The Line of Dance Is a Circle

[New Year’s Eve: Two years to the day after starting this blog.]

Only connect.
Howard’s End, E.M. Forester


I had great plans for this year. Great plans!

This year would be the Year of Connection. What can be more tango than that?

All year long I touched on what it means to connect.

my hips
my muscles
the many myths of my one body

many teachers, disciplines, styles underlain by a continuous thread,
one teacher, Grisha

the Denver tango community, unbeknownst even to itself, one
larger than the sum of its contentious parts,
in context global and historic, immediate and ethereal

composers and singers, rhythm and tune, the bandaneon
Fresedo and Canaro and the Communist Pugliese
resolved in the beat of one lead’s heart

lovely Comme il Faut shoes duct-taped,
one prayer to hold them together until a new pair can be found

old wood and moguls, the floor of the Merc,
gossip and small talk, Kari's laugh

The Five: Glenlivet, Stan, Tom, Andrey, Mark
plus one: The Mathematician

The Man on the Wall
My Deep-Thinking Friend
each one of them one of a kind

Argentina, its soul

my family, sisters, brother, father, mother
their stories, the story we are making together

my solitude

my story

my one heart

Look to the right, read the section headed “Only Connect.” It’s a catalog.

I meant to run through the catalog. I meant to connect the dots. I had a plan, a sketchy outline. I meant to write like crazy through the last twelve weeks of the year.

I was right on track. I had created a story arc, I had set up the ending. All that remained was to gather it all together with BrillianceMeaningTruthBeautyLight.

In the face of such a task, there are only two things a writer can do: drink or lie.

This is memoir. Lying is out.

Here’s a true story:

Shortly after Barbara died, I asked her husband, as he was cleaning out her things, to send something of hers to me. It’s a little creepy, this drive we have, to hold onto the dead. In Victorian times, the survivors cut the hair of their loved ones and wove funeral wreaths. They were not rough mementoes, they were décor: sophisticated and intricate showpieces.

I didn’t want Barbara’s hair. I wanted a talisman (n., from the Greek consecration).

He sent a red sweater. I had one just like it. I had bought the sweaters a year before. Barbara would wear hers on the East Coast and I would wear mine in the Rocky Mountains. It didn’t turn out to be as woo-woo meaningful as I had hoped.

I stuck the sweater in a drawer. Next summer, when Keith and I went camping, I wore it. We were cozy around the campfire when a coal burst. A cinder landed on my shoulder and burned a hole the size of a silver dollar.

I tried to cauterize the hole. I tried to rejoin the threads. But you cannot keep a damaged knit from unraveling. With every move I made, the weave came more undone.

It hurt to watch the hole grow large, ragged. Soon I threw the sweater away. It was not a big moment; I had no emotional attachment.

Barbara once asked: Do you ever want it all to connect?

I do.

I live in solitude, not in isolation. I want it all to connect in ways that are unseen and mysterious and cosmic and in ways that are immediate and earthy. I don’t need a god’s master plan, I only wish to believe that when a thread is plucked, the whole web goes ping!

But.

It does not matter what I want. As the song goes: Life comes together and it comes apart.

Tonight as I practice with Glenlivet, I tell him all of this.

“So that’s it,” I say. “I’m going to end the blog by saying it’s all just a big, unraveled mess.”

We laugh, and then he stops laughing. An idea is forming, he is going to think it aloud. It takes but a second. He pronounces it with certainty:

“It does all connect,” he says. “In you.”

in my one heart
dancing