Dancing Grandma

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room. ~Kurt Vonnegut

I can't tell you how much this picture reminds me of my own childhood. There is my Aidan dancing with his grandma, but rewind the clock thirty years and that would have been me and my mom. I still blame my mom for my inability to master social dance as an adult because, although she taught me the jitterbug, the chachacha and the waltz, I was always the "male" to her female. When John and I took a short tango class it was incredibly frustrating because I kept stepping off with the wrong foot, not to mention I was always taking the lead. My grown-up problems notwithstanding, I loved dancing with my mom. She had a song for everything and she would sweep you up in her arms and twirl you around the kitchen while she sang. Now, watching her dance with my two boys, I see that she obviously just can't help but dance. What has been so neat to watch is how her complete lack of self consciousness frees up Aidan to find his dancing feet. And find it he does. We found him doing soft shoe with a cane the other day! What in the world? I hope the confidence he gains from letting his hair down with my mom stays with him for a lifetime.

We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive... and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. ~D.H. Lawrence