Dancing Through Life
When I was 11, my mother sent me for dancing lessons. She sensed my approaching puberty, though I was still focused on playing soldiers with my plastic ack-ack machine gun. I vividly remember climbing the stairs to enter that house on Genesee Street in Syracuse, totally unaware that within 20 minutes I would be in the cleared out living room trying to do the box step with, of all things, a girl. There must be some way out of this, I remember thinking. And there was. At the end of the lesson, I was rewarded with the chance to go into the kitchen of this older woman, my dance teacher (who was probably in her thirties), and have some cookies and milk with her father.
Well, I'm a fast learner. Not for dancing, mind you. So, as soon as I could at the start of the next lesson, I went straight to the kitchen. For the rest of the hour, I ate cookies and drank milk with her Dad, which I repeated each of the remaining lessons. Luckily, my mother never saw me dance, so she had the good fortune to have done something good without the bad fortune of seeing her bad investment.
This may explain why, until I met my wife, I avoided dancing. When it was essential for having any contact with a girl, I performed not much better than I did playing baseball, where my batting average was very close to the number on my jersey: OO.
Now, when I met my future wife, that all changed. Not my dancing ability, but my wanting to dance - with her. And here's what I was up against. She was a great dancer, having learned from her Dad, who, with all his brothers, was also a great dancer. After all, during the Depression they could not afford much else, and the path to a girl's heart back then was on the dance floor, not Instagram.
Whatever dancing ability I gained in the last half century has come from my wife's teaching. Let's say she was a better teacher than I was a learner. Until recently. After years of pleading, I finally agreed to adult dance lessons, with no cookies and milk.
"Rick" is our dance instructor. I use an alias to protect his business. He's actually a gifted and gentle teacher and I would not want his reputation besmirched by my performance. Our lessons thus far have focused on rumba and salsa. I've learned inside turns, outside turns, he-turns/she-turns, parallel rocks, and a few other moves. I think I've got the names down, if not the moves themselves. But, I confess, the real benefit of these lessons is not what I expected - and no, I did not expect to get a whole lot better at dancing.
I've learned that this little thing I could do for my wife was something I put off far too long. She is too precious to me to have made her wait years to please her in this way. Every day, there are little things we can do to please those we love, and we should not put them off. I've learned that there is laughter in making mistakes, and that all my worrying about being so bad at dancing made me miss the fun of actually being bad at dancing. More importantly, as the humorist and pianist Victor Borge once put it, "laughter is the shortest distance between two people." As we laugh through our lessons and practice, we have moments of closeness that we both cherish.
I've also learned that I can actually get a little better. Right now I'm at the stage of being able to stop saying the steps, under my breath, "slow, quick, quick, slow, quick, quick." This, our patient teacher tells us, is "muscle memory" - the body and brain learning without the need for constant, conscious, focused attention. At my age, anything that improves any kind of memory is a decided advantage.
Finally, I've learned, once again, that the only solution to fear of failure is risking it. Self-confidence comes not from never making a mistake but from making enough of them. If only I had seen this when I was 11, who knows how my life might have been affected. But those cookies and milk were soooo good.
Photo Credit: Allef Vinicius
