She dances with her hands

In which our Hero is youtubing across the Rio Grande

When she was a knee-high child, my Mouse used to take cultural dancing lessons. Sometimes, on the too-rare occasions I was there to visit, I’d get to see her coming to or from her classes, bedecked in ancestral formal styles, a 6-year-old in a foreign pageant. She was taking lessons, and sometimes her parents or my parents would make her dance for us. I didn’t really get the dances because they’re not at all the western styles that I’m used to, but it was always charming to me to watch her sway and bob and gesture. (With her tiny sister emulating her because she’s a big girl who can sway and jump and spin too)

Dancing is one of my weak spots. My inability to dance is a failure, to me, in my desire to live up to the definition of a capital-M Man that I believe I should be. Equally troubling, to me, is that when I watch dancing, I generally struggle to connect the rhythm of the music which I do understand and feel to the rhythm of the dancers who are often moving. I know intellectually that they’re moving to the music, that the actual response to the beat doesn’t at all need to be a change of direction or something so unsubtle. I know that there are syncopations and changes of stance and balance that I cannot see but that are happening with the same rhythm as the music. But knowing it’s there doesn’t change the fact that I don’t see it. Not being able to see the relationship to the music leaves me feeling lost and confused.

I should say that truthfully, it’s not that I can’t actually dance. I can. By myself, or with little kids who are serene in our mutual ungainliness. Yet I think of watching the bridal party dancing and turning to find my mother spinning along with them beside her table and I am so jealous of her heart. It’s not that she lacks for pride, but her pride is for important things and not for keeping her from meowing at children or dancing at weddings. Me, I shut down at that event, hard. Stood at parade rest against one of the dark walls of the hall and just waited.

Last year or so, I got to see Mouse perform at a competition, as part of a university fielded cultural team. I’m not big into what would be my “native” music, making me a rare exception in our large family, but it was a pleasure to watch her perform. This morning, I found an email from her that started with, “I don’t know if you want to see this” and ending with a link a Youtube video of her performance of a hip-hop dance number for her department talent show. Idiot. She *should* know if I wanted to see it, and she knew enough to think of sending it despite the proviso.

I don’t know that it was a performance that would have got her on Dances with Stars with Talent or somesuch, but I can tell you I loved it. I loved watching her solo, I loved the energy and motion, and it was fun to watch her crowd encourage her.

You either know the double vision that drives this or you don’t. Me, I watched a 22-year-old dancing in sweats and the 6-year-old dancing in her too-big headdress and I feel such a joy. She was self-deprecating and maybe diffident. But she was also confident and certain in her dance. She was somewhere she chose to be, doing what she chose to be doing. I could tell you that I was seeing the child, or the woman, or the one within the other. It’d be better poetry and it’s not false. But the truth is just that one of my favourite people was just being herself and the warm pleasure of it made me smile all day.