Revelations in the Choir Room

To celebrate my 75th blog post, here is an advance sneak peak at the project I'm working on now. Enjoy!

Many defining moments of my high school years happened in the choir room.

“What are you reading?” I asked my friend Jamie one day (in the choir room). I feel pretty confident, and not at all over dramatic, in saying that that question changed my life.

Now, when I say that my defining moments happened in the choir room, I mean that I was a choir kid. Yes, a choir kid. I was one of those kids who walked through the halls singing Broadway tunes and Schubert art songs alike at the top of my lungs with the other choir kids. One of those kids you probably told to can it, or pushed into a locker, or politely ignored, or even secretly admired, when you were in high school. We weren't trying to be annoying, honestly. In my case, at least, the joys of high school life were just so overwhelming that they often manifested themselves in effusive bursts of song. I couldn't help it.

Something wonderful happens when you sing with a choir, when all the parts come together into one voice, and you can feel the notes and rhythms sliding and swirling around you, and the music fills the room until your breath is vibrating with it. And then, just after the song has ended, it still hangs in the air for a split second, reverberates through the vast space of the universe and back to the closeness of your beating heart, before fading to silence. It's that fraction of a second, that echo that makes it all worth it. There is no thought, no movement, just the lingering remnant of an enchantment just ended.

It is that remnant, I think, that made the choir room such a magical place. And maybe it was because of that magic that I was fated to ask that life-changing question.