Caption This Contest Winner!

"Yo, dude. If you're not gonna ask me to dance, mind bringin' me a beer?"

Is That a Pet in Your Pocket?

If so, you'll be happy to know that official Dawning of the Age of Aquarius (2008) nicely coincides with ...

The Dawning of the Age of the Pocket Pet!

The American Veterinary Medical Association has given the OK to a new, specialized branch of medicine just for Exotic Companion Mammals, or ECM.

Think rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, rats, etc. But not Gambian giant pouched rats.

Pocket pets = ECM = Rodents.

Big news! Thus, still no winner on the Caption This contest.

For those of you lured into thinking this blog is about tango, see Sunday's post.

And the winner issssss.

I know. You're waiting. You've submitted, you've waited, I said I would announce.

Tough luck. It's a wild news weekend in the veterinary world. Today, tango goes to the dogs.

First, there's the mystery of the missing pancreases. A drug manufacturer is discontinuing a certain kind of insulin for cats due to "overharvested" cow/pig pancreases. Last I checked, we were harvesting tons of steaks and hams. Where are the pancreases?

Then there's the rice crisis. Do you know there are growers whose entire crop of rice is dedicated to pet food? If your dog has food allergies, rice is your best friend--after your dog, of course.

Third,

FDA Orders Pet Food Maker to Obtain Emergency Operating Permit

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an order requiring that Evanger's Dog & Cat Food Co., Inc., in Wheeling, Ill., obtain an emergency permit from the FDA before its canned pet food products enter interstate commerce.

A recent inspection revealed significant deviations from prescribed documentation of processes, equipment, and recordkeeping in the production of the company's thermally processed low acid canned food (LACF) products. These problems could result in under-processed pet foods, which can allow the survival and growth of Clostridium botulinum (C. botulinum), a bacterium that causes botulism in some animals as well as in humans.

Read more.

Read the company's response.

Move over, Brenda Starr.

Last Day to Enter Caption Contest!

Scroll down to play.

News from Around the World

Tango May Treat Depression
Univ of New England researcher investigates link.

First Tango Festival in Kuala Lampur
May 16-19

Tango in China
Find a quiet, secluded area in this urban madness, toss in a couple Argentines, a Turkish tango dancer and a handful of bohemian Chinese, and the result is Hidden Dreams.

Tango Ballet in Oklahoma
Guillermo Merlo and Fernanda Ghi (“Forever Tango,” “Tango Dreams”) are creating a new work for Tulsa Ballet.

Otros Aires
Profile of the alternative band.

Story of Tango: Concert and FREE Tango Lesson!
Hey, that's us!!!

It Takes Tow to Tango
Go figure.

Enter The Caption Contest

Read One of These Things Is Not Like the Other, and enter the contest!

To those of you who entered but do not see your entries, please reread Rule 2. Remember, I'm the judge here!

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

I'm sitting at the Turn between tandas on Tuesday night.

Well, I call it sitting. TinaTangos might disagree.

Tuesday afternoon I posted her very smart essay, How to Sit at a Milonga. It has pictures and helpful advice for women who want to jump-start the cabeceo with their legs.

It just happened to be posted on my last birthday, so I am taking it with a nice personal touch. A little note dropped by fortune into my lap.

With that in mind, it's no surprise that at some point Tuesday evening, I would notice how I am sitting.

I was so impressed, that last night I recreated the poses, asked Andre to take pictures.

See his photos below. See TinaTangos photos at How to Sit at a Milonga .

One of these things is not like the other.

Caption This! Picture 1

Click on comments below to enter the Caption This! contest.

Here are the rules. Be very careful. They're difficult:

1. Click on Comments button below.

2. Write a caption. Nothing bad. This is me you are talking about!

3. Check back on Sunday to see if you won.

4. I choose the winner based on nothing but my own strong opinion.

5. If I don't have one (strong opinion, that is, which is often the case), Mary Alice gets to choose. And maybe Two-of-Six. Unless they have entered the contest, in which case the person sitting next to me at Starbucks gets to choose. I'm pretty sure he/she will not have entered the contest. But if by some weird coincidence they have, or if they do not respond well to being approached by strangers, then I will wipe the coffee from my face and clothes and ask my Dad, who is no more decisive than me ... or my Mother, who is so averse to hurting anyone's feelings that she parcels out her votes on Dancing with the Stars so that they are fairly distributed among many contestants... or ... You see? Difficult!

Winner gets a $10 Starbucks gift card!

Caption This! Picture 2

Click on comments below to enter the Caption This! contest. Here are the rules. Be very careful. They're quite difficult:

1. Click on Comments button below.

2. Write a caption. Nothing bad. This is me you are talking about!

3. Check back on Sunday to see if you won.

4. I choose the winner based on nothing but my own strong opinion.

5. If I don't have one (strong opinion, that is, which is often the case), Mary Alice gets to choose. And maybe Two-of-Six. Unless they have entered the contest, in which case the person sitting next to me at Starbucks gets to choose. I'm pretty sure he/she will not have entered the contest. But if by some weird coincidence they have, or if they do not respond well to being approached by strangers, then I will wipe the coffee from my face and clothes and ask my Dad, who is no more decisive than me ... or my Mother, who is so averse to hurting anyone's feelings that she parcels out her votes on Dancing with the Stars so that they are fairly distributed among many contestants... or ... You see? Difficult!

Winner gets a $10 Starbucks gift card!

What's Your Tango Blog Fortune? (TinaTangos Tells Mine)

Do you love fortunes, the kind that come in fortune cookies, inside the wrappers of Dove chocolates, "your day today" astrology bits in the newspaper?

Here's a find-your-own fortune game you can play while you should be working: Look up tango blog entries posted on your birthday. Here's one for mine:

How to Sit at a Milonga, from Tinatangos, by way of Alex.Tango.Fuego

.

Ooops! That can't be right! That's the fortune of a woman who is channeling her inner Sophia Loren. (Really! "This is how I sit when I'm channeling..." TinaTangos writes.)

Clearly, TinaTangos has a Girlie Quotient of 10.

I wear pants.


I may need to give a little thought to the whole Girlie thing.

Three Quick Questions ... Let's Dance!

What do you carry in the one hand, and in the other?

What is the difference between circle and spiral--geometry or perspective?

Do you ever want it all to connect?

* * *

And now, in the immortal words of my mother: ENOUGH ALREADY!

Let's dance!

A Change of Scene

This is what writers do:

Burp up the first thoughts, easy questions and answers. Toss them out. Walk away, look at other things for a while. You are not really walking away, you are circling around. With fresh perspective, pose more challenging questions, think to more interesting answers.

Toss and walk, look and circle, ask and think. When your brain takes you by surprise, connecting serendipitous dots along its own curlicue paths ... then things get interesting.

Time to walk away now. Look at other things:

Nina raves about my cool new hip action. At our last lesson Grisha said, "Beautiful dancing!" Deb and Brian are offering orchestra-specific classes in Boulder. Nick and Tara are back from Australia. Andre is all over me to take a Saturday class with Darryl and Sue. Next month I go to Boston and on Glenlivet's recommendation am going to seek out Hsueh-tze Lee.

Coming in May: the Memorial Day Festival! Tom Stermitz is bringing Hsueh-tze Lee, Brigitta Winkler, Tomas Howlin, Jost Budde and others. I am already registered and begging for every private lesson I can get.

A change of scene does a heart good.


* * *
Come to the Denver Memorial Day Festival!

Summertime

When the Memorial Day Festival is right around the corner, summer cannot be far behind. On Friday, the DJ at the Merc played the song Summertime:

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’, not a cloud in the sky
Your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good lookin’
So hush little baby, don’t you cry.

One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise,
Rise up singing…
You’re gonna spread your wings, child, and take to the sky
Until that morning, nothing’s going to harm you
No no no ...
Don’t you cry.


For a long time, I have heard this song only as elegy. But sitting in the Merc on Friday night, my heart took a new turn. A strong-willed woman can hold elegy in one hand and hope in the other. In the balance, there is compassion. Every one of us has a story. Love has a strong will of its own.

* * *
(Summertime by George Gershwin. You can hear it beautifully sung on YouTube by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. And my favorite: Janis Joplin!)

All the Usual Questions

How did I miss it? Whose dead soul did I think I was hauling around that island?

Why did I not step out of my own present moment, just for a moment, to investigate?

How is it possible that our vaunted, supersensible, oh-so-joined-at-the-soul, meaning-of-life, beloved-of-God, divine-gift connection failed at so critical a juncture?

Was Barbara hiding? Were we already lost?

Had the whole connection thing been a one-sided fantasy all along?

First thoughts, easy questions. Easy to wallow in, easy to get lost in. Begetting easy answers, all adding up to poor me.

How very unoriginal. I think it's time for new questions.

Finding Barbara

I found Barbara in the slums of Pontiac, Michigan, in a ramshackle house that had been converted to apartments for nutjobs. She was smoking cigarettes and looking out at the world with new eyes. Suspicious. Defiant. Cheated. Jealous. Haunted. Entreating. We gazed at one another as through the glass lid of a coffin.

Calling Barbara

An unfamiliar voice answered the camp phone. Barbara was no longer there, it told me. Best call her parents.

She’s not here, her parents said. We won’t tell you more.

What? Wait! What?

Called back.

We won’t tell, they said. Don’t call back.

Stop it, they said. Stop calling.

We’re sorry, they said. Go to hell.

Did I keep calling her parents? Track down her college friends, scattered for summer? Dial numbers at random? Camp beside the phone with sleeping bag and pillow, soiled tissues, carpet littered with the fine powder of Cheerios, picked out of the box one by one, crushed one by one between thumb and forefinger?

I cannot remember.

I suspect I kept calling her home until I caught one of her sisters, the one who hated the parents or the one who idolized me. I suspect we talked in soft tones, and I passed her my number. This seems vaguely familiar. I cannot imagine behaving this way.

One day I got a call, was told: Call this number.

A nutjob answered the phone. Someone took it away from her, spoke nonsense to me.

You can’t speak to Barbara, she said. If she wants to speak to you, she’ll call. Leave your number.

In dead silence I waited. Now I could hear the kudzu growing, killing everything in its path. And the pigs and the child-bearing mothers and the chickens and the creaking, groaning lava and the shout as it entered the sea.

When Barbara called, her voice was clear, like water. Dribbling.

The short version: The seizures that had been here-and-there for years had fully bloomed. Grand mal, petit mal, and the weird kind that look like being zoned out. Weakness afterward and disorientation. The camp called her parents. Can’t keep her here. Not safe for her, not good for the kids.

Her parents drove out to the camp, gathered her up like a Molokai leper, shipped her to the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter in downtown Detroit, left her there.

(I do not judge them in this; Barbara may have refused to go home. Her family was like that. No, I do judge them. There were safer places, if not in their suburb then in another, where they could have more easily dumped her. What did her parents want so badly to tell her that they could only say it by treating her so?)

Lying on a cot in a room full of cots. Seizures day and night. No one can sleep. She’s scaring the homicidal nutjobs.

Salvation Army can’t keep her. Next stop: state hospital.

According to a Harvard University physician, it takes a doctor 18 seconds to diagnose a patient. I bet the state set a record with Barbara.

Homeless? they said, must be schizophrenia. It runs in that crowd. Involuntary commitment. Electric shock therapy. Phenobarb. Cigarettes. Sex with orderlies who promise to help her.

* * *

Here’s a nice bit of irony: It was Michigan who’d cut off our idyll to go searching for his lost companion.

I hate irony. Also melodrama and pop psychology. Let’s spare one another all that and consent to look at the evidence with the detachment of scientists, observe dispassionately once, aloud, for the record: Had I not been distracted, had I not veered away …

Oh, don’t flutter. I don’t blame myself. But I don’t shy away, either.

Had I been less absorbed in my own present moment …

I would have ended the idyll to go searching for my lost companion, and I would have found her. Taken her home to my no-nonsense, brook-no-resistance, bull-headed loving mother; my gentle, listening father; my sweet little brother, his clueless dog. And me.

My mother would have ridden the doctor until he got it right. My father would have sat up with her nights. My brother would have played silly games with her, his dog would have cuddled her after the seizures. I would have been her safe harbor, a place to rest her whipsawed heart.

She would have been for us a changeling rescued from the forest. We would have nursed her and petted her until, restored to her whole, fey-wild self, she bit our hands and ran off, as the fey always do.

Stupid fantasy. Here’s what’s real: I was distracted, self-absorbed, trusting the divine gift, trusting to intertwined fate. Here’s what’s real:

A Tale of Two Idylls

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The hard shell cracks. The charm breaks. Only by your awareness does the world cohere. Stay awake.

Stand trust on its head. Sing to your children: When the bough breaks...

Never turn your back.

Dammit, I knew that, I knew that!

* * *

I do not blame myself. I am not the one who betrayed us.

After the Idyll

After a little while, Michigan left. Back on the mainland, his dog had disappeared. The dog had been his companion for years, he had to go find it.

Hmph.

* * *

I wasn’t heartbroken. It was sad that he left, but only that: sad. Not life-threatening. No reason to feel that my life was over.

I visited museums, babysat, swam, traversed the high cattle country, hiked as far as I dared across Halemaumau under Pele’s evil glare, sniffed at eucalyptus bark in the jungle, dared the trip wires to trip me, tumbled in the surf and walked out bleeding, gathered Pele’s hair.

Dead broke, I ate fruit that fell from the trees. Michigan had left a rack of bananas and a coffee can full of granola; they were alive with worms and ants. This gave me brief pause. When the cattle stepped on the water line, kinking it, I swiped the long grass with towels to mop up the water, then sucked the towels dry.

All the while I lugged my soul around like a dead weight. All that honeyed, luminous light, steaming and sparkling, the heaving ocean and sulfurous steam and rotting flowers’ perfume—every little thing broke my heart. I gazed at it all from a far shore, as a mother would at her child through the glass lid of a coffin.

It’s not that I wanted to die, I felt that I already had.

* * *

Soon I returned to the mainland, to a house on a hilltop with a goat and a big, scary stallion. In the valley below was a pig farm. Kudzu overgrew everything. The hillside was a jungle.

My roommate was a midwife. Sometimes I had to leave the house so clients could give birth in my bed. She took chickens in payment and killed them.

* * *

I called Barbara.

She was working one last season at the camp where we had met years before. Next spring she would graduate college and then we would … I don’t know what! We were already taking the world by storm.

Just a few months ago, this long, last free summer had stretched out before us, promising a tale of two idylls, our parallel paths running so close our souls could easily cross the breach to brush up against one another for a while. We loved doing that.

That was the idea, but it didn’t work out. Immediately I veered away and lost touch. The second I stepped off the plane and Michigan laid a homemade lei on my shoulders, there was nothing but the present moment for me.

This was not a big deal. Our friendship had endured separation before, Barbara in DC and Boston, I in upstate New York. We were like two intersecting waves in the sea; we went our ways, commingled.

A supersensible heart-bond is a divine gift. An hours-long, settled-in cozy, heart-to-heart talk is heaven on earth. Sometimes, even soul-twins just need to connect.

Idyll

One summer I lived in Hawaii. Not in the jungle. Not in a ramshackle hut rotting around me. I lived in a lovely and primitive guest house on a cattle ranch cut out of the jungle in the heart of the Big Island’s drug culture.

Michigan was the ranch caretaker. I was the caretaker’s sidekick. There were eight cows.

In the mornings after rain, visitors showed up. They walked through the pastures, harvesting mushrooms. Several times a week Michigan and I walked into the jungle. He was the point man, keeping an eye out for trip wires and such. The jungle was full of wahines, all named Mary Jane.

A mystery: Planted amid sumptuous beauty, life furling and unfurling all over the place, the locals tuned out. What can explain this? I conclude they were all lousy lovers.

Michigan and I drugged ourselves on adventure. We walked at night through standing-dead forests, hugged the shore at beaches too rough and sharky for swimming. We descended into fumaroles for steam baths, swam in hot springs as large as ponds. We crossed lava fields, sneaking past Danger! Kapu! signs to climb to a barren, windswept summit, crept to the edge and peeked over into the still-steaming crater.

The earth’s crust was fragile as eggshell. Beneath the shell there was nothing. Twice my foot broke through. The sharp edges of the hole scraped my ankle going in and coming back out. Escaping steam burned.

The main attraction of this island is Kilauea. It is a pretty, domesticated volcano, showy with lava in approachable, well-defined flows, with drive-through points of interest and rangers to interpret the scene. At a safe distance, visitors leave gifts; the volcano goddess Pele has a known weakness for flowers and gin.

Michigan and I found only harsh gifts at our backwoods summit. Rock burned to death. Sulfurous steam. This is what you get when lava subsides but refuses to cool. Below the surface, heat rises and burns. There is no safe distance. If you left gifts, the flowers would shrivel, the gin bottles explode.

A’a lava, the cool, clinkerish kind, creaks and groans as it crawls over the land. Pahoehoe, the fast-flowing kind, when it reaches the ocean, explodes into sand. This is the source of black-sand beaches.

At old beaches the sand caresses your skin like fine powder. At young ones, the unpulverized grains hold their edge. The surf tumbles you, the sand cuts and scrapes; you walk out of the ocean bleeding.

When the flow is turbulent some bits of lava spin into long, golden filaments. It is called Pele’s hair. It is glass. The wind tosses it up to the cliffs. Some of it lands in crevices and footholds, much of it falls into the sea.

We swam before we walked; we still do. The ocean smells of salt, of course, and of fish and floating mats of weeds, alive and rotting all at once. And of blood, fresh and warm.

The jungle smells of leaves green and plump with water and brown leaves gone to slime. Everything living is dying, and everything dying is alive still, in this sumptuous, procreant grave.


* * *

Michigan and I were buddies. In that spirit he invited me to Hawaii, and in that spirit I went. Silly, naive boy and girl. All that sumptuous beauty, all that procreant urge.

Time lost track of itself. We lived in every present moment.

It was our idyll. I thought we were charmed.

The Kilu Game

Once I wrote a novel. It started like this:


The smell of sulfur is the smell of loss. It overcame the chief Kahavari at Puna and left only his wife and his pig; it overcame Keoua’s army and left only their footprints; it overcame Kalapana and left nothing, nothing at all.

On the east side of the Big Island stand the trunks of palms, their heads eaten off by the volcano’s acid rain. The spirit of the palm resides in the crown. Without it the palms continue to stand, but they are dead inside, and when they have stood long enough and their bodies finally acknowledge that their spirits are dead, then they will fall into the sea.

So the volcano goddess Pele extends her reach: What she cannot reach with her tongues of fire she scalds with her sulfurous breath.

If You Want Good Neighbors

There is a man. He is standing in the doorframe of his house. It is ramshackle. The boards have gone soft, they are drooping. There is no paint left on the wood, and mold has spread over the rot, following the curlicue ruts of termite trails.

It smells wonderful, you know it does. It smells of water and rotting vegetation warmed over, a procreant grave.

I want to reach into the picture, rip that man out of his doorframe and slip into his place.

* * *

Not long ago, when people acted upon their fears in cruel and straightforward fashion, the missionaries gathered the lepers of Hawaii, shipped them off to the island Molokai and left them there.

The man in the picture stands in the door of his house, next to the old lepers’ graveyard. Beside the picture is a quote from the man:

“If you want good neighbors, go for the dead ones. They don’t take anything and they don’t talk too much.”


* * *


Wordplay

Writers love to play around with words. One of the games we love to play is “change one thing.”

I am noodling lightly, not paying attention, exchanging one word for another as fast as I can, when this combination catches my fancy:

If you want good friends, go for the dead ones…



Shit.

.
.
.

On second thought: Fine. You want to go there? Come on.

Surviving, the Sequel

The other day, flipping channels in a hotel room, I saw the last minutes of the movie Castaway. After being stranded on a tropical island for years, Tom Hanks returns to the world. He makes a beeline for Helen Hunt’s doorstep. They chat, they kiss, she declares, “You’re the love of my life!” And then she sends him away. She has a new family now.

The film ends with Tom at a country crossroads, in the moment of decision. Whither?

If the film were a novel, this is where the story would begin. The survival adventure is only the set-up, the meat of the story is how he survives the comeback.

Survival is all about overcoming adversity. Strong will and luck and resourcefulness win the day. Survival is as small as an island: one goal, one person, one present moment.

Living is navigating. Adversity is just one thing on your plate; your story is not about how you overcome but how you work with. What rules here: Identity, meaning, connection. Will and desire. Surrender. Oh, of course: love.

Living has no goal, rather process. There are many people, and each one contains many persons. Time loses track of itself, spreading like water over a wide, flat plain. You live in every present moment.

Following close on the Castaway credits are the opening scenes from Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason. This is a sequel to Bridget Jones’ Diary, in which Bridget and the man of her dreams find love. These movies are based on novels. Edge of Reason asks: How will they live on?

* * *

Earlier I had written: “I still hope Barbara will walk through the door.”

What if she did? Really, what if?

Hundreds

There are hundreds of ways to be.
There are hundreds of ways to connect.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Ghosts of Cabeceo Past, Part 4: My First Nutjob

A warm fall day in upstate New York is no time to be locked inside, studying. Better to study in sunshine.

At a nice city park not too far off campus, I found a spot close but not too close to everyone else, settled cross-legged on the grass with my books.

A man walked across the grass, sat down nearby. Attractive. I was brand-new to college, and in high school I didn’t get out much. So I could be wrong. Still, this is the way I remember it: handsome.

Of course, I studiously ignored him.

He stood up and moved closer. Scooted over a little more. Struck up a conversation. It took a few minutes to catch his drift.

… change into a cat, he said.

Wow! I thought. I need to get out more!

Really, he insisted.

Wow, I said.

He went on and on. His story was fascinating! Somebody was changing into a cat, but it was not quite clear who.

You can do that? I said, sounding impressed. He believed it, why shouldn’t I believe it with him for a while?

He grew agitated. No, he said. No, not me!

Evidently, turning into a black cat is not a good thing in his world.

My roommate’s girlfriend turned into a cat, he said. A black cat. Do you believe me?

Yes, I said. I wasn’t lying. I was speaking from my wild-imaginative self, who would willingly, unquestioningly, follow any idea into its own space.

I killed her, he said. I still have the gun in my pocket.

I snuck a look at his pocket. His hand was in it, too.

Ah, I said. (Run, wild-imaginative One Heart, run out of the forest!)

She turned into a cat and she tried to jump out the window, he said. So I shot her.

I see, I said in the voice I used with my little brother when he was very intent on explaining his four-year-old world to me.

What about you? he asked. There was some talk about women and cats.

I can’t turn into a cat, I said.

He shifted around, here and there.

Really, I said. I don't think most people can do that. I bet there's hardly anyone in the world can do it. Don't you think so?

Are you trying to do it right now? he asked.

(Run for the hills, One Heart!)

What I like to do is, I like to lie back in the sun and close my eyes, I said. Do you want to?

He did.

Just like that. Can you believe it? I couldn’t.

I like to close my eyes and think of things I like, I said, sliding my books q-u-i-e-t-l-y into my bag.

I like to lie there for a long time. I like to breathe and smell the grass and feel the sun on my face. I like to think about the things that make me happy, I said, standing up without making a sound.

Do you want to? I asked.

As he listed the things that he loved, I backed away.

I liked him. I still do. In retrospect I doubt he had a gun in his pocket. I hope he beat that whole black-cat thing.

My family calls me the Nut Magnet. He was my first. (The other ones—pervert, malicious middle schooler—were only opportunistic.) This was a clear-cut case. I want to say this in a way that doesn't sound too like a woo-woo drama queen. He was just he and I was just me, and we shared a nice walk in his interesting worldhis thickety thinking together.

When I was a kid, the nuns said each of us is born with a divine gift, and it is our duty to use it well and often, every chance we get. It's the least we can do for Jesus.

It's a weird gift, companion to nutjobs. But when I count my blessings, this is chief among them.

Ghosts of Cabeceo Past, Part 3: The Bough Breaks

Where to begin? Lots of people like the cabeceo. Let’s go there.

Drop back a few years to the pervert. Then fast-forward to the girl with the knife and malice in her eyes. (Read those stories.)

When I tell people I was not traumatized by the pervert, they think I am lying. They get that “poor dear” look in their eyes.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough.

I run this idea by Mary Alice.

I don’t know what to do, I say. I just don’t feel it. Didn’t then. Don’t now. Maybe I should try to rustle up some … I don’t know … shock and awe.

Mary Alice guffaws.

If the trauma didn’t happen in the moment, it’s not going to happen now, she says.

Mary Alice has common sense. She comes from Wyoming-frontier pioneer stock with a touch of the Sorbonne.

But, this raises the question: Why no trauma in the moment?

Because he had nice eyes. Kind. Friendly. Not scary. I liked him. My intuition takes a millisecond to size up a stranger. Even then. Never mind the rest. When I looked in his eyes, I saw friendly.

The girl with the knife just the opposite. This is the story my family tends to blow off. She was just a kid. It was probably a pocketknife. Don’t be a drama queen, One Heart.

Yes, well…. They did not look into her eyes. Or rather, her eyes did not look into theirs. The knife was window dressing.

Before the girl with the knife, the world was predictable and mostly pleasant. Safe. After, I saw with new eyes: Not suspicious, not mistrusting, but with trust turned on its head: I no longer trusted the bough to hold, I trusted it to break.

Lullaby, baby, in the treetop.
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
and down will come baby, cradle and all.

Connections

What is the essence of tango? Connection. With what?

Your body
Your shoes
The floor
The music
Your partner
The room
The gossip
The stories
The history
Argentina, her story
The world, their story
Your history
Your story
Your self

Note to beginners: Begin where you will. It’s a circle.

Tango Hula

Glenlivet wears a pained expression. He has made the mistake of letting go of my right hand.

I don’t know what he’s doing with his hand. I’m doing hula with mine.

Last summer, David Hodgson’s class. He encourages us to mess around with reality. With tango, I mean.

I like to mess around. I like to experiment with mash-ups.

Currently I am mashing up tango and hula.

Why not? You see a woman raise her left arm, waft it gently like a sea plant, slink-slide it into place across her partner’s shoulders. Why not the other hand, too?

I try a few wafting moves, the full-arm ocean waves of auwana. Glenlivet soldiers on.

What do you think? I ask.

Ever the gentleman lead, he says nothing but recaptures my hand, holds it close—traps it, you might say--in his.
.

Jane Austen Does Tango

“Pleasure in seeing dancing! Not I, indeed—I never look at it—I do not know who does.

Fine dancing, I believe, like virtue, must be its own reward. Those who are standing by are usually thinking of something very different.”

--Mr. Knightley, Emma

The Woman Who Turned Her Back on the Sea

I once met a woman who turned her back on the sea. Her feet were badly burned, but the scarring was light.

She credits thick, goopy layers of aloe, frequently applied fresh from the plant.

See her sitting, feet propped on a coffee table on her lanai. Housebound for weeks because she is unable to walk. She has nothing to do but break arms off the aloe plants her friends have sent, slather the goo thickly until her poor scalded feet look as they would through a few inches of clear, wavery water.

She is the one who warned me: The ocean will slap you around. Never turn your back.

She was a ranger in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. She worked at the Wahaula heiau, an old temple. In 1990, lava surrounded the temple and ran into the sea. When lava flows slowly, it cools as it goes, so that you get a hard shell with a river flowing beneath it.

The hard shell is not reliable.

The lava parted and flowed around the temple, leaving it unharmed. Perhaps she thought it was charmed, and so by extension was she.

On her day off, she walked out into the sea on the hard shell of lava. She carried a stick. She intended to go to the end of the flow, where the lava was fresh and the crust thin. Thrust the stick through the shell, scoop up some lava, drop it into the tin can she carried.

She would have a special gift to show her tourists: The newest land on earth!

All went according to plan. Except, that to thrust the stick, she had to take her eyes off the sea.

Big wave!

Tumble!

The hard shell cracks. The charm breaks.

By the time I met her, her feet were healed and lightly scarred, and all this was no more than a story she enjoyed telling to tourists.

And underneath, this:

The hard shell cracks. The charm breaks. Never turn your back.

Which translates to this:

Trust nothing. The earth opens and swallows. Nothing is solid, everything is real.

By awareness matter coheres. Be vigilant. When your mind wanders, everything does.

One measures a circle beginning anywhere.

A Lesson from My Vacation

There are these long days, there is this dumb luck, there is a brand new way of opening up.

Rhett Miller, Old 97s

One of These Things Is Just Like the Other: How to Stand in the Ocean

If you are in big wave action, take care not to be knocked over by waves. The waves are much larger than you, but you can withstand them.

Your feet must be at least shoulder width apart, and perpendicular to the line of travel. If you are facing head-on, one foot must be ahead of the other. But it is best to stand sideways, with your feet squarely under your shoulders and your head turned into the line of motion. Then you do not even have to hold onto anything, but can simply rock on the waves of motion.

It is also important to give yourself over to the ocean, to accept what it has to offer on its own terms. There are ebbs and flows. It slaps you and sends you staggering, it slaps you with joyous comraderie. Never turn your back.

There are fat people in tiny swimsuits, and they are beautiful. There are children squatting, and you know they are peeing. There are teen girls preening and teen boys preening back. There are thieves who will steal your wallet out of the pocket of your shorts where you left them on the beach unnoticed. The wind snatches up plastic cups and water wings and anything else that is not weighted down.

A flimsy, hot pink blow-up life ring rolls down the beach like the Gingerbread Man, on and on and on, impossibly far.

There are people all around; do not try to make friends.

The broken shells you crunch underfoot once housed life. Every grain of sand is a chip off its old block.

One of these things is just like the other: Stand in the ocean exactly as you would on the subway.

One Measures a Circle Beginning Anywhere

We shall pick up an existence by its frogs.

Wise men have tried other ways. They have tried to understand our state of being by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all thngs, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle beginning anywhere.

I have collected 294 records of showers of living things. (As in, it's raining frogs ...) ...

It is the profound conviction of most of us that there never has been a shower of living things. But some of us have ... been educated by surprises out of much that we were "absolutely sure" of ...

I have never heard of any standard, in any religion, philosophy, science, or complication of household affairs that could not be made to fit any requirement. We fit standards to judgments or break any law that it please us to break. ... We have conclusions, which are the products of senility or incompetence or credulity, and then argue from them to premises, and then argue from the premises, thinking we began there.

From the book Lo! by Charles Hoy Fort

Duck Hunting with Grisha

See, how it works, Keith says, gesturing with his beer can, you have to aim a little bit ahead of the duck.

Because it takes a little time for the bullet to get there, I say.

Right! Keith is proud of me; I learn fast. He’s proud of himself, too: Clearly, he is a fabulous teacher!

We are not actually duck hunting. We are lounging on a pine-covered knoll amid mountain peaks, toying with physics or ballistics or something. We converse like New Englanders: long stretches of silence broken by syllables.

So what is happening is, the duck is flying into the bullet, I say.

That percolates in the thin air 8,000 feet up the mountain.

So, actually, you’re not shooting the duck, I say. You’re just putting the bullet in its path.

Keith watches the clouds contentedly.

You’re really leaving it up to her to fly into it, I say.

I watch the clouds contentedly, too.

She could mess up your shot …

A cloud pauses before the sun and, just like that, the air goes cold.

… entirely, I add.

She could

dodge the bullet,

so to speak,

I say.

It’s really all up to her.

I can tell from the meticulous way Keith pours out the dregs of his beer, flattens the can and slips it into his back pocket, that he’d like me to stop now.

No, he says. It’s not up to the duck. You watch the duck and you see how it flies, and you time your shot to it, Keith says.

I pour and flatten and slip. Open my arms to the sky like a duck.

If she doesn’t do her part, you’re screwed, I say.

Keith throws his arm across my shoulders as we hike on.

You count on the duck to know how to fly, he says. Indulgently. Perhaps a touch too much so.

Keith is a nice guy. I do not wish to torment him, so I keep quiet. But I am thinking.

Geese are reliable; in flight they are rhythmic and steady. I am not so sure about ducks. They seem more, well, flighty. They seem as if they could be the victim of sudden gusts of wind. Also they seem nervous; they could be easily startled, and that would throw everything off.

I am not going to push it with Keith. But I believe I am right.

* * *

Years pass.

Grisha and I are working on milonga. It’s very quick, with sudden bursts of speed.

“Wait for me,” Grisha says.

We work on tango, with startling twists and turns.

“You’re late,” Grisha says.

In the vals, turns with sacada, a little bit scary.

“Go!” Grisha says.

Note to Self Doing Ballet-Hula Hip Hop Tango, with a PS to Nina

If the purpose of taking tango dancers to hip-hop class is to loosen the hips and get swingy with it, then if, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, plugged into Janis Joplin, one were to take a wide second position in grand plie and move the hips as in hula, in the cool sideways figure eight that calls to mind small boats on the sea or a Mobius strip, then one could accomplish almost the very same thing without having to revisit Detroit.

Isn’t this pretty, Nina? Let’s leave all that funky stuff out of it. Who needs it? Yes, I think this is lovely.

Hip-Hop Tango

Move it! Nina calls out.

She swings across the floor in a half crouch, hips swinging. She wants us to get funky.

Except for James, we are all middle-class, stiff-legged white ladies and gentlemen. James is a middle-class, stiff-legged African-American gentleman.

I’m taking you all to a hip-hop class! Nina says.

She says it again, enthusiastically. I can see that these words, which leaped impulsively from her mouth, have planted an idea in her mind, and she is taken by it.

Uh-oh.

Nina is north on my tango compass. We are both technique-geeks. My learning style is a perfect fit for her teaching style. We respect dance as a discipline. Technique is our path; beauty happens.

From my very first lesson, Nina has treated me seriously, ignoring the evidence of her own eyes. For 18 months and running, she has bullied and prodded me, cajoled and congratulated me, just as she has every other dancer in her classes. Thus saying: Come on, One Heart, come along.

Thus saying, Who cares if you lag? You belong.

Lately, Nina seems to be growing softer and tougher all at once. In class, she encourages and praises. She adds light notes to frustrating moments. At the same time, she insists more and more on practice; she gives homework, and she expects it to be done. She scolds when there is not sufficient evidence of progress from week to week.

Every week she becomes a better teacher. Every week her students move incrementally along.

So….

I trust her. If she says hip-hop is a route into tango, I will go there with her. I am an adventurer of the moment! I will grit my teeth and let that vigorous, angry, threatening energy that I intended to lose when I left Detroit enter and animate me for as long as the class lasts.

I will strive to be real in the moment; KO the Inner New Englander and get elemental.

Then I will go home and take a long, hot bath to soak it out, let it all drain away.

But...

Once something is in you, it is there. You cannot soak it out any more than you can leave it behind.

B-r-e-a-t-h-e.

If you’re going to do it, Nina, do it soon.