I Miss Dancing!

When I was seven-eight years old, I got the Gene Autry gun and holster set for Christmas and I worn them to bed more than a few times. I was in love. I even crawled up on my daddy’s lap once, sighed deeply, and told him that when I grew up I was going marry Gene Autry and his horse. My dad had the good graces not to laugh. It could be he was trying to figure out which one I was lusting after the most---the horse or the man. I still have that gun and holster and all of my Gene Autry fan club memorabilia. I never did anything half way, even my first crush.

I don’t know where I’m going with this trip down memory lane. Perhaps I’m looking at my life as if its film that I can edit and splice together into a movie titled: How to Grow up in Ten Easy Lessons, Plus One Really Hard One. Until I became a caregiver for my dad---in the five years before my husband’s stroke---I really hadn’t grown up and I was in my fifties at the time. My life was carefree and fun in my pre-caregiver days. Oh, I’d had my share of disappointments and pain. Who could get to be a half a century old without having a few monsters in their closet? But I try to learn my lessons and move on. Always wear the white hat. Mr. Autry would be proud.

Do you know what I miss? Dancing. I was never good on the dance floor. I have no grace, no natural rhythm, even though the Arthur Murray Dance Studios did their best to chance that when I was a kid. Never the less, I miss it all. Especially the tap dancing lessons I took when I so young that I still worn under pants with the days of the week embroidered on the fronts. Light bulb moment! If I were on the board of directors at Hanes, I’d expand that embroidered panties idea into a days-of-the-months set of cotton briefs for seniors. That way, when folks like me are at the store writing a check, and we can’t remember what day it is, we’d always know where to look to find out.

I also miss the square dances of my pre-teen days; my petty coats swinging and swaying with our do-si-dos and falling on the floor in a fit of the giggles. I miss the rock-and-roll record hops that came a few years later. (Those late night Time-Life R&R commercials are aimed at my generation.) I miss the rhythm and blues clubs and slinky dress dancing of my twenties. And disco. Don and I did some serious courting during disco. How could I not fall in love a guy who once told me, as I roller skated by, “You look like a refrigerator on a dolly.”

Most of all I miss the dancing that Don and I used to do in the 80s, the western stuff that came straight out of the movie, Urban Cowboy. Oh, we were never like John Travolta and Debra Winger struttin’ their stuff at Mickey Gilley’s. We just watched that stuff from the side of the dance floor. But we had our moments when I felt like there was nothing more fun than belly rubbing around a dance floor, thighs brushing from time to time, words passing back and forth---Gosh, I have to stop typing and go get a few ice cubes!

Don was far from a Gene Kelly or Patricia Swayze, and I was certainly never a Ginger Rogers, but I miss the magic and energy that dancing inspires. I miss the honky-tonk bars out west on vacations. Had I known the last time we danced that it would be the last time we dance, I would have taken a mental snapshot. But the sad fact is I don’t actually remember when that was.

I do have a mental snapshot of the last time my dad danced before he passed away. It happened in the parking lot of a KFC. I had been chauffeuring him and his girlfriend around on a date and the tape deck was playing a song from the 40s when my dad asked Martha to dance. He had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. We all knew he was dying. We all knew it was the last time they’d probably dance together. It was such a bitter-sweet moment, so private and personal---the way they looked at each other---that I had to look away. I’d like to think that if I had a snapshot of Don’s and my last dance, it would be like that---too intense and personal to share with friends.

My dad was a special guy. Even in the last years of his life, when our relationship was often more like mother and son, than father and daughter, he could still make me laugh. One time, when he was being tested for cognitive abilities---something that was done frequently because he was in the first wave of people getting a new Alzheimer’s drug---the psychiatrist had asked him what year it was. Dad gave the wrong answer and when the doctor corrected him, Dad said, “My daughter tried to tell me that in the parking lot, but I didn’t believe her.” Caregiver humor, you’ve got to love it. Another time, in a restaurant, my brother asked my dad if he was taking the noodle on his shirt home for a midnight snack. My dad, picked the noodle off his shirt, threw it over his shoulder, and said, “Hell, no!” and kept right on eating.

What is it I read in an old clipping from Ann Landers? “Old folks talk about the past, because they have no futures. Young folks speak of the future, because they have no past.” When did I get old enough to understand the full depth of that statement? Okay, so I’m having a cry-baby moment. But I know how to fix that. Tonight, I’m sleeping with my Gene Autry gun under the pillow!


Jean Riva ©

painting by ZilleHeinrich

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Dancing The Blues

Tuesday was the weekly blues concert in the park held in a tourist town near by. It’s a great park for events like this. It’s in between a river and a paved bike path that goes for miles, hooking several small towns together. Maple trees form a canopy over the stage and people bring their lawn chairs and blankets and spread them on the gentle sloping hill facing that simple platform. The sun is low in the sky by concert time and it dapples on the water, reflecting on the undersides of the tree branches. At the top side of the dam, there are usually canoes and kayaks parked along the shore.

I’d forgotten to put my folding camp chair in the car so I spread our emergency blanket at the edge of the bike path where Don could stay on the pavement with his wheelchair. Soon we were surrounded with bikers in spandex. In our view was another kind of biker, all in denim and black leather and sporting tattoos. These guys stood at the edge of the crowd looking bold and mysterious. We love to people watch at these events. Everyone comes to them from nursing babies in their mother’s arms to yuppies with cell phones attached to their heads to families who pass pizza boxes back and forth.

Right next to stage, a gaggle of kids from two to ten usually gathers. The boys jump up and down to the beat of the music like jackrabbits on steroids and the girls pair off in groups of three or four, looking like back-up dancers on MTV with their choreographed moves. A blonde little boy of two or three always stands by the stage with a red plastic guitar helping the band find their mojo.

Tuesday another couple took to the grass dance floor with the kids and they didn’t sit out a single song. The guy looked like a balding Woody Allen and his partner looked like a corpus. You almost needed sunglasses to look at her bare legs sticking out from her wrangler shorts. If they hadn’t been so old---they were in their sixties---you would have called their dancing style sexy, sensual and often down right dirty. But for some reason I just couldn’t take them seriously as their kept their eyes focused on one another, their lips within inches of each other. His hands roamed her butt as she fingered what little hair he at the nap if his neck. Had there been a beer tent at the concert, I’m sure several of us would have been shouting, “Get a room!” How ever I felt about them---and I couldn’t decide between extreme amusement or faint disgust---it was clear they’d gotten their money’s worth out all those Arthur Murray Dance lessons they no doubt had taken. No one dances with that tango gaze for two hours without professional intervention.

Since that night, I’ve been examining my thoughts and why it is that a couple in their sixties dancing with passion and joy could look almost like cartoon figures while had it been someone like John Travolta or Patrick Swayze (in their primes) with a hot girl in his arms, I would have been thoroughly charmed and come home with a romantic glow on my face instead of a silly smile. I wondered if younger women in the crowd had looked on them and sighed, and said to themselves, “When I’m that age I hope my husband still looks at me that way.” I wondered if the kids who shared the dance area with this couple wondered why they were the only adults out of several hundred who hadn’t lost their appreciation of dancing to rhythm and blues. I wondered if that guy was someone I had danced with back in my youth when I was wearing long strings of beads and hip-hugger bell-bottoms to the clubs. I suspect he was.

The blues concerts, I decided, are a metaphor for the cycles of life. From nursing babies to humped-over great-grandmas from a near-by independent living center, all phases in human life were there sharing a common bond for those two hours in the park. I have been most of those ages and I look back with fondness at all of my reincarnations. I’m betting that I’ll like being seventy and eighty as well. One thing is for sure, only the very young and the very old get to the concerts in the park early enough to claim the best views of the stage. The more we change, the more we stay the same.

Jean Riva ©

Painting by: Pierre-Auguste Renior