The Unfilled Space

This article was originally published in the Daily Post Athenian in Athens, Tennessee on August 25, 2017.

Confession: In the days leading up to Monday’s astronomical phenomenon, I was a Totality Grinch. My irritation reached a climax about 9am at Ingles.

I’m striding briskly into the market and am quickly slowed by an influx of people I don’t recognize loitering in my produce department.

Waiting in line at the deli, I send an uncharacteristically impatient text to my husband about all the people in my way. Waiting in line for a latte, something changes. The line is large and nearly out the door. Looking around I’m pretty certain that my patient friend Mr. Jim Dodson and I are the only “locals” in the group of 30 something coffee drinkers.

I return Mr. Dodson’s easy, kind smile and that’s when I notice it. Not a single foot is tapping, no keys are jingling. No one is doing that edgy “hurry this up” shuffle. And everyone, even me, is smiling. The three groups between me and Mr. Dotson are chatting jovially about their travels from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Alabama. The couple to my right is making plans to feed the college honors students whom they brought from Georgia. The teenage boys in front of me put their phones in their pockets, turn around, and engage me in conversation, complete with eye contact. By the time I pick up my latte, my heart has grown three sizes too big.

As I walked to my car, still smiling, I recalled Game 3 of the 2010 Divisional Series. Coach Shep and I were at Turner Field for the tense game and it remains one our favorite ballpark memories. In the bottom of the 8th , Eric Hinske hit a two-run homer to put the Atlanta Braves in the lead. The stadium erupted. My husband and I sprung from our seats to hug each other, then we hugged our neighbors, and continued to high-five everyone within arm’s reach.

It’s curious to me that we love so freely during these monumental occasions, but choose to grouch about the strangers in the deli line on an average grocery trip.

Austin Fesmire, our dedicated Director of Parks & Recreation for the City of Athens, also noticed an extraordinary kindred amongst strangers during the total eclipse. Chatting with Austin after a Pumpkintown committee meeting, I was touched by his account of Monday’s event.

Austin and his team hosted 10,437 visitors and locals in Athens Regional Park, and helped facilitate the logistics of getting all those people and vehicles into and out of the park. It would be easy for the person overseeing that nuanced orchestration to reflect on the day with a heavy sigh and a recount of the challenges, hiccoughs, and issues. Austin did none of those things. With a smile, he spoke first of the genuine kindness of each person who shared that experience in the park.

Austin was quick to praise the various departments that worked together to ensure the City of Athens was a gracious host to our thousands of visitors, and was equally complimentary of those visitors and the care they took of our park. His eyes gleamed as he explained how courteous the guests were and exclaimed “There was no trash! 10,000 people and we barely picked up a mess.” And his smile broadened when he recounted the calls, emails, and face to face thanks his office received for The Friendly City, which rose to its name, and made it easy and pleasurable for a community of sky-gazers to share that once-in-a-lifetime moment.

I enjoyed the eclipse with an intimate group of beloved, so I asked Austin what the energy of that mass collection of people felt like. “Was it like that Christmas morning feeling to the thousandth power?” I teased.

He nodded with a smile and said it was electric. “It was a huge eruption,” he continued, “you could feel the shouting, and I heard they could feel it at the industrial park. It was really something…a crescendo of 10,000 voices.”

It’s not insignificant to me that he used the word crescendo, an Italian word meaning “a gradual increase in loudness.” Austin drawing his verb from musical terminology reminded me that the exhilarating kindred we experienced Monday is not as uncommon as I initially thought.

I feel it every Wednesday in the Sanctuary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. I’m a soprano in the choir and those rehearsals are particularly special. Fifteen to thirty-two of us gather on any given Wednesday. One soprano comes from a labor-intensive job at a retail store. An alto comes from work at the Recycling Center. There are Wesleyan students who pause from class and homework to sing, or accompany the choir. There’s a banker in the baritone section and a retired Army officer in the tenor. There’s a librarian, a retired AACA director, a retired engineer, a retired medical professional, a social worker, a YMCA employee, and others who work hard to serve the community. We’re a diverse group with assorted daily labors and challenges, but for 75 minutes midweek we come together and breathe out the worries of the world. We laugh and smile. We enjoy the good, pleasant, and hard work that is creating a choral sound.

I felt it in July in the Sue E. Trotter Theater at The Arts Center. Twenty five 11-17 year olds assembled for a two-week theatre camp. They came from nine schools and several home school cohorts. They represented all walks of life and had various levels of theatre experience. Theatre Camp is not easy.

Their leaders push them hard to learn in the utmost encouraging atmosphere. By Tuesday afternoon of the first week, the group that timidly shared their names Monday morning was casually circled around a piano, arms linked, belting a Billy Joel classic as if they’d spent every day of their lives together in the Black Box.

Creative collaboration builds a unique bond akin to that stimulated by a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

This benefit, though, is not only for artists, musicians, or performers. The essential power of the arts is that they unite us.

There’s a Latin word my friend David Ledbetter – a baritone in the church choir, and accomplished instrumentalist – likes. Lacuna means an “unfilled space or gap.” This could refer to missing pages in a book or a rest in a piece of music, but I like how Dave uses it to describe the communal silence held after a remarkable anthem. I think of that word often in the Black Box. It’s the still hush that precedes a curtain call. It’s the collective pause before an eruption of applause following an especially moving song.

The union of an audience sharing lacuna is a pretty stark contrast to the crescendo of a multitude sharing the glory of Monday’s solar eclipse, but the essence is the same: when we share an experience, we remember we are kindred.

One of my beloved with whom I shared those glorious moments was my almost seven-year-old god-daughter Lucy. I know she gets it because Monday evening she said to her momma: “I Just want to live in totality.”