Last night I dreamt we moved to Nearby City. We hadn't yet moved our furniture from Small Town to Big City, and we merely moved ourselves back into the house in Small Town, realized the new owners would be showing up soon, and started looking for houses in Nearby City. In looking for houses, I ran across a little one-story bungalow in the darkness, the lights on and shining warmly. I stood in the driveway next to an old Honda, looking at the house, and the door opened and Crush, the director of our gay women's choir, came outside. She was happy to see me, hugged me, and I told her we were moving here and would be rejoining the choir. Suddenly we were in a huge church ampitheater's balcony, and several members of the choir were scattered around the curving pews. We sat there, folded arms on the backs of the pews in front of us, chins resting on arms, watching something happening in front and saying again, emphatically, that we were returning to the choir.
This morning, on the radio, they advertised a jazz brunch that had taken as its name the title of a song we sang in that choir, an a cappella song we learned nearly musicless. Immediately I heard the chorus in my head, the complex swelling of six parts, and missed singing desperately.
I have been resisting finding another choir, citing time constraints. Our time is constrained, but I think I am also reluctant to find another choir that cannot, by definition, live up to that one half-season I spent with the choir in Nearby City in which I found out I am a soprano I and went from marginal to soloist in four months. There were things about it I disliked, including one fellow soprano who spent all her time complaining and critiquing others when she wasn't insulting them, but I felt both challenged and safe there, and I hate the idea of getting acclimated all over again only to sing bad music, or silly music, or not trust my director.
And yet today I find myself singing softly to myself everything we sang last season, remembering my part-mates and my director and wishing Nearby City were, well, more Nearby than it is.