On my ninth birthday, my family’s moving van arrived on the South Side of Chicago. For a nerdy white kid from the Boston suburbs—meaning me—starting from scratch in the relative rough-and-tumble of Chicago’s public schools was a big change. And with one exception, up to that point I hadn’t been that good at making friends. I was always encouraged by my highly educated parents to be the smartest kid in the class and, in retrospect, it’s clear that I overdid it.

That competitive quality of mine didn’t help at school, especially at Shoesmith. Once, I was getting beaten up in the fourth grade, and when Ricky’s fist met my nose as I was on the way out the door to recess, I saw that it would be good to learn other coping strategies to substitute for being a know-it-all. (Some of you will surely tease me that I never really mastered that switch.) I tried being a little more sociable, although I had a hard time restraining myself from being competitive. There were kindnesses, to be sure.

My classmate Patrice Linder took pity on me in gym class and was patient in teaching me how to dance the “breakdown,” which must have been pretty funny to watch.

While I did have fun going to after-school classes and summer camp at the Hyde Park Jewish Community Center, the game-changer for me that first year in Hyde Park was getting into one of the “concert training units” of the Chicago Children’s Choir. I remember the day when a conductor from the CCC came into our classroom and asked everyone to sing, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” while she walked up and down the aisles. The next week was my first rehearsal with the training group, an all-treble ensemble that sang in up to four parts. I began as a first soprano until they figured out that I had low notes, and from then on I became a second alto.

And I made friends.

If you asked me to identify the most profound experience of welcome in the first 20 years of my life, the CCC (which we all knew as just “The Choir”) would have to be it. I was still a know-it-all, but that didn’t get you very far in the choir and, in what was a profound relief, it really didn’t matter. How I got to be completely loved by the second alto section—Sherri Hayden, Birgitta Gustafson, and a whole bunch of kids who were just a few years older than me—is still beyond my comprehension and surely counts as one of the most extraordinary gifts of my life. The Browning sisters, Sarah and Katie, were altos, too, and became dear friends. Alfred Shapere and Dan Levin, who both attended a different public school, became close chums, which I hadn’t had since leaving Brookline. My big sister and little brother also joined the choir, but not for a few years. This was a tribe for me, pure and simple—the first place where I really belonged.

In the CCC, I was loved, encouraged, and buoyed up just because. Sure, I wanted to sing well and to be accepted and known for being a good musician, but what I found there was a love and an acceptance far broader and deeper than that. I can tell you that it completely changed the rest of my childhood and laid the groundwork for much of what has been good in the rest of my life thus far.

And it wasn’t just me. If you ask people who were in the choir in those days to describe their experience, they will all tell you, without exception, that we knew we were part of something remarkable. This was not only because it was an intentionally mixed-race, mixed-class, co-ed children’s choir, but also because we were challenged musically with phenomenal repertoire and were never told there was anything we couldn’t do musically. Do you know how rare that is?

In addition, I found that I had some leadership qualities, which were greatly encouraged by the founder, the Rev. Dr. Christopher Moore, of blessed memory. Chris was one of the first adults who treated me like a peer and not like a kid. At the same time, I felt completely loved. How he got 120 children, from the ages of eight to 18, to feel the same way, and to sustain that sense of community for more than 25 years, is a miracle beyond my understanding, but he did it. We had superb conductors and pianists, including Ivy Beard, the brilliant accompanist and vocal coach from Lyric Opera, who inspired and guided us to unbelievable heights of musicality, including his conducting us in Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms when I was 12. I was one of the boy soloists in the second movement, which turned out to be my swan song as a treble since my voice changed that summer. (Ivy took his own life the next year, which shook all of us greatly—the first real loss like that in my experience.) Joe Brewer taught us the voicings of gospel music by ear; Lourin Plant, Kevin Butler, Marty Swisher, and others rounded out the conducting team.

But it is the sense of being home—the bedrock, in-your-bones understanding that there is a place where you belong, unconditionally—that is the greatest gift of my time in the Chicago’s Children Choir. This sense developed in many ways over time. One was a surprise. My father, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, had a Fulbright fellowship when I was 12 years old and took me with him to Bangladesh for about half of my seventh grade year. It might not sound like much, but just before I left, Sherri Hayden, one of the kindest people I have ever known, passed around a card to the whole Senior Tour ensemble for them to sign, and she gave it to me the Saturday before I left on the trip. I carried that card with me for the whole journey and probably looked at it every day of those three and a half months. I came back a different person because of that card. It was the first time in my life that I returned to a group of my peers where I knew I was loved that much.

There’s more to this story, including the five years when I continued in the choir after my voice changed, and I found myself in a new sort of home in the bass section… but that’s a tale for another day. The essential quality of belonging is what has remained with me all these years, that sense for which I am so very grateful and which I’ve tried to carry into all my musical work ever since.

Fifty years later, I can tell you that it’s gratifying to be having some success in our goal of creating a deliberate sense of home here at Sounds Good Choir. An angel of hospitality, my wife and co-founder, Sandy Siegel Miller, embodies the quality of gracious welcome as fully as anyone I’ve ever known. She’s also our program director and, while she likes to work mostly in the background, it’s clear that her sense of welcome pervades the whole organization. Our conductors, staff, board, and volunteers work hard to make this a place of belonging, especially our superb choir liaisons who greet singers every week in rehearsal. To those of you reading this who are singers, of course, you are the choir; thanks go to you for being the fabric of every ensemble, the ones who welcome newcomers and who keep on being kind to those with whom you’ve been singing—for anywhere between one session and our entire first eight years. The spirit of my friend, Sherri Hayden, lives on in you.

Thank you for being the place where people want to be, the home for our voices, and our hearts.

And please, if you have a story about ways in which Sounds Good Choir has made you feel welcome, we’d love to hear from you. Email your story to info@soundsgoodchoir.org.