So I rolled up to handbells last night figuring there would be at least one person absent because there’s always one person absent. We always need a sub and typically that sub is me. Well, has been me for the past few years, as my job has really limited me from being available for bells of late, so the life of a sub it is. But at yesterday's rehearsal, when there wasn’t a place for me to be, I realized I was that person. I was still here in this college town despite having graduated four years ago. I was old. I didn't belong. I hadn’t really ever felt that way before.
I started playing handbells my freshman year of college. I mean, I had played as much handbells as you played in elementary school as a church choir kid (we’re a specific and special breed) and I can read music, but I wasn’t a part of a bell choir until freshman year. I had a campus minister ask me what that was all about. “I mean, you just don’t hear of many people going to college and joining a bell choir.” And if I had been the person I am today, I would have told him that the world would be a better place if you did, but at the time, the question stumped me. I had a straightforward answer: the chancel choir, who sang on Sundays, met on Thursdays and that conflicted frequently with marching band. I couldn’t give up band, but I could replace choir and that’s what I did.
I didn’t realize that I was just trying to fill my college schedule the way my high school schedule had been filled because I didn’t realize that my college schedule would be under so much more academic strain than my high school schedule. But as other activities fell to the side when the physics major started heating up, I kept up with bell choir. It was a fun thing, an hour or so of my week where I interacted with people outside of my age group who weren’t trying to teach me something, tying me to the bigger group of the church proper.
I don’t know if all church bell choirs are like this, but our choir is full of the fastest wits and the most intentionally sassy women I know. They crack jokes about songs and composers and how there’s no way we could play any of this and after all that, they pull off songs with aplomb. They’re also some of the sweetest and most supportive people I know- for years, one of the members of the bell choir let me stay at her house so I could play at the Moravian Love Feast every December after the dorms had closed. So bell choir practice in and of itself is usually a party and a half.
Take today for example. Today, as we were waiting for the other member of the bass bells pair to show up, one of the trebles made the announcement that she and her husband (the present bass bells player) were going to have a baby, which was accompanied by the typical shouts and squeals and smiles and questions, and then followed by jokes about why she’d make that announcement without the other bass bell player there. Then he arrived, about five minutes late, and the father-to-be held up a pencil and said, “I came prepared for bells tonight! Also, we’re having a baby!” And the newly arrived bass player said, “You brought a pencil?!”
Which, yes, cheesy music situational joke, but I love it. I love hanging out with these people. It’s why I found myself on a warm April evening sweating in the choir director’s office, windows open, wondering to which committee one has to submit a request in order to get a fan installed and when they meet. Despite the heat, it’s a comfortable place. Like so many other parts of church, this is home. This is a constant in a university community where so many things change every four years.
I’ve been ready to go. Just, the most ready to be somewhere else, doing something new. But this is something I’ll miss deeply and it’s tempting to hang on to that kind of thing for all it’s worth. I know there are things I won't want to leave. In my last few days in town, I’ll walk campus and take an Old Well picture and a bell tower picture and think about all the mornings walking half an hour up to class from Hinton James North or Rams Five. I’ll run an eye over the libraries and the pit and my junior year dorm and take that last opportunity to glory in the loveliness of this place. And after that, I’ll be able to let those things go.
But these people, these groups, I’m not ready to leave that. Which is good, you know, it shows that there’s something worth staying for and that I’m not just running. One of the podcasts I listen to takes question suggestions and mine was, “How long do you have to live in a place to be able to say you’re from that place?” and they tweeted back, “It depends on how much you hate where you’re from.” I loved that.
I’m not from Chapel Hill. I don’t think I’d ever be able to say that I’m from Chapel Hill, not if I stayed five or six or ten years from now, even. Not that I’m ready to run back to Caldwell County (hi, family, I love you!), but this, this was not going to be a place that I was from. It’s good to see that. It’s good to know that. Ultimately, it’s gonna be good to leave that.
Just not yet.
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