Dinner on the Grounds

Five years ago, Carly established a weekly shape-note singing for Baltimore-area Sacred Harp-ers. Every Thursday evening, a small group of us would gather in her Bolton Hill apartment for a little over two hours of singing from The Sacred Harp and other tunebooks, with a break partway through for snacks and socializing.

The size of the group fluctuated from week to week. Some Thursdays it would just be Carly, Nora, Erin, and me, with Erin singing bass an octave up the scale. Other weeks, we would have out-of-town visitors and friends of friends packing into the apartment, and the noise of our song would spill out of the window and out into Eutaw Place.

For me, the highlight of the singing was the meal. What started out as a snack break involving chips and salsa expanded to a full-on vegetarian dinner, usually involving salad, a rice dish, fruit, and several desserts. Initially, we would stand around in the kitchen or in the living room with paper napkins cupped under our mouths to catch crumbs while we munched and chatted. But as the weeks and months went by, we began to gather around the dining table and eat off actual plates and use other utensils besides our fingers. Pass the couscous, please, Owen. Nora, I can't believe you made these cupcakes. Is this candied ginger, Andy?

Over time, the core group of six or eight of us that gathered week after week came to know each other quite well. Not that we all became the best of friends, of course; some close relationships formed, but there were always those who remained at the periphery of the circle, either by choice or because of the vagaries of group dynamics. Nevertheless, those Thursday meals came to resemble more of a family gathering than a grip-and-grin church coffee hour.

At the center of the singing has always been Carly. It was she who started the sing, and she who welcomed friends and strangers alike into her home each week. It was Carly's table we gathered around, and Carly who sent the reminder e-mails every Tuesday. One year for her birthday, we all chipped in and bought her a cake from Charm City Cakes before it had ever attracted the attention of Food Network executives. Another year, one singer presented her with a beautiful oak bench which he had made by hand. When she finally moved from the Eutaw Place apartment and a couple of the regular singers moved away, we lost more than a permanent singing space. In a subtle and mysterious way, the sense of family that had grown so quietly and organically over the years was disrupted.

In the couple of years since, our tribe of singers has turned nomadic, wandering from Fells Point to Remington, from Quaker meetinghouse to UCC church, from office space to living room. Lately we've been gathering at the home of two newer singers who are on extended vacation in South America. This past week there were few enough of us that instead of arranging chairs in a hollow square in the living room, we gathered around the dining table and sang and ate there.

At the dinner break, I looked around at our tiny and characteristically motley gathering. A couple of us were the same people who had trudged up the stairs to Carly's old apartment years before. Others were newer additions to our small singing community. The sense of family that I had come to love at Eutaw Street is not entirely gone and is not irretrievable, but it is different than what it was before. That's the way of things. But for a moment, it was pleasant to step back and listen to the conversation and the clink of silverware, and feel its presence, hovering faintly in the air like the echo of a song.