Dancing Through Life

In the last months of high school, she went to evening square dance classes with a girlfriend. On Wednesday nights, they arrived at a poorly lit elementary school cafeteria and inserted themselves into a motley group of dancers who were 15 – 65 years old. It wasn’t clear to them how this group came to be, but they were welcome. She didn’t look anything like the dancers who wore Western clothing, but she loved the dancing and she learned to allemande left and promenade all around the ring, listening to the caller and smiling at each partner as they met, balanced and passed by the right shoulder. String ties and cowboy boots and crinolines were a fine costume for the other dancers, but it was the moving together to music that made her heart sing. She didn’t have enough background to mind that the music came from a record player.

After that, she was most interested in young men who could dance well. She met her first boyfriend at college, first semester. They took a swing dance class in the evenings at Talcott, a romantic old stone residential hall with a small dining room.  On the outside, the boyfriend looked like a ruffian. He wore a black leather jacket, black jeans, had long stringy hair, and he was very handsome. No one who knew her before would have predicted this pairing, but it was dreamy to have a partner who liked to dance as much as she did, and who could stay on the beat.  She was seventeen and in love for the first time – dancing was just as good as kissing, and kissing was better than she expected. She liked that dancing allowed for plenty of body contact and hands touching hands, without long term meaning, and it wasn’t scary.

 The next summer, a friend who had worked on the farm included her in the group that he gathered up to go to Elkins, West Virginia for a week of contra dancing.  It was a scorching hot week, but she loved being there with nothing to do but dance.  Every morning after breakfast they went to the hall and danced until lunch.  At lunchtime the bank thermometer in the street said 102 degrees and they went back to the air conditioned motel room, stripped off their sweaty clothes and lay on their backs on the bed, putting their bare feet up on the wall, gossiping about all the other dancers and the amazing musicians.  Then they danced all afternoon and into the night.  She fell in love with Rod and Randy, the fiddle player and the pianist.  They were tall, gangly brothers with large hands and kind eyes and they made effortless, beautiful music.  There was an easy connection between them as they had all gone to Oberlin.

Paul, the farm worker, was a strong dancer with a low center of gravity.  Swinging with him was so nice – they did not need to worry about pulling each other over.  He had been dancing much longer than she had so he got to be the show off and the teacher.  He liked that and she soaked it up. She was still seventeen and bedazzled by a dance partner with strong arms who could land on the beat, do an extra twirl, flirt and smile, and spin without missing a step. It helped that they were traveling with his girlfriend, so there was no extra layer of expectation. He was young, blonde, handsome, and off limits. Perfect.

Two years later, her parents had invited farm friends to a barn dance at the end of October and Paul was coming from Chicago for the week.  By this time they had been waltz partners for six months and she was still completely abuzz when she thought about him.  Passing the window of the Moutoux barn on her way back from the field, seeing her reflection – she locked that memory into her brain for the rest of her life. After the barn and the orchard were gone, in middle age she still remembered her young face in the window.  The memory was of the intense feeling of anticipation, of looking forward to Paul’s arrival that afternoon, and how important that moment felt.

 And two years after that, she met the dancer she would marry. He was not obviously her type, as her friends said, but he could dance. He was a quiet, serious guy – he seemed shy but not when they were dancing together. Like all the good dancers, he had a sideways smile and a tilt to his head as he looked into her eyes when they met for a swing, arms quickly locked around each other, pivoting on their right feet together.  He danced with confidence and flair, always perfectly in time with the music, and he held her firmly. His growing-up years of skiing and ice skating made him a graceful and balanced dancer. It amused her always that he cared what he looked like. He was vain for such a funny-looking little guy. They were not the same weight – he was a string bean – but he could match weight when they swung.  That was all that mattered to her.

She began to fall in love for good when he taught her to dance the Swedish hambo at the Concord Scout House on a Monday night in January. During the break the musicians always played a hambo and couples would hop and spin and bounce around.  It looked lovely and impossible – in ¾ time with the hop on the first beat.  With patience and care, he showed her the steps.  In a hambo, each partner has steps that are independent, coming down hard on the heels at a different time from the other, sliding and twirling in rhythm but not in parallel.   They became hambo partners and waltz partners.  Later she learned what a talker he was, and how much they had to talk about.

A hambo is a fair metaphor for a long marriage.  Partners must stay in time as they progress in the same direction, but there is a lot of other independent dancing to do in between the times when they meet to look into each other’s eyes, smile and continue.  If there are disagreements or distractions, you still need to come back and get back in sync. And a partner who is a good talker and a good listener can be a partner for life.

Forty years and three full grown children later, dancing is mostly a memory for them. At weddings and rare parties, they still dance together. Their children are dancers now, and the story of their parents’ first dance is family lore.