Back to the Twins. Two years ago, my beautiful friend Kate and I were taking multiple lindy hop classes at Century Ballroom in Capitol Hill. It was a tough time for us both. She was getting a divorce and I was dealing with my mom’s dementia, which included getting my mom into a care facility, selling her condo, and taking over her finances. Lindy hop was a welcome relief– dancing, drinking, and getting a break from depressing realities. The classes we took were fairly large, around 20 couples made up of leads (usually, but not always, men) and followers (usually, but not always, women) and we rotated partners every minute or so. It was hard to remember the leads’ names, especially when trying to learn a new dance step and not kick anyone in the shins. Kate and I came up with nicknames for people along with the help of the female Twin, and those names often stuck long after we got a grip on their real names.
Kate and I befriended the Twins, who aren’t twins but are siblings who are 3 years apart in age and about a foot apart in height, and both really good dancers. We called them the Twins because they seemed to share that special bond of womb-mates; their obvious affection and consideration for each other made them a pleasure to be around–they both utterly charmed me. They had their own language and slightly subversive way of looking at the world.
Eventually their real names materialized as Tom and Emily, and Emily morphed into Smart Emily when another Emily, AKA Skinny Emily, came onto to the scene despite the fact Smart Emily is not fat and Skinny Emily is not dumb. It’s just that Smart Emily is extra smart and Skinny Emily is really extra skinny, so the pointy parts about their personality/appearance are what stick as their names.
Tom was an army man and an elegant lead who would also offer to walk me to my car after a night of dancing. Capitol Hill could get pretty skanky around midnight and it was nice to have an escort. He was so self-deprecating that I only found out later that he was a West Point grad. Later, my husband, Oliver, met him and said that he was a really smart guy. Oliver rarely says that about anyone, and Oliver is a really smart guy. Once, after we’d all had a dance class together, Tom put on a knit cap before we all went out to drink. I told him he looked like a cat burglar, and he said, “Well, I do like pussy.” All of this only endeared him to me even more.
So Kate, Smart Emily and I dubbed leads Sir Stomps A Lot, Harry Potter, Vlad the Impaler, and other, less socially acceptable names. Sir Stomps A Lot unsurprisingly hit the ground with a lead foot, Harry Potter looked a lot like a blond Daniel Radcliffe, and Vlad the Impaler had a deep widow’s peak and dark coloring. That Fall, Kate and I danced and often drank and to excess. Kate and I had some epic hangovers and now look back on that time with a sense of nostalgia mixed with disbelief. What the hell were we thinking? Two women in our forties having way too much fun pretending shit wasn’t hitting the fan right left and center in our real lives.
That Fall marked the beginning of what I now think of as my Winter of Discontent. I hated having to transition my mom into assisted living. I told her she was just going to try it out for a few weeks knowing full well that there was no going back to independent living for her and that this was one of her worst nightmares. When the movers came to take her furniture, they found stashes of things that she had said were stolen—a common occurrence among people with dementia. They hide things like jewelry, credit cards, and cash then forget where they hid them and that they even hid them in the first place. My mom was convinced that people were breaking into her condo every night and would drift over to my house in the evenings. This anxiety around sunset is a typical among people with dementia, called “sundowners syndrome.” She called the police a few times and filled out robbery reports. I remember being suspicious about the alleged robberies when her details didn’t add up—she’d say that she locked herself in the bathroom and that they banged on the walls and scratched at the doors, but there were no marks anywhere in her condo. I stayed at her condo a few nights, but couldn’t get any sleep because one of her boyfriends would show up at midnight and talk loudly for hours. It was nightmarish.
After she moved into assisted care, I cleaned out her condo and found a wallet stuffed with cash behind books in her bookshelves. I had to get all of her furniture out of the condo, and the movers very kindly gave me a small pouch filled with gold jewelry that she had squished behind her headboard. Though all those events were distressing, the thing that really got to me was finding a box of love letters from one of her old boyfriends. He died years ago and she probably couldn’t even remember his name. I didn’t know what to do with the letters, wasn’t tempted to read them, and ultimately recycled them. It really creeped me out—how much crap are we all leave behind that will be meaningless to the ones left behind, and yet those left behind still have to do something with it? It made me want to go through all my stuff and dump it all. I don’t want anyone connected to me to have to do what I did for my mom.
Years ago my college roommate made me promise that if she dies first I will go through all her shit and dispose of it appropriately. I didn’t get her request at the time, but now I do. It’s nice when you come across your great-grandmother’s love letters to your great-grandfather, but what do you do when you come across her letters to a different lover that has no connection to her descendants? Reading those letters seems like eavesdropping, whereas the letters to great-grandpa are heartening bits of family history, proof that all is right in the world and fated to be.
Dancing has the power to let me disappear into a flow state and release all of the burdens and anxieties of real life. Oddly, it has much the same effect on me as solving chemistry problems. I’m glad to have both of them in my life.
Successive Approximation 