Love Is a River

I don’t have any bad feelings about it, Keith says.

That’s good, I say.

I have many bad feelings about it, or rather one bad feeling, over and over. It carries little emotional weight, but that constantly.

Guilt.

* * *

We have just spent several hours unwinding the final strand that connects us. (For nearly three years it’s been stretched thin and thinner so that it’s begun to unravel, but we—I--haven’t had the heart to finish the job.) We have been to the bank to shuffle accounts, he has invited me to the house to see what he’s done to the bathroom that he tore apart … how many years ago? We can’t remember. He has put air in my tires and checked my oil and fiddled with a few things under the hood. This is how he always said I love you, with his handiwork. Earlier, I paid for dinner; this is how I always said I love you back, by taking care of business. That’s what I’m doing today, taking care of our last bit of business.

* * *

On an insignificant anniversary of Barbara’s death, Keith and I went to dinner. We weren’t marking the day. Eating out was routine, a better alternative to my cooking or my mood when I was cooking.

Still, I was cognizant. I thought: The day everything changed could be the day it changed again. I looked across the table. Said, It’s time. He agreed. Three days later I lived in a different city.

It was that easy. In our marriage, there were few surprises.

* * *

The biggest surprise was the marriage itself. The brainiac and the high school dropout. What is that?

* * *

On the night of the day that Barbara died, my doorbell rang. I had lived in the apartment since spring; that night was November. The bell had never rung before.

It was Keith, the man next door with the beautiful garden, who was always out tending it in the afternoon when I got home from work. We had often chatted over the fence.

I opened the door, my face full of tears. Somehow we got to this moment: He invited me to a concert. I refused.

What must he have been thinking? I wondered later. He said, I wondered why you answered the door.

I did not walk down from the third floor because I was curious to see who was there. I was hopeful. I hoped it was her.

* * *

Seven months later, the woman Keith loved with all his heart died.

* * *

Imagine Hansel and Gretel without the breadcrumbs. How do you survive? We were not strong for one another; we were equally bereft.

Consoling one another, we never said, “It’s OK,” or “It will be all right.” We said, “I know. I know.”

Then one day Keith stopped saying, “I know.” He had stopped needing to hear it long before I did, but on that day I knew he was right. You can’t say “I know” forever. At some point something changes, and then you can say only, “I remember.”

* * *

Keith and I have this in common: unrelenting creativity. Keith’s genius resides in his hands, and I am not being sly. He can take anything—he can take nothing at all—and create a thing of function and beauty.

Once he built a wooden clock from plans ordered from a magazine. The gears didn’t mesh right. With a compass and protractor, the high-school dropout figured out the geometry used to create the number and size and placement of teeth on gears of various circumference, and the height and slope of the sides of each tooth, and the width of the top of each tooth. Then he drew up his own plans.

He cut the gears from oak, black walnut, guncalo alves, purple heart, bird’s eye maple. Even with all of the gears’ various sizes and weights and grains and resistance, the clock keeps time within seconds per day. One museum has already laid claim to it.

The clock sits in a corner of Keith’s workshop, the gears choked with sawdust. He never fully finished the project. The pendulum is a cheap dowel piercing an orange plastic ball; the weight is scrap metal. I know why he left it like that: The creative work was making the gears; the rest was mop up.

In this Keith and I are exactly alike: What interests us is always what’s in the making, never what’s done.

* * *

Several friends said, We never could see what you saw in him. Beyond the creative genius part, I never tried to explain.

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly," Saint Exupery said. With my heart I saw:

Keith is an enlivened heart. To tell me who he was, he played for me this song by Tret Fure:

My house I leave open
My faith lies with friends
If I can’t trust my instincts, I’ll lose in the end
I’d rather risk injury than be on my guard
That side of the moon is too dark.

It became our shared point of reference, our song. Recently Keith gave me a CD onto which he copied the song. Even as we go our separate ways, it's still true north on his compass and mine.

* * *

If you ever grow heartsore, seek out Keith in his workshop. Only spirit can take you to that hushed place where you become the thing you are doing. Watch him, attentive and tender, coax new meaning from metal or wood, and you will be restored. You will see:

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

Not to paint too soft a picture: The man is 6-foot-5 and can bench press me. He owns a rifle and pistol, which he uses to shoot beer cans on stumps and doughnuts hanging from trees. He drives a motorcycle, a dirt bike, and a riding lawnmower he geared up to make it go fast. He likes to do wheelies on it, and more than once he has flipped it. He swears like a trucker and tells dirty jokes. He loves Pink Floyd.

He likes beer, and the more he drinks, the sweeter and more gentle he gets.

* * *

Keith and I were lucky. We were lost in a dark wood, and we walked out together. As children we had been bullied, jeered at, browbeaten and left to rot. When we discovered one another, we stared with amazement and admiration. If we didn’t love in a soul-binding way, we lavished on one another the necessary precursor: profound, enthusiastic certainty that the other was wholly worthy, doubly so, of a place on this planet.

We did more than survive grief. We engaged life. Certainty is contagious. We believed in one another, and then we believed in ourselves. We helped one another stake a claim in the world, and build our lives, and step into them.

We were divinely lucky to meet when we did. Fate dealt us a good hand, and we played it well.

Still, I can’t stop apologizing every time we meet. Keith needs a friend by his side. I need solitude the way a tree needs wood. I was not always nice about it.

You did fine. Don’t feel guilty, Keith says.

* * *

At dinner, Keith heaps some of his food onto my plate. He knows I want it, and he’s offered to let me nibble right off his plate as I did when we were married, but I decline. That day is over. Besides, it used to annoy him no end.

I miss it, he says.

Do you ever think about Mary? I ask.

I am not starting anything. I just wonder.

I do, he says. More and more lately. I don’t know why.

I think one good-bye brings on another.

* * *

The sun is on the slant.

Now that we have finished with the bank and dinner and house tour and mechanicking, Keith is leaning against the back fender of my car, his arms crossed. We chat, but things are winding down. It’s well past time for me to go, but we have never been quick to say good-bye.

I have something to say, and this may be my last opportunity. After this moment there will be nothing between us, no connection to give me the right to say personal things.

I want to say, Love is not what we thought. It is not a bridge, uniting two grieving hearts, then falling down.

I want to say, Love is the river that carries us into the future. That’s what our love did, is doing now.

Instead I say, I still love you. Quickly I add, Like a brother, like family.

Keith smiles sadly. He knows. The affection we feel in this moment, it is old affection. He has a girlfriend now, and I am meeting a favorite lead at the Turn in two hours.

It is time.

Keith pushes off the car, his arms open, and wraps me in a bear hug. My face ends up smashed in his armpit, and we laugh. Soon after we were married he read that women need frequent whiffs of the pheromones emitted in a man’s sweat, and he kindly volunteered his. It’s silly joke, and it gives us a cozy moment.

You can say all you like about the intimacy of the tango embrace, it is nothing, it is not a pale image, it is not even of the same ilk; it is a caricature of this: genuine, old, familial love. This is the connection that requires no tending. If I never see Keith again, we will always be family.

We know that. We know how way leads on to way. When two roads diverge, you cannot travel both.

Don’t be a stranger, Keith says.

He helps me into the car, then shambles over to the crabapple tree, picks fruit and tosses it into the grass as I back down the driveway.

We wave and wave and wave as I drive away.

Tango in the Town of the Democratic National Convention, Part 1

Last Friday night: Early-bird weekend for the DNC.

Along about midnight, the music cuts out. Finally! I have been looking forward to this ever since Marilyn McGinnity, the old hippie who owns the Merc, sent an email to Tango Colorado promising a special, antiwar tango performance.

This is a prelude to the Democratic National Convention, which will start in 2 days just a mile or two away. The city is already bursting at the seams. A friend is choosing the wine for a party the Washington Post is hosting for the 200 staffers it has brought to town.

The machinery of national politics leaves me cold. I vote the party line, don't bother me with the details. But...

I love performances! I love antiwar!

Andrey and I stand at the edge of the floor. We do not immediately head back to our seats, because I am filching chocolate candies from a basket set out for the purpose.

And that's a good thing, because on her next breath Marilyn orders all dancers onto the floor. We are the performance, she said.

I love performance art! I love communally created meaning. I love when the role of the observer is subsumed in the role of the creator.

The ones who are creating the art--and thereby its meaning and message--are themselves the intended recipients of its beauty and meaning and message. Roll over, Marshall MacLuhan: You said the medium is the message. Under Marilyn's direction, Tango Colorado is about to say this: Creation is the message.

This is the ultimate in self-referencing art. Imagine the Borg painting a picture. Imagine God creating the world.

Do you want to? Andrey asks.

Oh, I don't know, I say, are you antiwar?

It's a question of appropriateness, he says.

So, with my mouth full of chocolate, we enter the dance on a thoughtful note. The music is a gorgeous tango. Then the voice.

I am the disappeared of Argentina ... Your war ... your generals ... your Army ... your money ... men and boys murdered ... raped me and killed me and your money your generals my country ...

Andrey growls in my ear. I can't dance to this. I can't hear the music.

I am not helping. I am quaking in his arms. With laughter. Really, this is ludicrous. LIke a tasteless comedy skit.

Andrey is determined, but we are both relieved when the song ends.

Then another begins.

The ranting goes on. It grows uncomfortable, but not in a meaningful way. You, Marilyn, ask me to put myself into a very close embrace--really, with my buddy Andrey, intimate is not too strong a word--and then you rail on about rape? I am not feeling guilt, only embarrassment.

Oh, that's very nice, I say in my most sarcastic voice so I will sound jaded, which is often interpreted as self-assured.

Andrey grumbles on.

OK, I think. This is a moment. I don't want to lose it. I love performance art! "Just go with it. Find the musicc," I say aloud, to both of us.

Then I don't hear the rant any more because Andrey is dancing to the music itself, and the music must echo the rant because our dance is sharp and dissonant and energetic. It feels ugly. And then it is over.

And that's it. No effect. Nada. My Whitebread American guilt is no greater than it was 10 minutes ago. I have no sense of creation, or art having transpired. No sense of what Tom Stermitz describes as tango transcendence, when all the couples on the floor dance as a whole. No. This ending, it feels like pulling into a parking space at McDonald's.

Soon the tango orchestra Extasis returns to the stage. I have lovely dances until my feet hurt, and then I have a few more, and then one last tanda with a favorite lead, and then go home.

There I putter, do a little housework, jot notes for tomorrow's writing, slip into the CD player a cozy murder mystery, luxuriate for 30 seconds in clean 'jammies, clean sheets, sore feet and the bel canto of George Guidall's narration, and then I am dead to the world.

This is what my friend Ralph believes: What the religious call Heaven, this is It. Today, the Earth. Heaven is a co-op, we are its member-citizens. The heavenliness of Heaven derives from social action. Us.

Shane, my anarchist buddy, left town this week. He's seeking buffalo and serenity in Yellowstone National Park. The irony of his destination cannot be lost on him. Still, he's an anarchist. Leaving town is his political action.

Ralph is an activist. He has long experience in peaceful protest and in being arrested. He will spend much of this week within a few feet of police in riot gear.

I tango. I write. I dream. I wake in the morning to the image of Nero fiddling while Rome burns, and my most pressing question is: What song did he play?

Then I heard a cello

Then I heard a cello and thought,
Oh. That's how you say it.

Courtney Queeney

"Notes for My Future Biographer"

from Filibuster to a Kiss and Other Poems

Eden Raine, 3 Years Old, Gets a New Heart

Eden Raine comes home today! Whoo-hoo!

Last fall, the doctors told us that she never would live to see 3 years old. They said that, without a new heart, she would die this very month.

Last week, I got a call: She's having the transplant today.

Now, look at her go! She wants off the bed, she wants her toys, she is ....

feisty!

Yes!

Eden Raine has the heart of a 3-year-old boy. There is never a moment when you can rejoice for her but also grieve for his parents.

How do we live on? Is our life contained only within the sum of our bodily parts, or do we live on in each surviving part? Is there intelligent life at the cellular level? Is there soul?

Dead is dead, gone is gone. That's what I say. Still, I love that this tiny, doll-like girl who never knew a feisty moment in her life, might have a tiny bit of boy in her.

Blessings on you, little boy, and the ones who love you. As you reap may you sow. In love we live on.

Live on, little boy. Live on, Eden Raine.

Previous post on Eden Raine.

My Glasses, My Heart: PS, The Final Part.5

(Voice mail picked up at 12:30 p.m.)

Electronic voice:
Voice mail received 9:26 a.m., Monday, August 11. … 20 seconds. To listen, press 0.

Voice message:
Hi, I’m calling from Kaiser in the contact lens department to let you know that we got your lens in. You can pick it up here upstairs in the optical dept. Thank you!

* * *

And that's that. We close the book on another tango adventure...

My Glasses, My Heart: The Final Part

It is this simple.

He takes the glasses carefully from my hands as if he were well-accustomed to handling fragile things, and slips them into the protective nest of his pocket. The pocket is clean and well-pressed, prepared.

He looks to ascertain my approval. Then his expression changes: Let’s begin.

He enters carefully into the embrace. He moves confidently and with precision. We dance first in the open embrace and, as we become acclimated, he pulls me close.

His arm is strong against my back. Some women feel it is too much, he says. He asks more than once, Is this too much?

It’s nice, I tell him. I don’t say what I feel: Encircled. Secured.

There is nothing in this dance to awaken my dread. No fancy steps he can’t quite lead, nothing I can’t follow.

Well-cared for. Protected.

My forehead rests in the soft hair at his temple. My curls brush his cheek. When the moment is right, I whisper.

Sometimes after a tanda he forgets my glasses are in his pocket. He stands on the edge of the dance floor and chats, and I don’t ask for my glasses because that would be his signal to move on.

Eventually he remembers, or I remind him. Then he removes my glasses from his pocket, opens them, orients them so they will be easy for me to put on, and offers them. He holds onto them until he is sure they are safe in my hands.

If it were not completely stupid, I would be jealous of them, my glasses in his hands, in the pocket next to his heart.

* * *

Who would have thought such a mundane nuisance as glasses could yield such a rich field of possibility for self-expression?

Who would have thought the way to my heart is through my glasses?

My Glasses, My Heart Part 4

Then I tore a contact. Then the fun began!

Who knew? Who knew that, in the hands of an imaginative and considerate lead, solving the problem of spectacles could be a form of creative expression?

Three gentlemen raise spec-tiquette to an art. One wows my heart.

* * *

Robert has decided that if I am not going to wear my specs, he won’t wear his, either. He drops them in his pocket along with mine. After the tanda he pulls them out. They emerge as a piece, tangled.

This could be a film, French, of course, with atmospheric lighting and smoky music from the ’30s. The girly glasses slip coyly into the pocket, the boy specs dive in after. The music commences. The dancers are unimportant; they are only a vehicle for the pocket. The shot is quite tight, but of course the camera cannot reveal what is happening inside that dark, roomy space. We see the outward signs, the movements within suggested by the stretch and sway of fabric. The music ends, a masculine hand (a fine Gallic hand, a few dark hairs on the fingers) reaches into the pocket, pulls out the glasses. They emerge as a piece, tangled.

Last week at the Turn, I was standing beside a box speaker when Robert asked me to dance. I slipped off my glasses, then hesitated. For all my talk, I am self-conscious about asking leads to take care of them for me.

“I’ll just leave them here,” I said, setting them down.

He took them up quickly. “This is better,” he said, slipping them into his pocket.

* * *

I thought that pocket protection raised the bar on spectiquette as high as it could go.

Silly me. David Hodgson does not raise bars. He toys with them. It would not be beyond him to turn the bar into a pond, for example. It would not be beyond him to turn the bar into a pond and himself into a fish and you into a fisherman in an old wooden boat, and the merry game is on.

Is that too woo-woo for you? David would calibrate his magic, turn the bar into something you would find familiar and comforting--an umbrella, say, or a toaster.

I do not dance with David Hodgson. Last winter I took two private lessons from him, and I could not even walk straight. Teachers make me nervous, and David has an inventiveness that I like very much, so of course my feet were all thumbs. It was painful. He doesn’t ask me to dance, and if he did I would demur.

So a few weeks ago, when he asked me to dance, I demurred.

David, I said, we can’t dance together. Don’t you remember? I torture you.

He grinned. Herpetologically.

(Several months ago I confided in David my secret ambition to produce a tango show based on an old folk tale. The problem, I explained, is that no one is going to want to play the Devil. David grinned. I swear I heard a hiss.)

Oh come on, he said temptingly.

Without hesitation I slipped off my glasses, proving I am indeed a daughter of Eve.

“You’ll have to bring me back here,” I said, dropping the specs on a table at random. “Otherwise I’ll never find them.

“I can’t see a thing,” I added, reaching out a hand so he could lead me to the dance floor like the blind woman I am.

He grinned. Yesssssss.

After one quaking moment, I gave myself over. When you’re dancing with the Devil, you’d best give as good as you get.

When you’re a beginner, tango is a standardized test. For every question the lead asks, there is only one right answer. This is when you’re learning basic steps and technique.

When you’ve moved along a bit, tango becomes fill-in-the-blank. The lead integrates pauses for you to fill in. This is when a follower learns adornments.

When you’ve moved along a little bit more, tango becomes an essay test. You get the idea …

Dancing with David Hodgson is defending your dissertation before a panel of advisors from the New Goth College, the Potter School of Fine, Dark and Martial Arts, and the American Academy of Hula Hoop Queens.

It’s important to know that when you are defending a dissertation, you are not answering an attack. You are conversing. There is no mistaking who is teacher or student, but for the purposes of the moment, all are on equal footing.

Not to belabor the point, we had fun. When the last song of the tanda ended, I opened my eyes.

Look, David said. We were standing right next to a table, where sat—my glasses!

Wow! I said. What are the odds we’d end up here?

David grinned.

Yessssssss.

* * *

Ssssssso, I say to the next lead who snags me.

Apparently I am feeling a bit devilish still. I tell him David’s trick, give him a flirtatious “top-that” sort of look.

Hmmm, he says, considering.

I like this lead. He’s been dancing a year and he is like me, which is to say he has some natural affinity for music and movement and he aspires to dance well and he enjoys learning new things and practicing and he’s inventive.

He is different from me in that he actually has natural ability to go with that affinity, and so he is learning quickly while I am enjoying a painfully leisurely pace.

For this reason I call him Alaric, which is an actual name, at least it was in the very first romance novel I ever read (Barbara Cartland, who else?). That Alaric spoke Gaelic, which I believe would make him Irish.

I do not call this lead Alaric because he is Gaelic or a romantic icon, though I imagine he has broad appeal. Rather, Alaric sounds like alacrity, which is a Latin word traced to the fifteenth century, meaning lively.

Here is one example of Alaric’s alacrity: Recently, I learned from Gustavo to do a quick-step in the giro during vals. Alaric was not in the class, so I showed it to him. I did it once or twice. That’s all he needed to make it his.

You could watch his line of thought as it developed: If a giro is a grapevine, then this quick-step could work in any grapevine-type step … in any direction … and if the man could lead it at will … and if he did it along with the follower … and we were circling the floor with our new, very cool move!

If he were a Viking you could call him Alaric the Fearless. But that would be precious. Vikings didn’t dance tango.

Sssssssso I said to Alaric, then ditched the glasses and we were off, lively and just a bit devilish.

You think you know where this is going, don’t you? Don’t set yourself up. Alaric is no David Hodgson. No. Alaric is just my speed.

I like dancing with Alaric when we are playing around, and when we’re working hard and when we’re dancing for pleasure. We dance in open and close embrace, and when we go into close embrace, I close my eyes.

When I open my eyes at the end of the tanda, every single step, including the missteps, has been a pleasure. Tonight we were dancing to dance, with fun and inventive moves from the very first step straight through to the very cool pose on the very last beat.

We are in an odd corner, a bit outside the line of dance. Alaric touches my arm, indicates the way I should go. Of course he is walking me back to my table. He wears contact lenses, he understands my plight.

I can tell he enjoyed the tanda. His smile is a touch diffident, as usual, but also a touch self-satisfied. He is in no hurry to go trolling.

When I turn in the direction he indicates—surprise! We are standing two steps from the table on which sit my glasses!

How did you do that!? I squeal.

Alaric looks sheepishly proud. The DJ was playing a three-song set. It took all of the first two songs and part of the third to complete one full turn of the floor. Knowing there wouldn’t be time enough left in the set to make another full circuit, “I just danced right here until the end,” he explains.

That explains the odd corner, out of the way of the other dancers. But what about all those cool moves? It didn’t feel like we were stuck in an eddy. Every step was a pleasure!

Add gratified to that diffident, self-satisfied smile.

Wow! This goes way beyond etiquette or courtesy. This is full-bore, pedal-to-the-metal, dazzling charm. Alaric, you are indeed just my speed.

I am gushing. Here’s why:

I asked for a gift, and Alaric, inventive soul that he is, presented it to me done up with ribbons. That’s connection.

* * *

These are the three gentlemen. Tomorrow: The one who wows my heart.

My Glasses, My Heart, Part 3

Then I got contact lenses.

Very handy. I can spot a cabeceo, and I can walk myself off the floor. Men and women alike tell me I look prettier.

The leads no longer escort me to my table; there’s no need. They walk a bit in the general direction, say a nice thank-you, and wander off.

According to Kari, my tour guide to the dance scene, that’s because as soon as one tanda ends, everyone—leads and followers alike—start trolling for their next partner. They are afraid that, if they take time out for etiquette, someone will snatch the next partner they want or worse, all of the good partners will pair up, leaving only the dregs.

I am not fond of dancing back-to-back tandas. After a tanda, I want to bask. At the very least, I like to get one lead out of my system before another one takes his place. For more than a year this worked quite well; I often enjoyed the space of several tandas between dances. Since I started wearing contact lenses, however, I am often waylaid before I even return to my table.

This can be simply explained: Without an escort one is assumed to be trolling.

Also, to be honest: If a lead whom I like charts an intercepting course, I do not initiate evasive maneuvers.

Also: Some leads are gratified by my choice to wear contacts. They interpret it as a courtesy I extend to their temples or as acquiescence to their advice. They’re right on the first count, and perhaps on the second, though I hate to admit to acquiescence to anything. Nevertheless, to be honest: If it had not been so often suggested, would I have made the move?

Also: I have become a better dancer.

Never mind the causes, the effect is singular. When I wear my contact lenses, I rarely sit out a tanda.

Then I tore one contact lens.

My Glasses, My Heart, Part 2.75

Sometimes you wish to speak publicly. That's etiquette.
Sometimes you wish to chat. That's courtesy.
Sometimes you wish to put your heads together and whisper.
Yikes! What is that?

My Glasses, My Heart Part 2.5

I have become a connoisseur of pockets. Andre favored dress shirts. Bill is a cowboy—pockets with snaps. Robert often wears something unusual in fabric and color and cut with a fine, roomy pocket.

There are many other pockets, I’m sure, but I have not made an acquaintance with them. I am not a pocket-hussy. I don’t remove my glasses for just any lead, and I won’t put them in just any pocket. One likes to maintain a sense of propriety.

Once I took off my glasses to dance with a stranger; he left me stranded on a huge, foreign dance floor, and that was that. Now I use my good sense.

When you go out on the town with a man for the first time, it’s smart to keep taxi cash in your pocket. When you go out on the dance floor with a lead you don’t know, it’s smart to make sure you can walk yourself off.

This week at the Turn I took my glasses off, thought better of it and jammed them back on as I joined a new lead on the floor. Smart move.

Other than with Andre, I never put my glasses in any of The Five pockets. The glasses-in-the-pocket thing is a touch common. The Five and I maintain an elegant formality that is its own kind of dazzling.

Andre is long gone from tango now, but he has left his mark in these lingering thoughts about etiquette and courtesy, the character and purpose of each.

Etiquette is good manners, a code of conduct conveying respect. In a society that reveres the casual and brisk, there is a tendency to be utilitarian in our dealings with one another. Etiquette requires us to slow down. It says: I see you, I am paying attention.

Courtesy is the expression of the care we take for one another. When Andre walked me back to the bar and handed me my glasses, he was doing more than etiquette demands; he was saying: I wish to do you a kindness.

It may seem as if etiquette is the lesser of the two, but that is not the case. Not at all.

Etiquette paves the way for social commerce. As a code of conduct, it has broad range; it can speak volumes or not at all. It preserves boundaries and conventions and roles. Etiquette serves us best in situations where these things are of primary importance.

Courtesy says, I like you. Do you like me? Mannered conduct gives way to improvisation. Courtesy lends itself to the personal, but don’t let that mislead you. Conventions relax but persist.

Etiquette serves us in ways that courtesy does not. When we wish to express warm personal regard and even affection from a neutral stance, etiquette serves.

The Five are the leads with whom I regularly dance. I like them and vice-versa; at milonga and practica we seek out one another. Four of The Five are involved in significant relationships. Propriety is of primary importance. Etiquette speaks volumes, and the word spreads all along our interlocking webs of social connection. When it serves in this way, etiquette is outwardly focused, a form of public speaking.

My Glasses, My Heart, Part 2

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. It’s the way to many a woman’s heart, too.

My heart, as you may imagine, is staunchly contrarian. Dinner, candy, midnight nibbles: All leave me cold.

This makes me a cheap date … but not an easy one. I am a sucker for courtesy. Trust me: Dinner and sweets are much easier plays.

I am not judgmental about this, nor hard to please. I enjoy the company of every well-meaning person, even rude jokers, and my own manners are not as nice as I’d like. But I am not talking about manners, rather awareness … thoughtfulness … a sense of being tuned-in … ah, there it is: connection.

I am easy to please, but hard to impress. Pity the man who takes interest in me.

Or in whom I take an interest.

* * *

Tango and glasses do not mix.

That is why I wish I didn’t wear glasses.

When I dance in the style I prefer, my forehead to his temple, my glasses are an occasional annoyance, in turns and other moves that require a reorientation of the head.

When a lead insists that I dance straight-on, we encounter a problem: The protruding corner of the frame of my glasses pokes him in the temple. This is uncomfortable for both of us, due to the Rule of Equal and Opposite Force: When you exert a force against something and that thing resists, you feel the resistance as a force pushing back.

Einstein said that, and/or Machiavelli.

If I hold my head just right, with a fair amount of effort I can mimic the temple-to-temple position while keeping my glasses clear of contact … until the lead makes an unexpected move and our heads bang together. This is like getting a whole dance worth of equal and opposite force in one blow.

Ouch!

This is the sort of thing that prompts a man of weak character to abandon a woman on the dance floor.

For a long time I removed my glasses to dance. I laid them on the table where I was sitting, relying on the lead to return me to my table at the end of the tanda. This is the etiquette of the dance, Nina explained in her followers’ classes.

Other teachers weren’t teaching that lesson, or the leads weren’t listening.

I started to warn all comers: Happy to dance with you, need you to walk me back to my table when we’re through.

Well, no. I didn’t warn all comers. Some required no etiquette lessons. Glenlivet. Stan. Tom. Andre. Four of The Five. Not bad!

Once, as Glenlivet was walking me back to my table, we passed a group just in time to hear a man say, “… but you have to walk her back to her table.”

I did not see who said it. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. Also, I was bedazzled by Glenlivet’s charm.

* * *

Andre raised the bar on spectacles etiquette.

At the Blue Ice, where we studied as beginners, there is a long bar along one edge of the dance floor. Couples always entered the dance floor at the corner of the bar. Andre began every dance the same way. He would take the glasses and lay them in an protected spot; after the tanda he would lead me back to the bar, pick up the glasses and hand them to me.

One day during class, far from the bar, Andre invited me to put my glasses in his shirt pocket. He held it open and I dropped them in.

Wow!

Here, please listen for the twittering of birds … sunshine and rainbows or whatever corny thing you like.

You’ve had moments like this. Who hasn’t? Everything that has happened is happening still. Let’s all take a moment to bask.

My Glasses, My Heart, Part 1.5

I can see about 2.25 inches (6 cm) beyond the end of my nose.

I've always wondered.

My Glasses, My Heart, Part 1

I wear glasses. I wish I didn't. Not because they're ugly, or inconvenient, or restrictive, which they are: You are always at the end of their tether. No matter how late it is, how tired or distracted or otherwise engaged you are, you can't take them off without making very specific note of where you set them down. Really. It's like parking your car at the airport.

I cannot see the bottom of a lake while I am swimming, nor the stars as I fall asleep under them. Walking in the rain is a bitch, as is coming in from the cold. Snuggling can be problematic (reference the tethering issue).

On the other hand ...

When I look at a Christmas tree with my natural vision, every tiny twinkle light diffuses into a cloud-ball of color, hovering disembodied against an undefined backdrop. This is heaven: lying on the sofa in a dark room, Christmas tree lit, music playing, glasses laid carefully aside.

What do I see when I'm swimming? I lie prone, my cheek resting on the surface as on a pillow. My line of sight is the horizon, the exact point where water touches air. Limited to what is immediately before me, I see this: The horizon is not a straight line, it is a negotiation; it shifts and flows to accommodate the motion of water. It bisects me.

Above the horizon the light is sharp as crystal. The shore is a long green smear, the blue-white plate of sky dissolves into the distance. The light imparts vigor. I am blind to anything smaller than a landscape. No matter, the light itself lives.

Below the horizon all is luminous. The water is infused, the water itself becomes light. On a bright day in clear water, light descends to the depths. You can follow it down. Sometimes I walk out as far as I can, wearing my glasses, look down to see the bottom. Then I walk back to shore, lay my glasses carefully aside, and swim out, blind. I am not in the dark, I am feeling my way in the light.

These are the two aspects of the horizon: enlivened and enlightened.

When I remove my glasses, there is no precision, no definition. Objects lose their independent identities; all melt, thaw, resolve. Shape and differentiation fade to abstractions. The loss of the particular undoes logic, language, thought. In the world of my natural vision, there are only impressions.

With my natural vision, I see the world as it is, without a manmade, distorting lens. Perhaps you are blinded by your vision. Go to the doctor; ask him to remove the lenses from your eyes. Then you will see: We live in a diaphanous world.

* * *

Lately I have been troubled by the problem of war, or rather, the impossibility of peace. Now here's a new thread: Perhaps our problem is clear vision.

How can we see peace when we see only the particular, the clear definition of this thing and that? Clear vision gives rise to specificity, and specificity to difference, and difference to war. The clarity of vision is at the root. we must become a little bit blind.

For purely pragmatic reasons, nearsightedness could give peace a big boost: If we were all banging blindly about, it would be very difficult to wage an effective war.

Vision determines action. when you see the world as a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you see the world as a bomb, everything looks like a target.

What if, looking at a bomb, your poorly tuned eyes registered a big, fluffy ball? What if the words of every religious text blurred into one dark smear on the page?