My Dinner with András

Just kidding, I've never had dinner with András Schiff. But he comes to perform often in Ann Arbor, and tonight was the fourth time I heard him play. During the concert, I was reflecting on how his concerts have punctuated various stages of my life in Michigan. I attended the first two concerts with my roommate Christa during my second year of graduate school. They were part of a 2-year series in which Schiff played the entire Beethoven sonata cycle. I remember feeling so smug that this project would only be performed in New York City, San Francisco, and...Ann Arbor. (Take that, coastal elites! We're just as important, plus I can get good tickets for $10.) At the time, I was so grateful that Christa was interested in going with me. I was struggling to find friends with similar interests in my graduate program, plus I was single at the time, and I was always anxious about having to go to classical music concerts alone.

By the next year, when I attended the third concert (still Beethoven sonatas), Christa had moved, and I took Dave as my date. But this was early in our relationship, and I was skeptical that things would work out: here's a guy who doesn't read literature for fun and had never heard of my field before! What did we have in common anyway?? I was planning to leave in a few months to spend a year abroad for research. I figured I may as well see where the relationship was going until I had to leave...

And now, the fourth concert (Goldberg Variations): Dave and I are newlyweds, trying to find our way out of Ann Arbor and to the same location. Now we're balancing two real careers and future family plans. Christa is married, has three dogs, and a beautiful baby girl in Boston. And those friends who didn't share my interests and left me feeling lonely? Now we text, call, email each other regularly; though some are as far away as Kabul and Munich, and others have left academia altogether, I treasure the experiences we've shared and the support we can offer each other.

The future is so hard for me envision right now. I'm struggling to define what it is I even want out of life, beyond knowing that Dave and I must. live. together. For a goal-oriented person, this is hard, especially when I control so little about the academic job-seeking process. But in the fall of 2007, when I walked up the hill with Christa, tickets in hand, I never would've imagined the circumstances under which I would write this András Schiff post in 2013. This gives me hope that in 2019, I'll again be writing about doubts diffused, challenges overcome, and relationships celebrated. It just seems a long time from now.