danceislove

Alighting at the main terminal in Orlando, I saw a skylit plaza up ahead and walked toward it. In the center was a fountain - a good potential meeting place, I thought. I opened my phone.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a young man, with the full lips and soft curls of a Greek god, a red sweater and camel-hair jacket over his broad chest and muscular arms.

It was my boyfriend.

He put those gorgeous lips to mine, then encircled me with his strong arms, pressing me to him for long breaths, seconds, minutes. The sunglasses hooked in the V-neck of my black sweater dug into my sternum.

“I parked kind of far away,” he said.

The summer we were nine, my best friend told me, “Imagine.  The boy you are going to marry someday is growing up like we are, right now.  You just don’t know where.”

“I never thought of that,” I said, marveling at her brilliance.

But she was wrong.

The man I would someday be married to for five years was almost grown by the time of my friend’s pronouncement.  And my real true love had not even been born yet.

Not that I have never dated more age-appropriate men.  Of course it is not quite fair to compare ex-boyfriends with the person with whom one is very much in love, but I have the idea that they fell into two categories.  Most were not passionate enough for me.  I tended to seek them out after a heartbreak.  Those in the other category - the passionate ones who broke my heart - did so, I realized, because for whatever reason they declined to fully open to me, to have a complete experience of loving someone.  Perhaps it was just me that they didn’t want to be completely open with, but the fact remains.

“They’re Yankees, baby,” Taj summarized patiently, when I was trying to describe to him why I loved him more than any one I ever had before.

There must be northern men capable of real love, but I no longer seem to be interested in finding out first hand.

I was sitting at the computer in the half-renovated restaurant which my gourmet grocery employer was using as an auxiliary office when I saw Taj at the glass doors.

I jumped down from behind the bar, turned the lock on the left-hand door and opened it.  He kissed me.  Then he said, “Are you gonna get in trouble?”

“It’s really slow today.”  I looked around for my boss and didn’t see her.  “But I’m supposed to stay until two.”

“OK.  I’ll be around.  Just come find me when you’re done.”

At 1:51 I got permission to leave, clocked out and then went in the employee bathroom to pull myself together.  I emerged at 2:12.

Taj wanted to take me out for a drink because his precipitous departure would occur in two days.  Nothing in D.C. had worked out for him the way he had hoped; relatedly, the family who had been graciously hosting him - and me, for a time - was caught up in such drama and intrigue that their discovery of the age difference between me and Taj was but a minor blip in the general scandal.

“Is this ok?” Taj asked, opening the door for me at a high-end-looking glass-and-chrome establishment in Old Town.

“Yes, great,” I said.  We sat at the bar.  I shook out my hair, loose and a little wild from having been bound up and under a cap since 7am.  He ordered Jack and I chose the Malbec.  As we talked about our respective days, the XM music kept nudging its way into my consciousness with nonsensical lyrics:  I made a break, I run out yesterday/ Try to find my mountain hideaway…

Songs that you memorize when you’re eleven sear themselves indelibly into your brain.  For the rest of your life, you can sing the first words after the musical introduction, at exactly the right time.  In that moment I didn’t want to pay attention to those hardwired lyrics to Duran Duran’s “Is There Something I Should Know,” because I had been singing them non-stop as a completely conscious human being the year Taj was only just born.  Somehow I felt that if I could remove my affiliation with 80’s music I could connect more fully with Taj; maybe I thought it meant he might not really leave, or I could go with him.  Neither were realistic.

He went to the bathroom while I tried to shut out Morrissey telling William that It Was Really Nothing.  I thought of the bank employee at Capital One who had recently assisted me in opening my checking account.  She was very chatty, asking me lots of questions since I had just moved to the area.  When I told her about my roommates she asked, “Are you all around the same age?”

“No,” I answered, looking at her quizzically.  “Not at all.”  I didn’t add that the gal who rents out the other two rooms is about 20 years older than me and the other gal is more than 10 years my junior.

Reading my general “why-would-you-ask-me-that-question” attitude, she backpedaled:  “Oh, if you’re living with, like, 20-year-olds, you know, they party all the time…”

“When I lived in Madrid my roommates were, like, 20-year-olds, and it was great.  There was always a party going on.”

Taj returned from the bathroom and I announced, “Seems to be 80’s Day at the bar,” loud enough for the bar gal to hear me and perhaps take the hint to change the station.

Fortunately the Malbec was delicious but I had to go outside and speak on the phone to my latest potential client.  This was for a gig doing some editing.  I came back inside and began to talk excitedly about it to Taj.

We wanted to go to my place and he didn’t have a lot of time, so I drank the wine too fast, and I had not really had lunch.  He helped me to the bus and we spent the rest of the afternoon in my bed.  It was sweet, but sad, like Romeo and Juliet used to say.

No more boys under 30. That was my mantra when I met Peter, a hobbyist lindy hopper.  He was 35.  How refreshing.  Shockingly handsome, consistently nice to me.  We did love each other for a while.  I finally decided to get what people called “a real job” and use my master’s degree and stop doing the stupid crazy artist thing.  I was too old to become a better dancer, remember?  I decided fix my money problems by handing over the whole thing to Peter when we got married.  He would be the financial manager and he wouldn’t let me continue to bleed.

My life working in human services drained me of the will to do anything but watch two episodes of Seinfeld at the end of the day.  It takes a very special kind of person to be a therapist and I am not that kind of person.  Especially when, after your master’s, you start at $19K a year and maybe move up to $29K after you earn your license.  I didn’t dance much.  Still I insisted on throwing lavish birthday parties and Peter let me.  Later I realized that he was almost as bad at money as I was.  He was a great rationalizer.  His weakness was buying electronics, booking trips to friends’ weddings and to visit his parents.  We lived beyond our means in a one-bedroom in Cambridge, then bought a Somerville condo at the height of the market.  My parents provided the $15,000 down payment as a gift.  Peter and I lost that and more when we divorced and sold four years later in 2008.

It might be that my return to dancing is what broke up our marriage, but I think an important part of our eventual dissolution was that neither one of us was being true to ourselves.  We didn’t realize it, but it kept us from being happy and respecting each other.

When we divorced, we didn’t divide up assets and money.  All we had to divide, really, was debt.  And it was staggering.

This might have been my rock-bottom.  I was a borrowing addict and now I had to stop.  I might have fought my way back too, making decent money with my private wedding dance lessons and lindy hop classes.  I’d been in Boston now quite a few years and had a good reputation as a teacher.  As a promoter I was branded a trouble-maker but people seemed to like my events anyway.

But then, that slightly younger man came back into my life.  Now seven years older since the last breakup, we fell almost effortlessly in love again.  I thought we were much more mature now, we knew what we wanted out of life.  I thought it was real love and I was ready to give up everything.  So I did.  I followed him to Spain, and he promptly broke up with me.

I lost a couple of friends back in Boston, too.  It was over money.  They believe I owe them rent.  It is a story I won’t go into here but you can read a bit about it on this post.

I also gave up my entire dance teaching business, my reliance over the years on the lovely Boston dancers who fed me.  I gave it all up for love.

Oh, my beloved Madrid.

Well, there I was in the hot Madrid sun, summer of 2009, brokenhearted and disoriented, without any credit to speak of (I had borrowed the last bit to help me make the move and get my English teaching certificate).

I went to a Spanish-English exchange in a bar, wearing a strapless black dress, my hair nicely waving in the dry heat.  The men flocked to talk with me, American girl.  “Where else have you traveled?” they demanded.  “What?! You haven’t been to Barcelona?  You must go!”

“Really?” I smiled, twirling my hair.  “Really, you think I should visit Barcelona, it’s very important?”

“Oh yes,” they cried.

“Wanna fund my trip?”

This shut them up pretty quickly.  Thank God, I had learned a little bit.

Madrid was good to me.  I found work, I found friends, and six days after being broken up with, I was sitting in the computer room at school when a man walked in, sat next to me, and began to slowly commandeer my full attention a scant moment after I was not giving anyone the time of day.  What gave him the idea to ask me if I liked blues music, and more astonishingly, how did such a young man know about the Allman Brothers?  Did he really just say he would make dinner for me, that he was good at cooking?

When he left the room to go off to the pool thought, I’m sure he’s that way with all the girls, he couldn’t possibly be interested in me.  I never could have predicted that he would vanquish the no boys under 30 edict, eight years after I’d sworn it.

It took a while.  Taj waited for me.  I wasn’t over the guy I’d moved there for.  Taj didn’t know that then, but he could sense that I needed time and he didn’t push me the way men usually push, charming as you are, you sweet men you.  He dropped me a note every once in a while, usually about a party at his place, or he’d call while I was out with friends and not leave a message.

My reaction to him was the opposite of what I was experiencing with the men I went on dates with here and there.  When casually mentioning Taj to one of my friends, or suddenly getting the idea to make peanut butter for him (good peanut butter being unavailable in Madrid markets) I felt relaxed, non-analytic.  Yet in his presence I became strangely nervous and shy.  Regarding the other guys: I analyzed, prepped, practiced, second-guessed, but in the actual date I usually wavered between pleasantly numb and fixedly pleasant, to avoid sounding defensive.

Taj and I traded music, he let me teach him to blues dance (which he was instantly good at), and one night late in November he took me to what would become our favorite blues bar.  I could tell he would kiss me that night and I wasn’t going to stop him.  This was a big deal because I had begun to wonder if I would ever fall in love again.  Finally at the late-night salsa club he kissed me suddenly, exquisitely, and I was hooked.

Halfway through this year he’d had to come back to the States.  So here I am in Virginia.  I’d saved just enough to make the transition.  It was the first time in my life I saved money.  English/ lindy hop teachers don’t make too much.  The students who took my workshop in Germany were wonderful, and the organizers worked so hard, and paid me handsomely, for which I am abundantly grateful.  It was enough to get me through my first month in the States.  Now I’ve just started working. I’ve done all this for love.

You could argue that I have not been smart.  I have had many opportunities and squandered every last one of them, searching for the chance to love someone and to love what I do.  You could make a very convincing case that what I am currently attempting - finding a literary agent to sell my book to a publisher, for example - is very difficult, and that I will suffer.  You may be right.  But some things never change.

I would like to allow myself the choice of love over fear, the permission to focus on joy rather than the avoidance of pain.  Almost everyone that I talk to disagrees with this approach to life, but doesn’t someone have to do the experiment?

As I approached the Germantown Transit Center a bus wheeled past and screeched to a halt, then began to discharge passengers.  I hurried forth in my flats, high heels swinging suspended from my shoulder in a blue cloth shopping bag Taj had given me to use.  When I reached the front of the bus I looked up.  It said, “EXPRESS 100.”  I didn’t know what that meant so I paused in the doorway.

“Does this bus go to Shady Grove by any chance?”

“Of course it does!” laughed the driver, a small, gravelly-voiced lady with very elaborate hair done in corkscrew shapes.

“Oh, good.”  I went up the stairs and slid two dollars, one at a time, into the money machine.

“You know that don’t give you change,” she warned.

I walked halfway down and chose a spot facing the aisle, grateful that I got a seat.  Onward to Virginia, not knowing quite what might happen next.

I know what I want, though, and I am persistent.  There is purity and comfort in that.   Who I am doesn’t have to do with where I’m from, or my family (sorry guys), or my alma mater or my age.  I’m an artist with an open, fragile heart and that’s about it.  Art reminds us of what it is to be human.  Therein lies my work.  I have to find a way to make money, too.  Someday I’ll do both in one type of activity:  writing.

A quote I saw recently at the end of a letter ran thus: “Start by doing what’s necessary, and then what’s possible, and pretty soon you are doing the impossible.”  Those words, attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, have amazing power to restore my hope and focus.

As the 100 Express sped along the highway toward the northwesternmost outpost of Washington, D.C.’s Metro Rail system, I wondered about blond BMW dude.  Was he on his way home, in his enviable windswept car, braced for another night of samba on the Bose system and a glass of whiskey in front of Facebook?  I’m sure there were other possibilities - friends for example - but my mind left it there.  Instead it turned to the subject of my own love, Taj, the American I met in Spain.  I’m fighting for our love.  Sometimes, I think that’s all I know how to do.  Well, maybe that and an acceptable swing out.  Not so bad at any age.

By 23, after completing a farm apprenticeship and a sentimental visit to the Bay Area, no longer under my parents’ thumb, I moved to Ithaca, NY, to be with my mathematician boyfriend who was a grad student at Cornell.  It was in this lovely small town that I, quite by accident, discovered the lindy hop.

Cascadilla Gorge

Previously, I had danced in college and loved it.  I had been as surprised as all my peers that modern dance was “an actual class!” meaning you could take it for the normal amount of semester credit, do homework (choreography), write papers (on books written by pioneer choreographers) and take tests (be evaluated on your development as an artist through class performances).  I luxuriated in 4 hours a week of technique, two of choreography and many hours of practice in between.  I began to understand the importance of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, and went alone to shows in Princeton and New York:  Mark Morris, Hubbard Street, Pilobolus, Paul Taylor, José Limon.  They changed me forever.  I still quote Doris Humphrey to my guy students when teaching them dips:  “The end is 40%.”

Nevertheless, at the time it did not occur to me that dancing could apply to my life personally in any legitimate way.

In Ithaca, though, freed by the new (to me) rhythms of 1930’s swing (Peggy Lee’s “Why Don’t You Do Right” was one of my first, best-loved songs) I began to feel true happiness.

But clearly, I was far too old to start training as a dancer!  And I must do something to help the world, because somehow I had decided that this was the only way I could be acceptable.  What about the farm school, my idealistic plan to take kids from the ghetto and heal them through working the earth?  Suddenly it seemed far too big an undertaking.  Not only did I lack any knowledge of how to get help for something like that, I didn’t think it was ok to ask for help.  Needing help meant I wasn’t good enough, which deep down I knew I wasn’t.

So, although I was grossing about $280 per week working as a teacher in a cooperative home school, I decided to get a master’s degree in Dance Movement Therapy.

Friends tried to stop me.  They said, shouldn’t you get a master’s in social work first?  Are you sure you are going to be able to get a job?  But I yelled at them all, thinking they were doubting me, like my parents always had.  My parents, strangely, were supportive.  They agreed to send me $600 per month to cover living expenses.  I would borrow tuition, about $70,000 or so.

More and more I got swept up in the world of lindy hop.  The peer pressure began.  I never realized it was peer pressure until much later.  “Steven Mitchell is teaching a workshop in Toronto.  You HAVE to go!  What?!  You’ve never been to a Steven Mitchell workshop?”

I had a credit line at the credit union and didn’t even think about using it.  These things should happen.  People should be together and learn to dance and we shouldn’t let mere money, or lack of it, get in the way.  I borrowed and borrowed, went to dances and events and, yes, learned a lot and fell in and out of love and all those wonderful lindy hop things.  All on credit.  Maybe I did this because I had felt starved for friendship in childhood, for the permission to pursue and develop it.  I hadn’t the motivation of love, and now here it was.

When I left for Boston and grad school I was happy.  That song by Sugar Ray, “Fly” was always on the radio, and I was about to turn 25.  The only problem with Boston though was that the guys didn’t know how to lindy hop the way I liked.  When an old roommate from Ithaca decided to get her master’s in the Boston area as well, we planned to teach the lindy hop together.

This was in the summer of 1998, which, some of you will be old enough to remember, coincided with the release of that most memorable of GAP ads, “Khakis Swing.”

It was pure luck.  We thought we’d have 10 students.  We had 75.  All from two or three fliers in the organic food co-op and most popular Cambridge cafe.  This was before most people used the internet, and in those days they paid attention to fliers.

I began making, for the first time in my life, money.  Which I spent immediately.  Dances, every night.  Dance shoes.  Black clothes.  Ballet classes, three times per week.  Weekend workshops.  Rental cars, plane tickets.  You HAVE to go to Dance Flurry!  Then Eddie and Eva in Cambridge!  Steven and Virginie in Rochester! San Francisco Swing Dance Festival with Paul and Sharon! Swing Out New Hampshire! American Lindy Hop Championships! On and on and on.

“Everyone” went to these things.  They never talked about money.  They were making it, or they had it, or they were saving it.  Or they were not gushing about the particular events they weren’t going to.  I was still gullible, still dying for love, and I had it when I was dancing.

One evening I was working on a paper at my flatmate’s computer and a very strange sensation came over me.  In a moment I realized its origin.  It was evening. I was home, instead of at a dance. This hardly ever happened.

Naturally I didn’t take school seriously at all.  Dancing and men were much more important.  I wrote about my (constantly aching) heart, the men who chased me, the ones I chased.  I was reckless, but I was letting all my feelings flow and something about that was good.  I got hurt.  A lot.  And I kept on spending money.

So, you know.  A few years went by.  I was living in a pretty nice flat with a long-ago ex-boyfriend, teaching dance for a living and doing ok.  My hotshot California partner and I were getting paid to travel to Atlanta, Austin, Albany, Ottowa, Sacramento.  Not huge scenes but this was still pretty exciting.

I was sort of dating a guy.  (Not the partner.)  We were in love.  It was complicated.  For a year and a half.  When he broke my heart for what seemed the final time, I got this crazy idea that my problem was dating younger men.  He was only a year younger, but since naturally women were more mature than men, dating anyone less than two years older than me meant trouble.  They were boys, and this was bullshit, and I was tired of it, and I was 28 already.  No more boys under 30!

One Saturday on the ride to Juilliard Pre College - there were many happy moments in my childhood, and some of these involved playing the radio in my dad’s car, watching myself in the side mirror as I sang along - my father informed me that I had to, I absolutely must, attend an Ivy League College.  Since I wouldn’t be going to Juilliard anymore.

I stopped singing and smiling.  “OK,” I said, probably tiredly.  Although the next day, Sunday, was my only day to sleep in, my dad would invariably ruin it by barging into my room, turning on the light and throwing back the curtains, saying in his accent, “Come on!  Get up!  You have a laaaaaaaaaaata work to do.”  Meaning homework and practicing.

And I couldn’t say, “Shut the hell up and get out of here, I’m trying to sleep,” which is what my sister would have said.

“If you don’t go to an Ivy League,” my father continued, in the car, “it’s not worth it.  We won’t pay for your college.”

“OK,” I repeated flatly.  “How about Cornell?”

“Cornell!  That’s not Ivy League!” my father thundered.

“Um, I think it is. Becky’s sister is going there, and -”

“No, no.  Harvard.  Yale.  Princeton.  Cornell!  Ha ha!”

I was quiet.  This was before the days of Google.  Later at home the argument developed into a huge row.  My brother chimed in, thinking we were discussing a popular New Jersey chain of ice cream stores.  “I wanna go to Carvel!” he whined, in a manner very appropriate to a four-year-old.

It was around the actual decision of college that I became the most memorably wounded.  I still have not forgiven my parents for this, even though I know they didn’t hurt me on purpose.  Maybe by writing about this I’ll be able to forgive them, and myself.

We visited Princeton in September of my senior year.  We went on the tour.  My parents told me I should apply.  “You don’t understand,” I told them.  “I won’t get in.”

“Just try,” my mother pleaded.  “It’s like my mother says, Ya, ya; nein nein.”  Yiddish for yes, yes; no, no.  Meaning that if they say yes, great.  If not, no harm done.  “And if you don’t want to go,” she added, “it’s ok.”

“What do you mean it’s ok?”

“You can go to college wherever you want, honey,” my mother said, stopping me on the clean college-town sidewalk and gazing up into my eyes.  “We want you to be happy.  That is the most important thing.  Your happiness.”

What?  I had never heard this from them.  I didn’t know how to be happy, only how to do things out of fear.  But this happiness thing sounded like a good idea.

“What if I don’t want to go to an Ivy League school?”

“That’s ok,” my father affirmed.

“You mean you will still pay for my college no matter where I go?”

They assured me that they would.

So I applied to Princeton since I probably wouldn’t get in, and I didn’t have to go anyway.  I applied to a few other Ivies (not Harvard or Yale), and Johns Hopkins, because once my mom heard I would major in biology, she gasped, “Oh, you could be a DOCTOR,” and so Johns Hopkins had special dispensation; my parents didn’t understand that first you had to be an undergrad before you went to med school.

My safeties were U Michigan and, of course Cal Berkeley.  My boyfriend was there.  We’d met on the high school newspaper staff; he was a year ahead of me.

Both U Mich and Berkeley had rolling admissions so I found out from them before the Ivies and Hopkins.  My parents even bought me a ticket to jet out to Berkeley in February of my high school senior year.  I had been dieting, rather successfully, from 115 to 110 pounds, and my bf thought I looked great in my acid-wash shorts (warm in the Bay area in February) and white Berkeley sweatshirt.  I half fell in love with his roommate, a lead guitarist with a bowl cut, but mostly I pitched head over heels for Berkeley and San Francisco, the vast blue skies, scrubby hills, endless flowers, red roofs, fantastic produce, colorful people, the veritable love in the air.  Who on this earth doesn’t become enchanted by all that?

I came home and announced my decision.

“Oh no,” my mom said.  “You can’t go to Berkeley.  Berkeley!  There are so many bad influences there!  Everybody does drugs!”

“But you said -”

“No.  You’re not going.”

I think my parents really wished to believe that they wanted me to be happy.  But when it came down to it, they thought it was much more important that I not suffer.  Also, they hated my boyfriend, because it was a relationship I had outside the family.  So to rub salt in my wound, they taunted, “You only want to go to Berkeley because Maaarrrrrty is there.”  They drew out his name, which wasn’t really Marty.  I knew deep in my shamed bones that doing something because I loved someone was absolutely the dumbest thing possible.

Countless times over the years I have looked back and kicked myself.  For a smart kid I was pretty damn stupid.  It didn’t occur to me to say, fuck you, I’m going wherever I want, I don’t need your money, I’m going to work first anyway.  That actually would have been awesome for me.  As you have already undoubtedly surmised, I hadn’t a clue about the world.  But just like AP Calculus, going to college at 17 was the only option.  Anything else meant nonexistence.

I got through Princeton.  I’m glad I went.  I had some good times there.  About halfway through I began to wake up, thanks to a paid internship ostensibly teaching science to inner-city kids in Trenton.  Once I started with that kind of thing I couldn’t stop.  I had to save those poor kids, their older sisters all getting knocked up at 13, the drug dealers on the corner.  I got all organic and hippie, stopped shaving my legs, thought I had no right to overconsume or buy into the beauty myth that Naomi Wolf so eloquently described.  I thought I should learn how to work on a farm and bring all the city kids to a farm school.

My parents thought I’d gone crazy.  When my savior tendencies began around the age of 19, my mother wept, “You’re still young and idealistic,” meaning that this was a disease I’d surely grow out of.  I guess maybe she was right, but it took a good long while.

Lately I’ve begun telling people that I was a child prodigy, because it makes them understand the basics and it also keeps them from gasping that I must play for them someday.  At this point I’ve spent many more years of my life not playing piano, but folks seem to understand  instinctively that child prodigies rarely grow up to do anything.  I wasn’t a prodigy, though.  I wasn’t good enough.

I was a pianist out of dire fear, and that is not as good motivation as love.  My parents did not put classical music on the stereo and rhapsodize over the gorgeousness of Chopin.  Instead they told me how lucky I was that I didn’t get beat up if I had a bad report from my piano teacher.  Fear was enough to make me pretty good, especially early in high school.  I won a few competitions and even played at the Garden State Arts Center, which now is the Core States Bank Amphitheater I think, something like that.

Regularly, I was called “lazy,” “stupid,” and “shithead,” mostly by my father.  Why?  Was a skipping school and doing drugs?  No.  I liked to read teen novels and write in my journal.  Also, occasionally I liked my friends to come over.  My mom hated that.  I had two friends.  Generally only one could come over; she was tolerated for short periods of time.  My dad couldn’t stand my talking on the phone.  We lived an hour away from Manhattan and you had to drive to buy milk or rent a video, and I longed for friendship.  I thought this was very stupid of me, to want people in my life other than my family.  It was what my parents seemed to think.  On many occasions during my adolescence my dad ripped the phone out of the wall and threw it across the room.

Unfortunately, I was not tough.  I was about a fragile as a wet Kleenex.  I don’t blame my parents anymore, not really; I blame the match.  I was a bad match for them.  A ridiculously sensitive kid brought up by war veterans.  This was not a good idea, but it happened anyway.  So I believed, thoroughly, what they seemed to think of me.

They wanted me to be a concert pianist, because I would be famous and have lots of money and be safe from the mean world.  They were always yelling at me to be careful because people were trying to take advantage of me.  I had no clue what they meant and later went on to let lots of people take advantage of me.  (Not sexually.  Emotionally and financially.)  See, my parents had the right idea.  They could see I was smart and sensitive and I was going to suffer, and they were trying to head that off.

Somehow, at 14 or 15, I drummed up the courage to inform my parents that I would not audition for Juilliard College Division.  I wanted to be more well-rounded, I told them.  Already I was learning to be quite the bullshit artist.  I could write formula 5-paragraph essays for my English teachers, A+ every time, passionately dissecting theme, plot, irony and synecdoche as though they really meant something to me in that context.  I did half-believe my own lies.

Anyway, my parents were surprisingly ok with my wish to attend a non-music university.  That was the thing I wish I’d figured out much earlier: that if I simply told my parents what I wanted, they might let me do it.  And I should have, because my sister was great at telling my parents what time it was.  They always relented.

I had such fear.  Maybe I’d been born with it.  I was gullible, believed everything.

My father said, “You have to pick your major, because you have to go to a college that has a good department in your major.”

“OK,” I said.

“Math or science,” he specified.  “Math.  Or science.”

It never occurred to me that I could study literature or creative writing because that would be like writing in my stupid diary.  In fact at that point in my life I already I understood that anything I naturally liked to do - read, write, have friends - was a very stupid thing.

Well, math was out.  I found it difficult and my grades weren’t up to par.  They weren’t bad, just not necessarily A’s.  Today - literally today - I wish I had studied business in high school.  At the time this was unheard of - like a “voc” class.  I wish I’d studied voc, too.  Cooking, woodshop.  What could be cooler?  No, the biggest problem in high school was the possibility of NOT taking Calculus senior year!  Oh no - if I didn’t take Calculus senior year that was almost like being dead.  There was a kind of hysteria, not just in my family but in the whole town.  Take Calculus.  Get 5’s on all your AP’s.  Have life full of olympic-sized pools, BMWs, dark green lawns and plump smiling babies.

No one told me that those BMW’s, pools and lawns (and maybe by association the babies, certainly the diamond engagement ring) - all had to do with business.  America runs on business, and all the high school teachers and parents could shove down our throats was the importance of math and science.

Important, too, to be sure.  Most of my boyfriends turned out to be mathematicians and scientists.  And naturally both subjects are closely tied to business.  And of course many Ph.D’s in physics get recruited by Wall Street; there’s a reason for that.  But anyway you get my point… seeing as how I am short of a Ph.D in physics, it would not be bad to have some business knowledge knocking around in my overstuffed wordy head.

I chose biology, because I liked it pretty well and got straight A’s in it.  In those days, biology was all about memorization, and I was good at that.  I didn’t realize that in college I’d have to go into the rainforest and count tree seedlings and this was supposed to mean something and I really had no clue what.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

To be continued

It would be abominably cliché to begin this post by saying that there probably comes a time in each of our lives when we look back and reflect, take stock of our individual histories.  But I don’t know how else to start, because that’s what’s happening to me.

I’ve just returned from spending over a year in Madrid, Spain.  I’m trying to begin a new life in a Virginia town just outside Washington, D.C.  I’m in a wonderful relationship and I have no money.

“Why not?” my boyfriend, Taj, asked me matter-of-factly, a couple of days ago.  “You don’t do anything.  You don’t really drink.  You don’t smoke.  You don’t gamble.”

Why indeed, the lack of money?  I mused today, while walking.  My usual short answer:  “people are irrational,” was not enough this time.  It’s a flip phrase I often use in an attempt to stop the tedious behavioral analyses so popular among the half-drunk discussing their non-present friends.

I wasn’t musing long when, as I paused to cross the parking lot entrance to a sprawling brick and glass office building, a boyishly grinning blond man in a black BMW convertible also paused, perpendicular to my path, and I took his hesitation as a go-ahead to maintain my stride.  If the next bus to Shady Grove Metro was coming in the next few minutes, I wanted to be on it.  The combination of Columbus Day and suburban bus schedules could mean an hour-long wait to my ticket out of Maryland if I arrived at the top of Century Blvd just too late.

BMW man called out after me.  “I’d offer you a ride but you look like you can walk for days.”

I turned and smiled.  “Thank you, and yes I can.”

“I hope you don’t mind if I watch.”

“No.  I’m a performer.”  I was just wearing a black sweater and black slacks as usual, but he didn’t know what was usual and he obviously liked something.  Guess I’ve still got it, I thought, swinging along.  It seemed the man might still be calling after me but I wasn’t worried about it.

He pulled up.  “I didn’t hear a no, so I thought I’d make sure.”

“I’m sorry?”  I said.

“Would you have lunch with me sometime?”

“Thank you, you are very nice, but I have a boyfriend.  Have a good evening.”

“You too,” he said, still rather happily, perhaps the happiness of having tried, of not having to wonder what might have been.  He drove off, wind in his yellow hair, the black car agleam with October sunshine.

No, I prefer to walk, and take the bus, and wait to see my love again, and wait longer until one of both of us makes some money.  True love, money.  Which is harder to come by?  Yes, today, in this bad economy.  I would wager (ha) that true love is still rarer than money.  But what do you think?  Am I just saying this to make myself feel better?  Since I’ve failed at both so flagrantly, but finally have found true love - for which I am daily officially grateful, in writing - do I just conveniently think that I have the better deal?  Which would I rather?  Love, love, love, love.  Naturally.  Not saying I have to choose, forever.

The shaking out of our last Euro coins to buy coffees or settle the bar tab was very romantic in Madrid, but here in America living on a shoestring is not nearly as much fun.  It means, for example, that where you lay your head is way outside the city.  Who lives here? I thought, as the metro rattled by stop after stop backgrounded by enormous apartment complexes, parking lots full of SUVs giving way to perfectly graded half-bumps of hills studded with evenly spaced, sickly birches.  Why does everywhere 5 miles and out of the city look the same, why these sinister office buildings like immense, striated cinder blocks?  What is the unholy point?  Live in a 1-bedroom, drive an SUV, go to work, be proficient in Microsoft Office?

People like their officemates, I thought.  People love their families.  They go to work to provide for the ones they love.  It’s all about love.

Still, I thought.  An important something seems missing.  I miss the glorious, intricate architecture in Madrid, like drippy sandcastles stretching toward the starless night, throwing their violet and yellow lights irresponsibly skyward.  Taj always said he didn’t like the curlicued structures as much as he liked the way their upper stories were lit up; I loved both.

Then I was in a small town in Germany and saw the stars.  “What are those?!” I gasped theatrically at my host, one of the committed lindy hop teachers and promoters I met while in that country.

We have to choose city lights or stars.  We don’t have to choose love or money, do we?

I have, though, sort of.  I think.  Let’s see.

Growing up, there was a lack of love in my life.  I don’t mean that I wasn’t loved.  My sister and I loved each other growing up but she hasn’t liked me for a while because to her I seemed to have forgotten our tender past, but that’s another story for another time.  My parents loved me fiercely, hugged me often, let us watch ABC Eyewitness News with them every night in the summer.  The four of us adored my brother, the youngest by a lot.

I was the oldest child, a situation I don’t recommend to anyone.  The starter kid.  There should be a not-real child, for the rehearsal.  “The first time never counts,” I once liked to say to my dance students.  “Even professional ballet dancers practice the combination a few times before the teacher evaluates them.  That’s what they call a mark.”  We should have that for child-rearing.  OK, we’re marking this one.  Don’t do it full-out.

In addition, my parents were immigrants, had been denied a lot of opportunities in their lives, and were struggling intensely, admirably, and yes, after a while successfully.  They wanted to spare their children all the suffering they had had to go through.  I liked to sing and dance, and I played my toy keyboard surprisingly well for a 4-year-old, so they sent me to music school, and there my childhood ended.  Or was put into a long suspension.

To be continued