Community counts

Tonight, two girl friends and I enjoyed dinner at the Rustic Kitchen on Stuart Street. We three go to the same church, but the other two had not yet met in person. By the time we finished decaf and creme brulee and adjourned two hours later, they too felt like friends and were free in saying so. (Hooray!)

We got together because of their shared connection to Columbus, Ohio. One knows the city, living there already part-time; the other is learning to know it....leaving Boston in a few weeks with her husband and son to live there full-time, to my sadness.

I posit that single folks in in this city do often think about other things besides dating. Hard to tell from the content on this blog, you may say, but true. When roommates are cats and the family lives 1400 driving miles away, it is necessary to create yourself a community or two within the bigger community. And that's something I think about an awful lot. My two friends tonight created an instant community--Columbusites from Boston who share a passion for missions and a friendship with Karin--where hours before none had existed.

My first apartment in Boston was on Peterborough Steet in the Fenway....on a block teeming with Berklee and Northeastern students I didn't exactly care to know.....a boisterous, echoey population that in that one street, exceeded that of my hometown in North Dakota. Had a college friend not moved at the same time and provided some social comfort, the immensity would have swallowed me. But I soon discovered the pockets that provide the same comfort as small towns: my roommates Ilaria and Nithya and our dozens of little mouse friends. Church choir. Memoir-writing class. The pot-smoking waiters, all studying piano and singing when not smoking and waitering at the West Street Grille, who bonded over post-shift martinis. Like little towns unto themselves.

Later would come the community theatre folks. And the office folks. And the marathon-running folks. And the church folks and the church folks and the church folks who never stop cycling through and sometimes stay...who are like brothers and sisters to me.

I hope to not portray the single life in Boston as a lonely place. Like any, it is pockets of community.....where there are builders and destroyers.....the good and the ugly.....and where when one might falter for a time, another thrives and fills the hole.

With the recent addition of a dating community (CFO among them) and all of you--my reading community--I was already sated. The new community tonight feels like dessert.