When it is Friday night and all of your tango friends are at the Merc dancing and you are for the fifth day in a row bedridden with flu.
[When you are little kid who has made up the funniest pun in the world and nobody laughs, no matter how many times you repeat it, jumping up and down in frenzied excitement at what you have seen, peeking through a tear in the thick canvas tent, the word circus!, where words fly the trapeze and juggle and tumble out of tiny cars and make elephants balance on brightly colored balls, and ride bareback on ponies, shouting “Get it? Get it?”
When you are lying in your bedroll on a broad prairie beneath the indifferent firmament with a cold, dew-soaked dawn coming on, growing old.
When the week before Christmas your best friend, so frail she is nearly transparent in a stranger’s tattered, hand-me-down nightgown, climbs through a maze of filthy junk, the leavings of too many transient predecessors, in the unlit basement of a wreck of a house, calling in a starving, angelic voice that could still sing beautifully if only she could, calling for her lost kitten, when she says, to protect you from falling in the dark, “Stay back, you can't come with me.”]
When, making the best of the flu, snuggled in the dark, the cozy burden of double-knit afghan pinning your every curve and angle to down cushions, steaming cup close at hand, narrow light trained on your lap, you open a book
that breaches all your readerly/writerly walls, walks right up to the palace of your heart, with one confident finger reaches out and rings the bell. Every jaunty word sings vibrato, all of the palace doors fling themselves open, the jugglers and elephants and trapeze artists and bareback riders flood the square ... and it is all so peculiar you cannot think of one other person to share it with.
If the word circus came to town and nobody bought a ticket ...
Writers need readers.
Suddenly you are lonely, so lonely you must behave rashly, must set the book aside and shout into the void studded with nodes as the indifferent firmament is studded with stars:
Hey! Read this!
Whale Season, by N.M. Kelby.
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2 comments:
Okay, I'm reading.
You know what else will make you feel less lonely?
Lunch with friends and funkadelic holiday parties!
Just kidding. Have a Happy Holidays!
Dear Readers:
This is The Man: Shane, who got me into tango two years ago. You can thank or curse him as you please.
Yes, I missed our long-scheduled brunch and the funkadelic holiday party. Why take tango lessons and discover your hips if you can't treat them to a funkadelic holiday outing? Why have friends if you can't take time out from tango to enjoy them?
First weekend of the New Year, Shane, brunch. Next party, I'm there. Promise. Unless it conflicts with tango.. NO! Stop that! I'm there! I'm sure we can schedule around... I'm there!
I would like to remind you, however, my favorite lit-buddy and anarchist, that had you not quit tango, the community would be greatly enriched with a fabulous lead and a fascintaing person, and you and I would actually speak in person ... at last count, 5 nights a week.
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