, she chatted freely. Basketball. Classes. The dorm. And, she did her best to draw me out. Home. My major. The university. I was a bit taken aback by the dynamism of her personality and sat deep in my chair, a bit shell-shocked. But that dinner connected us, the first link.  

Soon, we were meeting up to walk to Mass together and dinner afterward became a norm.  Eventually, we started to talk about very real things, storing each other’s thoughts and pains in the vault of friendship.  

Among the things that I learned at college, Sheri taught me how to be a friend.

As the years passed and our friendship remained, I gained the confidence to refer to her as my “best friend.” I was honored and humbled when she asked me to be her maid of honor, but in reality, it wasn’t much of a surprise.

As she prepared for her wedding, I enjoyed getting regular updates, hearing about the details as they unfolded. There were a few mini-dramas planning a wedding a few states away, and I listened attentively as the bumps got smoothed out. The right paperwork got into the hands of the deacon, the cake baker started returning phone calls, and the awkward conversations about the abbreviated invitation list were carefully handled.

Somewhere in the process, a thought began to irritate me, a tiny sliver under my skin that kept pricking me during the joyous preparations, even though I tried to ignore it:  What would marriage mean for our friendship?  It was right and good that he was now the one to plan things with, the one to hold her hurts and dreams. Would I still have a place?

I made light of this tiny fear, raising my glass to toast the newlyweds at their reception. In front of all the guests, I presented her husband with official recognition that he was now entitled the title “best friend.”  I would retain the rights to the girly stuff.  

I gave that toast a little over a year ago, an eventful year of Friendship Cardups and downs.  A year of phone calls sharing good news and tears.  A year of advice as decisions were made and support as hard times were confronted.  A year of visits and gifts and travel.

The stuff of gold, our friendship remains:  a relationship with history and weight, with vulnerability and trust. The sliver of doubt which nagged me during wedding preparations is gone, the tiny wound has healed. My place is secure. In becoming one, Mick has been joined into our bond of friendship.  He is a wonderful man–gentle, insightful, authentic. He loves Sheri and I love him for it.

Last week, I sat on the couch of their living room and held their first-born daughter, less than three days old. She was perfect, a truly beautiful baby. Her limbs were still curled up as if she were contained, the occasional stretch exploring new-found room. They recounted her birth story, filled with the intimate details that you only share with a tight knit group.

Sheri Mick MaryThey are calling her “Lizzie”, in short for Elizabeth Marie.

I asked about the process for choosing her name.  In the confiding voice of a long-time friend, Sheri leaned her head just so and said, “Mick loved the name….and when he learned it was your middle name, he said, ‘Even better!’”

With silent joy, warmth filled my heart.  Tracing my finger down Lizzie’s cheek, there was no doubt.

Love multiplies.

***

mary bio YAH

My Town

Posted on by under Finding Place

When I was seven, my parents packed up two U-Hauls, myself and my 5-year-old brother. We drove three days from San Diego, my birthplace, to our new home in Spokane, Washington.

Spokane is on the eastern side of Washington State, the side everyone forgets is here. Around election season, the majority put up conservative signs. On this side of the Rockies, there is a desert. It rains, but not frequently.

For a long time, I thought that I would grow up and move away from Spokane. Before college I was in love with the idea of moving to Paris and writing in cafés like Hemingway. Instead, after a short stint working full time in a grocery store, I went to college in the middle of the corn fields of Indiana.

I thought that I would marry my college boyfriend and we would settle in Chicago. The city seemed larger than life to me, sticky, with hard edges. Chicago wasn’t my kind of town, but I was in love for the first time. I would have followed that love anywhere, long after he broke my heart.  

Instead, I moved back to Spokane once more. I worked at a local winery high on a hill, and at nearly every library in the county. I covered restaurants and chefs for a local magazine. I made friends and ran into people I’d known longer than a decade at the grocery store. I began to move through the city like an adult, finding my way through familiar pathways of my youth.  

From time to time, I would chat with my therapist about moving to a bigger city, hoping it might increase my chances of meeting someone I’d like to date. Twice, I contemplated moving to Portland, both times for a boy.

The second time, I almost succeeded. I had a job and a house secured. In the days and weeks before I was meant to go, I found myself craving a chicken chipotle sandwich from Rockwood Bakery, a coffee shop where my brother used to work, and a place I’ve never been to without running into someone I know. I bought one and cried as I ate it on my porch, thinking about what a long drive it might be the next time I had a craving. I wanted to buy several of their quiches and freeze them so that I could warm one up when I needed to taste home.

IMG_3586I worked toward overcoming my fear of parallel parking so that I could wander downtown. I wanted to lay eyes on places I hadn’t been for a while. I wanted to fix them firmly into my memory so that I could carry them with me when I left.

Friends hosted their annual garden party in their backyard while the chickens were shut up tightly so they didn’t mingle with the guests. I held two brand new babies, one of them for hours, even though my arms ached. I knew that even if I came home once a month as I’d planned, to write my food articles, she would still be much older the next time I saw her. I squeezed just a little tighter.

That same baby fell asleep on my shoulder at brunch next to a sunlit window the week before I was supposed to move. My anxiety was speaking to me that day, throwing everything into sharp relief. I held that baby close, not wanting to let go even as we stood next to her ready carseat. My friend kissed my cheek and hugged me tightly, tearful, her daughter squashed between us.

Maybe it’s always hard to move, even when you are doing the right thing, but in those days and moments, I wondered.

I had only to throw my clothes in the car when the relationship slipped through my fingers, leaving me to decide whether I would stay or go. After a dark, sleepless night, I wrote two emails and a text. I cancelled my move.

Not everyone understood my decision. I can’t tell you how many people asked me why I hadn’t gone through with my big adventure. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that moving wasn’t the adventure at all. Falling in love has always been where I get my thrills.

Almost moving was a strange experience.

It was several weeks after the aborted move when I told my therapist I wanted to stay in Spokane. “I’ve been afraid,” I told her. “I’ve been afraid to love this place because I thought it was a good place to grow up, to raise a family, but not to meet someone I might love.” She nodded, because we’d had this conversation many times. “I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I want to dig my feet in like roots.” Finally, I unclenched my hands and let Portland fall. Spokane reached for my hands and held them warmly.

A few weeks ago, I witnessed a historic event in Spokane. Our mayor was reelected for the first time in 42 years. He’s a friend of mine, and I love the look on people’s faces when I walk right up to him and give him a hug in social settings. He has a tagline: “This is my town.” I found myself whispering those words at the election party as I raised a glass of red in celebration.

Even now they wander through my head as I drive to the bank or the grocery store, or take an evening walk along the ridge near my house at sunset.

This is my town, I think, and I mean every word.

cara YAH bio

Homecoming

Posted on by under Finding Place

The snapshot is of a girl in a gray Allegheny College hoodie, one she purchased in the campus bookstore on one of her pre-college visits. She is gazing at the camera, chin on fist, an open notebook on the table in front of her, a pen clutched between her fingers. She is not smiling.

The girl in the gray sweatshirt is me, more than three decades ago.

I look at the photo today, and I remember the melancholy and relief, the complicated emotions I experienced upon completing the first term of my first year of college. I remember that unmoored sensation, adrift between old and new and unknown.

*****

It was a few days before Thanksgiving, and I had a long six-week holiday vacation ahead of me before I would return for second term. I had survived my first round of final exams, and with that stress behind me, I was looking forward to seeing my mom and dad and two younger brothers, waiting for me in a house I’d never seen, on the other side of the state.

Just a month earlier, my family had relocated from a northwestern suburb of Pittsburgh to a northeastern suburb of Philadelphia.

When I chose to go to Allegheny, one of the selling points of this idyllic liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania was its proximity to home. I knew before Christmas of my senior year of high school that this is where I would go. I found out shortly after I graduated that, instead of a two-hour drive to visit my family, it would take eight hours door to door.

Now that finals were over, I felt homeless. The home of my high school years now belonged to another family, and the home I had known for the last ten weeks was a dorm room two hours north. When the photo was snapped, I was hanging out with my mom’s brother and his family for a few days. On Thanksgiving Day morning, we would all pile into Uncle John’s station wagon for the journey from one end of the scenic Pennsylvania turnpike to the other, where I would spend my long holiday break in a home I had yet to see.

When we arrived, I had to ask where to find the bathroom.

*****

I spent the first 18 years of my life getting used to new homes. Thanks to my father’s frequent corporate job transfers, I had never lived any particular place for more than five years. Home was where the family was. I learned to make new friends and adjust to new situations. As long as I could count on going home—wherever that was—to be with my mom and dad and brothers, everything was okay.

Every time I reread my favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder book, These Happy Golden Years, I was thrilled by the romance of Laura finally marrying Almanzo. And I cried every time I read the last chapter, when Laura moved out of Ma and Pa’s house and into a home of her own.

*****

I cried when my mom and dad left me at college one sunny September afternoon a couple weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday. But my tears dried quickly as years of new-kid-in-school practice kicked in. I met the other young women in my residence hall. I participated in all the orientation week events. I found new friends with whom to eat and study and explore campus and the surrounding town. I met boys, and I enjoyed my first post-high school almost-requited crush.

And then came the casual invitation that would set the course for the rest of my life so far.

When a new friend, a senior named Karen, invited me to a Christian fellowship meeting, I said yes. Because, why not? I had been saying yes to everything, from fraternity parties to movie nights to spontaneous late-night pizza deliveries.

A life-long church-goer, I had been involved in my high school youth group, but I had given no thought one way or the other about whether I would continue to go to church as a college student. Bible studies and service projects and retreats had no place on my pre-college bucket list.

Who knew that this is where I would find my people—and my calling?

*****

What the girl in the gray sweatshirt did not know on that long ago Thanksgiving Eve could fill volumes.

She did not anticipate how her decision to attend a fellowship meeting would lead her to a deepening faith in God, and to a desire to invite others into that journey. She did not know how many of the new friends she had just wished a happy Thanksgiving would still be in her life three decades later, or what triumphs and heartaches they would experience together in the coming years.

She did not realize that her own experience of finding purpose and direction as a college student would become her purpose and direction going forward.

She may have sensed that the home she was about to visit that Thanksgiving would never really be hers. She certainly did not yet recognize that Home had found her.

*****

Amy bio YAH

Dreaming of Feasts

Posted on by under Scent & Place

Deep in sleep, I am dreaming of feasts.

I’m dreaming of a long table set for many, holding platters piled high with meat, the rich juices pooling below.

In my dream there is plenty—not just plenty of food, but plenty of everything that we crave: plenty of room, plenty of laughter and conversation, and, perhaps most of all, plenty of time. We are all around the table, feasting together, taking our time. There’s nowhere we need to be, no agenda beyond savoring the food and one another.

As I settle into a contented, even deeper sleep, my mouth salivates, and it seems my soul is anticipating the meal every bit as much as my taste buds.

*   *   *   *   *

When I wake up the next morning, the dream is still vivid—probably because the scent of slow-roasting pork shoulder is real. It fills the house, blurring the lines between my worlds of dreaming and waking.

Yesterday, my husband Jason came home for lunch just so he could unwrap the pork shoulder and prepare a rub. Rosemary, sage, garlic, fennel seed, salt, pepper, white wine, and olive oil became a rustic paste with the help of his mortar and pestle. As he applied the rub, Jason handled the meat lovingly, like a newborn getting its first bath.

photo (24)Jason’s respect for the piece of meat in his hands runs deep; it’s rooted not only in his knowledge of the flavor the meat is capable of producing—how the layers of collagen and marbled fat will soften and melt into the meat as it spends time in the oven—but also in his friendship with the farmer who raises the pigs and cattle we eat. Jason and Stan could talk about meat for hours, it seems. Could a cook’s ability to talk at length about meat be a direct measure of his ability to magically transform it into something that demands a response? It seems entirely possible.

After bathing the pork shoulder in the redolent rub, Jason returned it to the refrigerator for the important resting period that allows the flavors to penetrate and soften the meat. Then he hung his apron back on its hook, gave me a kiss, and headed back to work.

*   *   *   *   *

I spent the afternoon writing in my home office, for the most part forgetting about the resting pork until I went to make tea in the kitchen, where I smelled the remnants of crushed rosemary and sage still in the stone mortar on the counter.

A love for cooking is something Jason and I share. But Jason’s willingness to embrace a process—to cook something that involves multiple steps and often multiple days—is something I don’t find appealing. I’m too impatient, too eager to find out what a particular mix of ingredients tastes like in my mouth. I also don’t understand (or, I suppose, care to understand) the science behind cooking—what happens when meat is seared, fat is rendered, onions are caramelized, steaks are tented under foil after coming off the grill. I’m all about the results; the taste alone tells me all I need to know about the science.

But to be married to someone with that level of curiosity, patience, and knowledge about the many complexities of food? That is a gift I willingly receive. I’ll lend support with the sides and dessert, the texts to friends asking if they’re free for dinner, and the carefully set table. Perhaps my favorite thing about pork shoulder, after all, is the imperative that accompanies it: The 10-pound shoulder demands that we invite friends for a feast.

*   *   *   *   *

Later that night, while I was washing my face before bed, I  heard Jason downstairs in the kitchen—the beeping of the oven being set at 225, and the clatter of the roast pan being pulled from the cabinet. Finally, the well-rested and seasoned pork shoulder was tucked into the oven and the kitchen lights were turned off.

As we settled into bed, the only scents that reached my nose were soap and toothpaste, and a whiff of detergent on the fresh tank top I’d pulled on with my pajama pants. Falling asleep, we had only the knowledge of what was taking place in the oven downstairs, none of the proof.

*   *   *   *   *

Around 3:00 am, though, our noses are roused by the rich scent of roasting meat, as the juices begin to drip, soaking the rosemary that has fallen to the bottom of the pan. The scent tickles our minds and pokes gently at our stomachs as the other parts of our bodies continue on in sleep.

And the dreams that are triggered? They’re the very best kind: dreams of full tables and bellies, friendship and fellowship, and a meal that invites us to sit and savor, as if we have all the time in the world.

*   *   *   *   *

profile2014“Dreaming of Feasts” is by Kristin Tennant. Kristin and her husband and two teenage daughters are settled in a small, Midwestern university town edged by cornfields. Her days in Urbana are filled with freelance writing in her sunroom office or favorite coffee shop, learning (mostly by doing) everything she can about parenting teens, cooking elaborate feasts with her husband Jason, and feeding as many people as possible in their big old home. (The photo above shows Jason with the porchetta he made during a family vacation this past summer.)

Then the music begins

Posted on by under Creating Place

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

A Park Called Manito

Posted on by under Memory & Place

There is a park in Spokane, Washington, called Manito. It’s the crown jewel of the city, the place my family always takes out of town guests when they come to visit. It’s 90 acres of formal and informal gardens, fountains, a conservatory. When my family first moved to Spokane, when I was 7, we would sometimes make the 25 minute drive to the park to spend the day. In the cool of the evening we would walk around the Rose Garden and I would take note of all of the rose names like “Queen Elizabeth” and “Pretty in Pink.”

Occasionally, we would go to picnics at the Upper Manito playground and the other kids and I would move the picnic tables, covered with dark green, peeling paint, behind the swings. We mounted them, the swings around our legs, and jumped off for maximum lift.

pool at duncan gardensOnce, with friends, I stripped down to my underwear and went swimming in the fountain in the middle of a traditional English garden. It was cold, and my friend’s father made us put back all of the change we had collected.

We always walk through the Lilac Garden in April, breathing in the heady fragrance. Spokane is known as the Lilac City. Families and couples cluster close together for pictures during the high point of the season. Choose any weekend in spring or summer and you’ll catch a glimpse of prom-goers, or a wedding party.

Our next house was blocks away from Manito Park.

Often, in the evenings, I would walk a little ways to Upper Manito and swing by myself, sometimes bringing a friend, or my MP3 player (long before I had a cell phone, let alone one that would store music). I would swing and think, sorting out the problems of the day, sometimes praying. I went there whenever I had an unrequited crush, or when I was waiting for a phone call. I went there the day before I left for South Korea when I was 19, my first trip overseas without my family. I went when I was stressed out at work.

They have re-done the swings and the playground equipment since our days of jumping off the picnic tables, and added a splash pad, but the baseball diamond is still there, and those picnic tables are still peeling.

ManitoOver the years, I walked with many friends through that park. Now, when I return, I hear snatches of conversations, I see snapshots of people I don’t know anymore. In a grassy area beside the English garden with the fountain, I can almost see my beloved dog when she was a puppy, chasing after a  tennis ball, and I have to remind myself that she’s not with us anymore.

I sat on a bench in the Perennial Gardens after my first breakup and told a childhood friend that I was fine.

“You don’t have to be fine,” she said.

When I moved out of my parents house, my new place was near enough to walk to Manito still. I often made my way to the calming Japanese Garden and took a lap or two. Sometimes I would bring my phone and catch up with people as I walked through the Rose Garden or down to the duck pond.

lilac gardenAs I wind past the Japanese Gardens, I remember that the park was the site of a zoo which closed in the 1930s, a casualty of the Great Depression. The ruins of the animal enclosures still dot the landscape in certain areas. If I didn’t know what I was looking for, I’d think that they were just stones haphazardly stacked.

We hadn’t even started dating yet when my out of town boyfriend first came to visit me. Almost as soon as he got off the plane, I told him that I wanted to take him to Manito Park. He still teases me about this, about my dogged determination to bring a country boy to a manicured park in the middle of the city. But I’ve lived my life in Manito. It has been there for heartbreak and heart-to-hearts. I spent time there with my first crush as an 8-year-old (naturally he was completely unaware of my existence). I have pushed my friends’ kids on the swings, picnicked in the grass, and played kickball. It was only fitting that it be the backdrop for this new, fragile chapter too. Now, as I walk through the field next to Upper Manito and take a seat on the swing, I hear whispers of that visit joining the rest of the cacophony.

To see what I could see

Posted on by under Alone in Place

I had travelled more than a thousand miles to be surrounded by people, yet there I was, alone on a hard red-dirt trail in the Santa Fe National Forest.

To be clear, I was “alone on purpose,” as Nicole Morgan so deftly phrased it in her recent guest post. But following through on this intentional aloneness had taken great willpower. By choosing to set off solo on a hike that afternoon I was voluntarily leaving behind the potential of great conversations and new friendships—the very experiences I had in mind when I devoted a week of time and a sum of money to attend a Glen West writing workshop.

Many people at the Glen arrive in search of space and time to think and write, but as a full-time solitary writer who longs throughout the year for “colleagues,” I went to the Glen to fill that space and time with people. I needed a break from being alone with my thoughts and words, and during my first three days there I had accomplished just that. The mornings’ inspiring conversations in my non-fiction writing workshop transitioned into lunch hours sitting with authors I’ve long admired. Afternoons spent around courtyard tables, hearing about writing projects others were working on, gave way to more conversations over dinner, followed by engaging author and artist talks. Each night found me fighting the need for sleep as the extroverts and night owls gathered for more talk and laughter over whisky or wine, late into the night.

By that Thursday afternoon I had reached a state of “satisfyingly full” and knew some solitude (beyond the fast-asleep kind) would be good for me. It was one of those moments of awareness that separates childhood from adulthood: when you know that something—maybe eating those greens or getting up early to exercise—is important for your wellbeing, so you do it even though you don’t really want to.

I didn’t really want to be alone, but I knew it would be good for me, so I set out on the nearby Atalaya Trail to see what gift Aloneness might have for me in the midst of so much togetherness.

photo (9)The hard-packed ground was dry and gravelly, a shade of burnt, orangey-red that might as well be called New Mexico Red. I passed by Juniper and piñon, cacti, yuccas, and sagebrush, breathing in a heavenly-yet-foreign blend of scents that added a new layer to my aloneness: I was alone in an unfamiliar land.

As I continued walking, I began to wonder what range of unfamiliar creatures might call this arid region home (rattlesnakes? scorpions?). Then I recalled the coyotes whose sparring the night before had awoken me in my narrow dorm room bed, the windows open to the cool night air. Suddenly, alone took on multiple layers of meaning: I was not only by myself, far from others, but I was 7,000 feet above sea level in a foreign land, surrounded by potential dangers. The cell phone in my pocket didn’t even have service. I began anxiously singing, for company:

The bear went over the mountain,
the bear went over the mountain,
the bear went over the mountain—
to see what it could see.

I couldn’t remember what the bear saw, so I stopped singing and walking to just breathe—to calm the tinge of fear I felt and focus my mind on the quiet and the beauty that was all around me.

After walking a bit further, I reached a trio of wooden plank steps that carried the trail up and over a gravel road. Turning around, I lowered myself onto one of the steps, opening my water bottle and taking in the view below, the path I had just walked. The college campus, where all of those conversations and friendships had taken root the days before, looked small, but there it was, waiting.

I pulled my journal out of my backpack, turning to a page where I had taken a few notes while the poet Scott Cairns had read to us an evening or two before. A line from his poem “Draw Near” had especially captivated me:

For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered far to find.

I had traveled all the way to New Mexico to be with other writers and artists—I needed new conversations and different perspectives to help reframe the story within me. Then I had traveled up this mountain for time and space alone, in a land so different from the one I know that I couldn’t help but be aware, notice, and respond—not intellectually but viscerally. And all of those miles, all of that wandering both with others and alone, had helped me meet what is very near, in my heart.

photo (8)

Alone in the City Again

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

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.

Choose Your Own Isolation

Posted on by under Alone in Place

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.

Pull Yourself Together

Posted on by under Together in Place

It was well into summer when I started to lose my grasp on the splintering pieces. On my lunch break, I would drive to a large parking lot for a big box store and cry until I thought I might throw up, and I couldn’t breathe. Even then, I used a wet wipe to compose my features. “Get it together,” I said to my reflection in the visor mirror. Then I would drive back to work, heavy in the knowledge that things might never change.

I’d always prided myself on my ability to hold it together. “You can’t change your circumstances,” my mother would say, “but you can change your attitude.” My six year old self drank in those words, and didn’t realize that certain circumstances were not okay, no matter my attitude.

So I tried to change my attitude, using all of my tricks. I went to yoga at lunch and bought scented candles for my office. I read books instead of talking with my co-workers. But the days continued to roll over me, crushing my spirit a little more every day. My job was slowly killing me.

It started subtly. On the way to work I wondered what it might be like to drive off the ridge near my house. One small movement of the steering wheel, one gentle push over the edge. Or perhaps I could drive into the median. Nothing serious, just an accident. If I was in the hospital, I couldn’t go to work, right?

I’ll never forget where I was and how it felt. I was in my office, at my desk, the one right next to the window that looked over the parking lot. It was hot in the building, and my fan was on, pointed at my hands, hovering over the keyboard. An image entered my mind unexpectedly. I pictured myself walking into the kitchen and opening the drawer where we kept the knives, selecting one, and plunging it into my chest.

The room began to close in and I began to shake. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t focus. I’m not sure how I made it through the rest of that day and home. I’m even less sure how I made it to the home of my small group leader.

Pull Yourself Together by Cara Strickland | You Are Here All through the evening, as the other members of my group discussed the Bible in that small, cozy home to a single mother and three foster kids, I stayed silent. I was afraid to move or speak, because I knew that I could no longer keep it together. My next move would be the end, I would fall apart. I waited as long as I could.

After group was over and we continued to talk, I raised a timid voice. “Can I ask for prayer?” I said.

I sat on the large ottoman in the center of the room, legs crossed. I wasn’t sure how to begin. How do you fracture the image of togetherness? How do you admit that you want to die, and that you are terrified?

It wasn’t the sort of small group that talked about personal struggle. All the prayer requests around the circle were about other people, and physical health. I wasn’t sure if it was a safe place to fall apart, even as I shattered. But I couldn’t hold it in any longer.

There was silence for a time, after my flood of broken words. I waited for the clatter. Hugging my knees into my chest. But it didn’t come.

“Let’s start with therapy,” one of the women said.

“I can call and get you a doctor’s appointment,” said another.

I’ll have lunch with you tomorrow,” said another voice. “I’ll come get you at work.”

“You can quit your job,” said the single mom with the three foster kids.

In the days and weeks that followed that night, I began therapy, went to the doctor, quit my job, and almost jumped out a window high above downtown Denver. Often, after I stopped working and began to heal, I would stare at the wall, trying to muster the energy to drink the tea after I’d made it.

But I returned often to that tiny house, and that warm living room, even to that large, cushy ottoman. I awoke my memories of that circle of people around me, reminding me that I wasn’t alone, even if I wasn’t together.