NEW

March 2022

I’m writing about letting things go and taking things on, about springtime and dancing and pretty new clothes, and about a trip to Goodwill.

It’s Sunday, the first day of daylight savings time, and it feels like everything’s happening early, so early, and being early means feeling fresh and new to me. It means I’m ahead and the world is mine. Every day I get up early to claim the day. Reminds me of the time as a kid when I woke up to fresh snow, three or four feet of it, and I got to leave the first foot prints in the back yard. Like the time decades later when I arrived at Rattlesnake and found no cars, no footprints, only an untouched trail through freshly fallen snow. That’s what early is to me.

So everything’s early and it casts the day in a certain light. The light of March, with buds forming and breaking open, the whole world opening up.

I have a new dress, too. Fitted through the bodice with a skirt that drapes and flares, and today I get to go dancing. Waltz, my easy dance, the one I can throw myself into and float and fly. Been doing West Coast Swing lately—or trying to—and it’s been nothing but misery for a long time. Count when you step, one through eight, but sometimes it’s six counts and it can be twelve. Or more. And then they add “and” between all the numbers and then for extra annoyance they add “a” so “one, two” becomes “one-and-a-two.” So goddamn complicated. No wonder that dance floor is full of engineers and accountants. Analyze dancing to death, and it could be the death of me. Time to quit West Coast and spend more time waltzing.

So fresh new day, springtime, a new dress, and I’m going to waltz at the Century Ballroom. A place I’m starting to love. A gracious old building on Capitol Hill, with wood floors and a stage for a band, with velvet curtains and an arch adorned with gold curlicues.  Big windows look out on the streets of Tenth and Pine where people in jean and T-shirts, mostly black, make it all the more clear that dance is a world of its own.

My favorite dancers are here. Heber, an engineer who studies and counts and somehow all that analysis adds up to seamless grace. He’s told me what goes on in his head, but luckily I don’t have to do all that. I am a follow. I don’t have to think or count, in fact it’s better if I don’t. I hear the music, stay supple and responsive and keep moving, and we are dancing. I do that, too, with Jon and Stuart and David and Phil. All wonderful leads and nice people.

Then there’s dancing with Cooper, a whole different thing, as different as this room is from the streets outside. I have to pay extra attention with him. Not analyze or count, just be very present and attentive. Sometimes I close my eyes to keep out distractions. He learned from different teachers than I did, and years later. Dance styles change, evolve, and his are not all my familiar moves—or he does variations that feel fresh and new.

 We move fast, we fly around the floor. He is big and strong and full of vitality and I am small and light-footed. We go from waltz to tango to who-knows-what. I am not at all attached to keeping my dance in boxes with labels and luckily he’s not, either. We play. He gives me a lead that could mean to hesitate and trail my foot in a half-circle, a waltz move I’ve nearly forgotten. Or it could mean go into tango and do ochos. If each dance is its own planet, we are cruising the galaxy.

I always think I could do better, work harder, be a better partner, on or off the dance floor, but still I am filled with joy.

And then he says this. “I love dancing with you, and playing. You can tell when someone’s really worked on their dance.”

I have worked on it, for more than twenty years, to learn to play like this.

Add play and knowing I’m making my lead happy, add friendship to an already very fine day…

Three-thirty comes and the music stops and I’m back to the street, out in my car, but still bursting with happiness. I want more. What else, what next?

How ‘bout the box and bag in my back seat? Old stuff once treasured but kept around far too long. My guitar and recorder books from high school—high school! I have hauled those suckers up and down the East Coast and across the whole country, and will I ever play either of those instruments again? Not a chance. I’m escaping my family pack rat heritage. Keep things just because you’ve had them so long already. I am cutting loose. Space in my house, freedom from the burden of all that musty, fusty old stuff.

And guess what? There’s a Goodwill right here on Capitol Hill. A small, friendly one, not the huge overpowering warehouse kind, and they’re taking donations today. A handsome, smiling, longhaired man takes my bag and box and they’re gone. I’m free.

Now what? I went in this store once, looking for cowboy boots, and I came out with $400 Via Spiga sandals with sexy low heels and salmon-colored studded leather straps that wrapped around my ankles. For $9.99. Really.  After two hours of dancing, tiredness is catching up to me, and low blood sugar is looming but still I have to go in.

I’m free now, ditching my mom’s rigid system of shopping, too. I wander ‘til something catches my eye. Jeans. I need new jeans. My old ones are nearly worn out. And there is a pair right in front of me, on the end, where I don’t have to sort through the rack, clacking the hangers and losing heart with every hanger I slide. This pair is good quality, has nice details, and it looks like they would fit. Then a scarf for eight bucks in colors that remind me of a summer garden and sky. A lovely J. Crew peasant blouse, the old, well-made J. Crew, in cheery orange and white, and my size. I skip the fitting room line and try on the jeans under my dress. I never find jeans that fit, I pay lots of money to have them altered, but these are perfect. I hand over my $33 and emerge from the Goodwill freer, lighter, and with lovely new clothes.

Could it be any better than this?