Valentine's Day Now At Thanksgiving Day 2011

This is my February column for Valentine’s Day even though this is now almost Thanksgiving 2011. Some months, it is hard to find an interesting topic to write about. February is the month of love, Valentine’s Day. The first Valentine’s Day that I was going with my husband occurred only four months after we had met. I did not expect much and I did not get much. He gave me a five pound box of chocolates and I was so thrilled that I did not open it up for two months. I let it sit on my bureau dresser and kept looking at it all the time.  Since this is a column on love, I decided not to wait to have it published till Valentine’s Day 2012. Love is a good topic any time of the year. Dad was yearning for a piece of the chocolate candies in the box and as much as I was a giving person and always was buying things for Mom and Dad since they did not have a lot of money in those days of  1958, I still would not let him have a piece and disturb the beautiful box. Instead, I went to the candy store and bought him a smaller version of chocolate candy so his yearning would cease.

I loved the heart shaped red box with the bow on it and the smell of the delicious chocolates. The box could have been empty and I would have still loved it for the thought and all the things I hoped would come true from this first offering. The events did come through and we married two years later. Now it is fifty-one years later from that first box of Valentine candy.

Many dancers feel great anticipation after starting on their first lesson. We started on November 2, 1977 and after we went down in the elevator of the dance studio, I had this premonition that tonight was the beginning of a new plateau in our lives. So it was and it evolved into weekly dance lessons, competitions for me and Saturday night social dances at the studio where we took these lessons. The next day after the first lesson, we rode down to a music store in a small mall and bought about six records, those big ones that were used in those days. They were Arthur Murray recordings for ballroom dance. We would go down to our family room in the basement and roll up the rug and try to remember what we had learned the previous night. We wanted to become good dancers and we knew that practice surely made us closer to perfect. We took notes as the teacher gave us instructions and tried to decipher what he had said the previous evening. I even bought a small tape recorder and began to tape in audio mode the whole lesson to help us remember his teachings.

Those were exciting moments in my life, the beginning of a dream that I always wanted to be a ballroom dancer. Now I see advertisements on the television that hurray ballroom dancing is back. Back from where I say? It never left, we knew it never disappeared; we knew it was alive and well. It seems the general public thinks that ballroom has reinvented itself with the program Dancing With the Stars. Ballroom never left; perhaps it was quieter because the show was not on the television. It has stayed and we dancers know that it continued on and we with it.

Many email me that ballroom dancing has influenced their life to the point that it is a necessary need they have to do it, spend money on it and enjoy it. Even some dancers who now are unable to go out and dance due to some physical ailments or problems with their shoulders or knees still go to dances and sit around talking to other dancers and use it as a social tool even though they cannot really dance a lot there that day or evening. They feel that just being there in the dance environment is cause enough to dress up, pay and if they can only dance one or two dances, they have accomplished and continue on their dream. They may not be able to cha-cha the way they use to years ago, but they can still enjoy the music and the beat and listening to the music is also therapy to their hearts and ears. There was a couple that came to the dance studio named Neil and Dottie. They are both deceased now, but Dottie had some back problems and could not dance much anymore. So they came and Neil would go and dance with some of the single ladies and Dottie would get pleasure watching him and the other dancers dance. She would socialize with the ladies and men and had a good time just being there at the beautiful studio.

People seem to think that this is something new and that the folks who were dancing quietly and not on shows and who had not called attention to themselves did not exist. They think this, because we silently went about our dancing hobby and the only applause that existed for us was the clapping we gave to our being by becoming so happy doing this thing called ballroom dance.. We did not need any television shows to promote it, we did not need advertisements to herald this, and we did not need thirty hours of practice and learning to excel in this as the stars of these shows do. The hype all about dancing seems to appeal to new dancers who thought they could not do this and now have hope that maybe they can.

The Valentine heart box of candy when opened consisted of about twenty different kinds of shades of chocolate. So is the box called dancing when opened. There are many varieties of dancing and like the chocolate may appeal to one person and not the other person. The interesting thing is like the box of chocolates, dancing is sweet and delicious and we do not know what to expect when we bite into a piece that looks a bit like something we have not discovered before this moment. We can try it and if we do not enjoy it, we put it aside or in the case of candy, we throw it away. We cannot destroy something in dancing by tossing it aside, but we can save it for later or for never or for when we are more ready to ‘taste’ it and savor it.

Many readers write about their first experience taking that initial lesson. They have fear, they have anticipation of something great, they have feelings intensified by the unknown and lastly they have hope. Hope that they will excel in this at some point and that they will eventually view it as a hobby of delight and a hour of fun and knowledge. That is exactly what I imagined after the first lesson with our coach Laurence E. Miller. Larry was a young man about twenty years or so younger in age from us. That did not matter. He had the tools we wanted and he gave us the love of dancing that we still adhere to. He encouraged us and complimented us and gave us the hope that we could become great. I know I became great, greater in my mind of who I was about to become and greater with exercise and even greater with my ego. Great is a good feeling whether you are forty-three or seventy-three.

My best friend just passed away last week. She and I met when I was eighteen and she was twenty-three. She was my hairdresser, now called hair stylists and she and I were friends from that first day on until she passed away last week on November 2nd 2011. We shared our lives and talked on the phone often in these senior years about our children, our homes, ourselves, our marriage, and our grandchildren.

She admired me because in my senior years and before then, I danced, won trophies in competitions and I wrote articles in magazines and online about it all. I admired her because she made jewelry and ceramic pieces and was very art inspired. In the last years, we never saw each other, but we conversed via the phone and through the mail. She had no computer and never wanted one and I would send her pictures of my grandchildren and copies of articles I wrote, through the old fashioned way of postal service. She enjoyed reading them and viewing the pictures of the young grandchildren.

We told each other, one afternoon a few months ago, something we had never verbalized. We told each other that we loved one another. Though through the mail, she always signed her cards and notes to me “with love, hugs and peace.” I signed mine to her” love from both of us.” It need not be Valentine’s Day to speak of love with family or friends. I gave a eulogy at her memorial gathering last Sunday at a funeral home in Reisterstown. I recalled things from our dual pasts and incidents that had happened to meld us as dear and devoted friends. She would have loved hearing and or reading it.Her name was Virginia Louise Woerner and she lived in Randallstown and I live in Pikesville. She loved shopping in Cockeysville and so do I.

I have always been grateful to Laurence because without his understanding in his young years, he helped a couple in their forties to feel that forty was young to begin to learn to dance. The learning is easy; it is the continuing on and reaching for the stars. So Dancing with the Stars may be a popular program, but like my Valentine box of candy way back in 1958 given by a young man to the young lady he was starting to court as they called it then, so our assorted dancing box was full of enticing tastes of dancing. I am glad that I opened it up and did not let it sit there, that is my dancing and not my candy.

When we bought our first little doggie, we named her Candy because she was white and fluffy like a cotton candy on a stick you get at a carnival and like the box of unopened chocolates. Our second doggie many years later was named Rhumba and I need not explain why other than to say she moved her hips like she was doing that dance.

So go and open up that Valentine box of imaginary candy and think of it as a container of ballroom dancing opportunities. Sweet, delicious, delightful and enticing. The most important part is that it is better than the candy because it will not stick to your hips, it will make your hips move and heart feel happy. Go rhumba or cha-cha or waltz. Whatever you accomplish for those four minutes will make your life sweeter and best of all no calories used up. In fact, calories will disappear as you dance your way to a sweeter life and like my friend Virginia Woerner and her friend Elita Clayman, tell someone you love them, do not wait until Valentine’s Day 2012, do it now right around Thanksgiving 2011 which is arriving soon. Tell them you care about them, about their work or hobbies and most of all open that box of sweet happenings early, do not save them, enjoy them whether they are events, people, things or life. Savor them now, do not leave the box unopened, open it and be happy what you will accomplish.

The opening will be a revelation that you can enjoy in the present. It will be a present to yourself and your acquaintances. Dad who will be gone forty-seven years this November 10th, 2011 always said “today is great, tomorrow will be greater and the future will be the greatest.” I use to think that quite a lovely expression; I no longer do. We cannot always live with the adage of the future being the greatest. We have to live in the now sometimes. Dad passed away never getting to do some of the things he wanted because of tight finances and always applying the adage of the future to his life. He never got to travel hardly any place, because he was waiting I guess, for his finances to improve. When he died, Mom did some of the things they never did or waited to do. She traveled to many countries and went on a cruise. So she accomplished what he waited for.

Open up your box of desires as soon as you can. Do not wait for the Valentine candy; enjoy it now and on Thanksgiving which is coming soon, be thankful if you can have the ‘sweets’ sooner than later.