I put my coffee and croissant down at my favorite spot. It is a seat facing the window at the front of Alnwick, Connecticut’s historic café – The Broad Street Inn. The café itself was built in the 1780s and serves as the centerpiece of Alnwick, a near rural town in northern Connecticut. I boost myself up onto the stool, I’m not a terribly tall person. Then I take my old-fashioned over-the-ear headphones and a notebook out of my bag. I pop the one over my ears and flip open the other, unclipping the pen that’s always attached to it.
Then, I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and begin to draw.
I’m not sure what the other people in the café think when they see me. I recognize most of them, but I imagine they think I’m new here. I imagine they think I’m an occasional visitor who stops by and spends hours just drinking coffee and dancing in my seat – for reasons that are beyond their concern. They’re right about the dancing. But they’re not right about me being new. I’ve been coming to this café longer than most of the people here.
I’ve been coming since I was a little girl.
My parents lived in Alnwick. I grew up in Alnwick. For my parents, this café was a monthly ritual. They were ambitious people, deeply ambitious. Somehow, they managed to organize a monthly get-together in that coffee shop in semi-rural Alnwick. It wasn’t just an ordinary get-together, though. However they swung it, their guest list ended up including the most prestigious scientists, lawyers, corporate founders, professors and hedge fund managers in the region. People would come from the plush towns of southern Connecticut. They’d come from Boston. They’d even come from New York. They’d gather at this little café, some of them even flying in by helicopter or private jet. And, for just a few hours each month, they’d be a part of what became the most prestigious networking event in the state.
At these events, my parents would preen and smile and act as the perfect hosts of the perfect show. They even brought me along. In many ways, I was the highlight – the ultimate demonstration of their success and achievement. They would dote over me and constantly sing my praises, speaking of my perfect grades and letting me demonstrate just how articulate I was. I was well-versed and well-travelled. Even as an eight-year-old people would fawn over me. Some even came back each month just to see how I had progressed.
Normally, of course, you’d have this sort of shindig at your mansion. It would be Gatsbyesque in its execution. Top-end automobiles, valet parking, hostesses. Maybe even drugs and bedrooms upstairs. But my parents chose their venue carefully. As they explained it to others, the café was historic, picturesque and deeply authentic. That experience of authenticity was valuable to those they invited.
Of course, the café was so authentic that it didn’t host private parties. It didn’t matter who you were; it was an historic site, and it was meant to be open to the public. The entire public. What that meant was that amongst the hedge fund managers and captains of finance, healthcare and industry there would be ordinary people. Townies. They’d come in and buy their coffees and pastries. The two groups would occupy the same space. But there was some sort of invisible forcefield that kept them away from one another. The townies would weave in and amongst the great and the mighty and neither group would seem to acknowledge the other. There were two communities occupying a single place.
And then there was the woman in the window seat. She sat there, every time. Her old-style over-the-ear headphones were on, she was scribbling on a sheet of paper, and she was dancing in her seat as if the rest of the world hardly existed. And nobody – not the titans of industry or the ordinary townies – seemed to pay her the least bit of attention.
I watched her though. I was fascinated by her. And I wanted, desperately, to know what she was listening to. One night, the monthly party had wrapped up and we were making our short drive home. The warm glow of all the attention my parents had received was still hovering over them. I asked them then. “Who is the woman in the corner?”
My parents were quick to respond. “Oh, she’s probably homeless,” said my dad.
My mother nodded sagely and then added, “There just aren’t enough mental health care facilities in this state.”
And that was it. They said nothing more and with a few words the woman who danced in her chair was dismissed from our reality.
Our reality, of course, wasn’t as perfect as my parents portrayed it. They didn’t host their grand soirees at the family mansion because there was no family mansion. We weren’t poor. We lived in a perfectly decent four-bedroom house. It just wasn’t the kind of place that could impress the café’s crowd. In fact, our home life was far more humble than our home. My parents would fight constantly. Especially once the afterglow of the soiree fell away. All those people they hobnobbed with just served to remind them of their own failed ambitions. My father was a fund manager, but he wasn’t a terribly successful one and he never managed to assemble a significant portfolio of investors. My mother started serial businesses, none of which ever went anywhere. They’d gone to great schools, and they’d graduated with great ambitions. But nothing had been realized. As they compared themselves to those they considered their peers – all they saw was their own failure. Failure they ultimately blamed on one another.
They were supposed to be world conquerors. Instead, they lived in a four-bedroom house in near rural Connecticut and only pretended to be world conquerors. Whatever they did manage to earn went straight into those parties at the café; parties which didn’t really seem to do them a whole lot of good.
While my parents were doting exemplars of parenting at the monthly soirees, our reality was nothing like that. Outside of the café, I was cared for by a nanny. The woman was fine – pleasant even – but she wasn’t one of my parents. The only time, outside the café, that my parents would really get involved with my life was when it came time for my report cards. And what passed for their love would wax and wane with the scores I got on my first-grade quizzes.
That was why I loved the café, even though I knew it was a façade. I loved my parents’ attention. And I loved to watch that woman who always occupied the window seat and danced to her own music.
I couldn’t talk to her, of course. My parents wouldn’t want me associating with the homeless woman who belonged in an asylum. It certainly wouldn’t look good in front of their erstwhile friends. So, I just watched; watched and wondered whether she really belonged in an institution.
It was a Sunday in July when I got my chance to speak to her. I was nine years old. It was a hot late afternoon and the café’s air conditioning was struggling with the crowd. And then, in an instant, it somehow got worse. A man walked in and the whole room seemed to shift its gravity towards him. Not just the high and mighty, but the townies too. Even at nine years of age, I was old enough to understand the word “Governor.” The Governor of the State was visiting my parents’ monthly get together.
Everybody wanted to lobby the man. Everybody wanted to talk to him. Everybody but me.
Me and the woman in the window seat.
She didn’t react at all. She kept drawing on her paper and bopping to her unknown tunes. But my curiosity, in that moment, was uncontainable. I walked up to her and tapped her on the arm. She lifted one side of the headphones off an ear, turned to me, tilted her head and just looked at me – waiting for whatever I was going to say.
“Are you crazy?” I asked.
She smiled just a bit and said, “Well, I don’t think so.”
“What are you listening to?”
She lifted the headphones from her ears, and placed them over mine. They were, to my complete surprise, absolutely silent.
I stood there for what must have been five seconds. Then I asked, “Are they working?”
The woman smiled again, a warm, joyful, smile, and said, “Yes, they are.”
“I don’t understand.” I said.
It was then that she pointed at her paper. At first glance, it seemed like there was an incomprehensible scribble there. It seemed like insanity. But as I stared at it, confused, a sort of pattern began to emerge. There was something there. I couldn’t understand it, but there was something there. I looked at the woman, confused. And she just said, “We all need to learn to make our own music.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I was nine. So, I just handed her back her headphones. Then I watched as she placed them over her ears, picked up her pen and resumed her mysterious dance.
I rejoined the party then, watching the crowd surge around the Governor. I thought about what I’d seen. But the fact was that I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand her. As best as I could figure, my parents had been right. The woman was crazy and she belonged in an institution.
When we returned to our regular life, later that same night, that conversation didn’t just go away. It stuck with me, needling at me. The shear incongruity of it made it completely unforgettable.
The soirees continued. For years, they continued. And as my parents dreamed would happen, I continued to excel in school. Eventually, perhaps with a little help from their café friends, I was admitted to MIT. My focus was the study of Large Language Models – the models that underpin modern AI. But I had a specific interest. I was studying the psychology of such models. I know they are statistical models – but they are statistical models like the human brain is simply a collection of neurons. In reality, I was a part of a large number of people working on a theory of the mind for the models, one that analyzed them from a level above their statistical underpinnings. The work was a combination of statistics, engineering, computer science, cognitive linguistics and – yes – psychology. The ultimate goal was to treat AIs. Of course they aren’t real intelligence. Nonetheless, I thought – as did others – that psychological techniques inspired by human mental health treatments might be able to improve their performance and utility.
My work was cutting edge. Even as an undergraduate, I was drawing plaudits from my professors – and my parents. But I was drowning. It wasn’t the work that was killing me. No, it was the lack of purpose. All I was living for was that hit of approval – like a computer model being trained by the earning of points. As my work progressed, I realized how little I was actually accomplishing. I wasn’t raising anybody else up. The praise of my peers, my professors and even my parents seemed to ring increasingly hollow to me.
I considered dropping out. But what would I have then? Nothing. No praise, no accomplishment. Nothing. As my work continued, I felt my path growing narrower and narrower. It seemed there was no way for me to find purpose. To my right was emptiness, to my left, failure. And ahead? Ahead there seemed to be nothing at all.
Then one day, I decided to try it. I sat in my dorm room. I put in my earbuds. I turned on no music. And I started to draw. It didn’t happen all at once. It barely happened at all that first day. I heard only the faintest glimmer of the imaginings of notes. But I kept at it, what else was there to do? Every day I spent 15 minutes listening to nothing and drawing on the pages of my notebook. And every day, I heard a little more. The music, built on the patterns that I was drawing on the paper, was growing stronger and stronger. And it was my music.
Music that nobody but I could hear.
By the end of the semester, I was dancing in my chair. I was reborn; filled with a joy I didn’t know I had within me. It was there and then, on the very last day of exams, that I realized what I needed to do. No, I didn’t need to develop the psychology of large language models. Somebody else could tend to the mental well-being of AIs. No, I needed to use the AIs to lift people up. I needed to use them to transform lives.
To the shock of my parents and the faculty, I dropped out of school then. I could have stayed and pursued my new work, of course. MIT had, and has, tremendous resources that could have supported what I was going to do next. But I didn’t want to do my work for the accolades of others. I didn’t want it to be polluted by the praise it might accrue. No, there was a purity – an authenticity – that had to be intrinsic to it.
So, I quit school. I raised a little money from friends. And then I poured myself into something new. I called it a ‘music box.’ It was a room. I created a musical motif for the room – an expression of my soul, of my joy, or even of my pain. That motif was just a phrase, a few bars of something that spoke to my soul. Of course, that wasn’t what the music box played. No, people would walk into it and a hundred sensors would watch their every move, map their body temperatures, monitor their heartbeat, listen to their breathing and feel their footsteps. Then an AI, yes, an AI, would combine all of that data with my motif. And that AI would make music; music that was the listener’s own.
It took me almost a year to make my first ‘music box.’ A young man in Boston was the first to try it. He stepped into almost complete silence. The thrumming of the motif was at a frequency so low and subtle it probably escaped his conscious mind. Then, he tentatively moved. Just a finger. The music began, with a little trill. It was quiet uncertain. But the man heard it. He understood it. And as he began to move more, the music gained momentum. The AI, my motif, and the man built off of each other. Soon the man was dancing, and the music was dancing with him. Then, after only 3 minutes, he emerged from the box.
The man who came out was quite a bit more alive than the man who had gone in.
Truth be told, so was I.
The boxes were a tremendous success. One was installed in Times Square and one in the Boston Common. Soon, they were in London and Paris and Seoul and Los Angeles. But each one was different. Each one was a unique experience, built on a motif, which was in turn built on my own experience of the place it called home. The boxes became famous, but I wasn’t famous. I remained in the background, filled with a joy whose reality rested on its very anonymity.
It was an autumn day in Tel Aviv and I was watching a bikini-clad woman emerge from the box. She was smiling like crazy. In that moment, I realized I owed a debt that I had never repaid. I owed a debt to that crazy lady who sat in the window seat in Alnwick, Connecticut’s historic Broad Street Inn. I felt a sudden and urgent need to thank her for that long ago conversation.
I flew back to Boston a few days later. I recovered my car from my apartment in Cambridge and then made the 2-hour drive straight down to Alnwick. I didn’t visit my parents; they had long since moved on – resigning themselves to a mid-range retirement village in Florida. No, I went straight to the Broad Street Inn. When I got there, I ordered my coffee and croissant and then put on my old-school over-the-ear headphones, took out my notebook and began to draw.
I didn’t see the woman. She didn’t come in that day. I rented a room in the Inn itself. And I stayed there, all day, for three days. But she never showed. I knew I couldn’t stay there forever. So, I decided to do something a little more sustainable. I’d come every month – I’d vary it a little to improve my chances of running into the lady in the window. Then, I’d keep coming until I had a chance to finally thank the woman who had changed my life.
Now, I close my eyes and begin to listen to the music that nobody else can hear. I realize that a year has passed. A year has passed, and I have seen no hint of the woman. Perhaps that is why the tune I’m hearing is a somber one, filled with uncertainty and doubt. Is my mission worth it? Is the woman even alive? Has she, ultimately, been institutionalized? I’m swaying slowly in my seat to the unsettling tune.
As I sit there, I become vaguely aware of a crowd gathering. Then I realize, as if sensing my own childhood, what is happening. The rich and the successful are gathering. The bankers and the financiers, the professors and the scientists. They are gathering here, as they did decades ago.
Somehow the Alnwick soiree has outlasted its own founders.
My song shifts to mild curiosity, tinged with old pain. And then, in a thread that dances across the page, there is a note of hope. Perhaps the woman who danced in her chair will finally make an appearance?
I am so deep within my music that I barely notice the tapping on my arm. Maybe I’d ordered a coffee and had forgotten about it.
I pull the headphones off of one of my ears. Then I open my eyes and turn to look, wondering who is disturbing me. But there is no waiter standing there. No, there is only a little girl; dressed to the nines by parents who are clearly showing her off.
She looks up at me and she asks, “Are you crazy?”
I look down at her, then I smile and I say, “I don’t think so.”
I see myself through her eyes then. I see myself and I realize that I am the woman by the window. I am the woman by the window, and what I want is not gratitude, but kindness. Kindness that is sustained from generation to generation.
"What are you listening to?" asks the little girl.
I say nothing.
Instead, I pass her my headphones and watch, with a knowing joy, as her confusion unfolds.
When I interviewed Helene Shapiro I was drawn to two fundamental aspects of her character. First, there was her love of music. Helene described herself as dancing in the seats of her Synagogue, connecting to G-d through music – no matter what anybody else thought of her. Second, though, was something even more powerful. I asked her why she teaches Sunday school and Hebrew lessons. After all, she's been teaching for more than three decades. She told me that empowering her students is what motivates her. She empowers them to overcome challenging material. She empowers them to be confident in a public setting. She empowers them to lead. And, most importantly, she empowers them to touch something far greater than themselves. Like the woman who sits by the window (pick whichever you prefer), Helene lifts others up and shares blessings that they can – in their own time and in their way – pass on to others.
This story was commissioned by Nechama Katan. It was commissioned in honor of Helene’s work on Team Aryeh. Helene has been relentlessly driving Aryeh to learn to read Hebrew – properly. She was steadfast in this effort because she believed – and has demonstrated – that he could do it. Of course, her steadfastness was based on something even more fundamental than Aryeh’s capability. No, she wanted Aryeh not just to be able to do it – she wanted him to know that he was able to do it – and that he could bring that same attitude to life’s other challenges. . I’d like to believe that Helene wanted Aryah – just like all her other students – to develop the capability to create, and dance to, the very best of his own music.
Thank you for reading,
Joseph Cox
Stories that Celebrate