Home Safe?

This post is not about singing.  Not really.

On Saturday I celebrated 38 years of sobriety.  A few weeks ago, my partner and I started going to a meeting in her neighborhood.  I hadn't been to a meeting since 2005 or thereabouts.  Even as this program had saved my life, after a while I got turned off.  2004-2005 were pivotal years for me.  If you read this post (if you haven't already) you will see why.

I tried going back to meetings then (where I always grabbed for help) but the one available at lunch hour was packed with unemployed young people, I always came late (lunch hour? work? duh?) and so never got called on.  The conversation was mostly about drugs, there was lots of slang and profanity, and as a 50something wearing a suit with long term sobriety I was not perceived as needing help.  So I got help from the Well Spouse instead.  And from blogging communities, and later, an in-person caregiver support group.

When my partner and I went to the Unitarian Church in 2003, we had hoped that that would be an extension of our spiritual life in 12 step programs and that it would be something that would bring us together during a difficult time.  I was burnt out from working in a stressful high level management job, she had just sort of opted out and spent the day in bed, waiting for me to come home (often at 8 pm) and make dinner.  Instead our experience with that church tore us further apart.  I was swept off my feet by someone who got me to sing (the sexual aspect of all this was really the messenger, not, as I had thought at the time, the message), a dream I had deferred but never forgotten, and I became someone else.

From time to time, I hope that the spiritual messages I get from the Lutheran church will spark something beyond my love of the music there (and opportunities to sing my oratorio repertoire) but these sparks come quickly, and fizzle out quickly.  Recently my main feeling at that church is one of being subsumed beneath all the superachievers.  Everyone either has a music degree, a theater degree, or the means to travel all over the world.  At the panel discussion a few months ago that sparked so much envy and self-dissatisfaction, they were able to assemble a Broadway producer, a Broadway company manager, a high profile Broadway actress, and several recent conservatory graduates.  A 60something with a nice voice who sings an occasional solo and produces a concert once a year just didn't make the cut.

The meeting I started going to is not on the Upper West Side, where, no doubt, I would encounter the same demographic that I see at the church.  It was in South Murray Hill, where my partner lives, which is a lot more low key.  True, market rent apartments are as expensive there as anywhere else in Manhattan, but the population is a lot less flashy. And among people my age, there are many in lower middle income, uninteresting professions (or retired from them), who moved there in the 1960s or 70s and stayed.

Interestingly, I felt a lot more "spiritual" there than at church.  I shared my experiences of being 38 years sober, and listened to other people share about their lives.  Not once did I hear about where anyone went to school, or even what they did for a living.  For the first time in a long while I didn't feel "Well, I'm only a copyeditor", "I only have a BA from  Hunter College", "I'm only an unpaid church soloist".

If I am looking for a spiritual home, maybe that is it, regardless of where I choose to make music.

I can hardly wait to go back there, holding my partner's tiny frail arm, to do God's work.