By Peggy Sturdivant

In the last few days I have traveled far from Ballard. I have been to the Dominican Republic under the tyranny of Trujillo, to Selma, Alabama in 1964, and to Pittsburgh during the Depression. It was only for Pittsburgh that I had to travel as far lower Queen Anne.

Last week I wrote about being in a funk. Well-meaning friends responded with offers of special teas and sunny windows. Sometimes there’s just too much bad news in a row. How do we all keep putting one foot in front of the other? At least for me it seems like what enables us to face the world and find joy again is seeing events transformed by art. The forms can vary, from piecing a quilt that depicts family history, songs so beautiful that you don’t realize the subject is loss, or the book you cannot put down.

In the course of three days I finished reading Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” sat in Ballard’s crowded Majestic Bay Theater on the Monday holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday to watch “Selma” and attended opening night of the revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Piano Lesson.”

Experienced in that order each work took me further from my own daily world and petty grievances. I am not in a position where I could be shot for a whisper against a dictator, or participating in a civil rights march, or “stealing” a piano that has family history engraved in its wood. I have never really had to ask myself the question, what would I be willing to die for? I’m blown away enough just watching actors portray those who really did have to answer and act on the question.

What I know about myself is that to thrive I need to read, listen, visit, attend, seek out all ways we tell our stories and transform events. A wise woman at Horizon House: Retirement Community counsels others to keep their world as big as they can, as long as they can. I had been letting my world get too small. But it doesn’t take airplanes or even freeways to help us keep our world larger. We have books, movies, art walks, Poetry on Buses and art and poetry on display in Seattle’s City Hall. In Ballard we have the Majestic Bay, our library, Ghost Light Theatricals, and Rain City Video. And through February 8, 2015 there’s “The Piano Lesson” on stage at The Seattle Repertory Theater.

When I left the theater on Monday and emerged into twilight I couldn’t leave behind the scenes from the movie “Selma,” most of all the actual archival footage of those events as they occurred in 1964. It’s one thing to know that a work is a film based on facts, another to see newsreels, not reenactments.

It’s even harder to put live theater behind, because it makes us witnesses, almost participants. There is an amazing intimacy, that of actors inhabiting the characters in front of your eyes, and their voices in your ears. Of all of August Wilson’s plays that I’ve seen performed, plus the monologues I’ve watched in the annual student competition, this play put me closest to being in that Pittsburgh living room. When two of the characters would attempt to lift the upright piano (stage right?) I could hear again the same grunts when the upright in my living room was carried up the front steps six years ago.

In “Piano Lesson” the piano is object and vessel of history, a symbol of the family’s path from slavery to freedom, but it’s also an instrument that gets played and connects that characters and the audience through music. Martin and I have been talking about letting go of the piano in our house. It came to me from a “Free piano” ad in the Ballard News-Tribune” nearly 20 years ago, passed along by a couple whose children had left home. I suppose I hold onto the piano just in case someone will come into the house and touch the keys. Also, a saving grace in the play and my life, the piano is almost impossible to move.

The Dominican Republic, Selma, Pittsburgh…each one has allowed me to feel like I am standing in someone else’s shoes and put my life in perspective. I don’t know if I would have had the courage to stand on that bridge in Selma knowing what might happen. But by going to the living room of the Charles family circa 1936 I can experience lives of those whose survival gave them that courage.

So here’s my only parting advice about keeping your world bigger and richer. Go to see “The Piano Lesson” at Seattle Repertory Theater first, and then watch “Selma.” And don’t even consider trying to sell the piano.

Seattle Repertory Theater. 206.443.222. www.seattlerep.org