Month: February 2015

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Shall We Dance?

Missy’s finger unerringly found Feb. 27 on the calendar. Then her hand went to her collar, tugging it up and out at an angle – her signal for getting dressed up.

“I want to go,” she said firmly.

This one didn’t require an expert in Missy Charades to figure out. Once again, we would be off to the prom.

The prom, in this case, is the “Shine” dance for the disabled, currently held every other year at Flatirons Community Church in Lafayette. It’s a huge night in every sense, inviting hundreds of people to don their best clothes and then eat, play games and – of course – dance until the floor wears out.

For Missy, this is an experience just short of heaven. After all, it combines some of her favorite things in the world. It’s peoplewatching on a massive scale. It’s dressing up for your friends (and especially, in the case of Missy the Flirt, for the guys who can be greeted with a shy smile and a “Hi …”) It’s music cranked up past 11 and freedom to move with all the energy and enthusiasm you can muster.

And this year, it’s something else as well. By some odd coincidence of the calendar, Shine falls on my birthday this year.

That couldn’t be more appropriate. Because being with Missy these last four years and seeing the world through her eyes has been a gift beyond compare, for both me and my wife Heather.

Better still – to see how many people can truly see her.  That’s not always a given for the developmentally disabled.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: We have a gift of invisibility that would put J.R.R. Tolkien’s magic ring to shame. But it’s almost never used on ourselves. Instead, we grant the “gift” to anyone whose presence is too uncomfortable for us to bear.

That could be the disabled. It could be the homeless. It could be anyone we don’t know how to approach – or that we fear might approach us, as though misfortune were somehow contagious.

Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe it’s too strong a reminder that all our gifts are temporary, from the money in our banks to the thoughts in our heads. That at any moment, something could happen that resets our entire existence.

It’s a scary thought to look in the face. No one could deny that. But when it keeps us from looking others in the face as well, it’s gone too far.

Those others look back. They know. And they understand more than you would ever guess.

Certainly Missy does.

And thankfully, blessedly, she’s been lucky enough to be surrounded by people that understand her.  Friends and relatives and neighbors who know the balance needed, how to make accommodations without treating her like a pet or a doll. Because of that, she has a life – and a social calendar! – that still makes me blink.

Bowling. Softball. Swimming. Trips downtown. Always among friends, always with someone who gets a look of recognition and a brilliant smile in return.

I count myself lucky to get a lot of those looks.  And to truly see the spirited, mischievous person behind those dancing green eyes.

And when that means escorting her on her big night – well, strike up the band and never mind the crowds.

Our partner’s ready.

It’s time to dance.

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Inner Space

I’ll admit it. Cleaning our closets can be a bit of an adventure. It’s like an archaeological dig with clothing mixed in, where anything can pop up and often does. Forgotten games. Battered sneakers. Barely-legible notebooks that detail either the next great bestseller or last year’s Oscar winners.

I haven’t found any cameras from the moon landing, though. There, as in so many other ways, Neil Armstrong was in a class by himself.

In case you missed it – maybe your chores took a while, too – it seems that Armstrong’s widow Carol found an old bag while doing some closet-cleaning of her own. Inside were about 20 small pieces of gear that had gone to the moon with Armstrong. A mirror. Some tethers. An emergency wrench. And, yes, the camera used to record the Eagle’s final approach to the landing site.

Hey, some people take pens home from the office, right?

Now I know that to some folks, this probably sounds like an episode of Hoarders: The Final Frontier. But I can sympathize. It’s hard not to hang on to the small and not-so-small things that mark a memory.

In one of my own closets is an oversized map, one that would probably dominate any wall I tried to put it up on. The map depicts the after-effects of the 2013 flood, laying out the needed repairs in point-by-point detail. I used it for a story long ago, then put it away, planning to frame it someday.

These days, it’s become a frame, holding the larger pictures of my mind.

Other moments lie similarly “archived” from a lifetime of journalism and theatre. An aluminum can from an Emporia, Kan. factory that was never built. A spice jar of dry soil from a Garden City, Kan. “dirt collector” I interviewed. A sheaf of parodies, written for theatre cast parties so we could all laugh at our trials and triumphs.

Sure, it’s easy to accumulate stuff. I do it without even trying. (Just ask Heather.) But these are the things that go beyond mere stuff, the pieces that become memory in a tangible form. Where simply holding them and looking at them can bring back a moment, an event, a face.

You’ve got one somewhere. We all do. Maybe more than one.

And each one is the doorway to a journey of our own. Inward, not outward. Through time, not space.

But in that moment of rediscovery after a long absence, it can feel like the Eagle landing all over again.

It gives me a little comfort to know that Armstrong was the same way. Even in this cynical day and age, there’s still the temptation to lionize our heroes, to paper over the cracks and sand off the rough edges. It’s an unfortunate distancing, since it robs us of a certain kinship, a knowledge that, under different circumstances, it might have been any of us up there.

Well, probably not me. Not without some major improvements to my sense of direction. (“Houston, the Eagle has landed … somewhere.”) But you get the idea.

He was human. He gathered a few mementos in a bag, passed it off to NASA as “odds and ends” –you know, just keeping the clutter down – and took it home as a keepsake.

Which he then threw in the back of a closet and left for his wife to find. That, too, is very human.

Because of that, we’ve gained something neat. A few small artifacts. A chuckle at people being people. Maybe even a sense of wonder at how an ordinary moment can become unforgettable with just one forgotten bag.

And of course, the best closet-preservation excuse ever.

“I swear, honey, the Smithsonian’s going to want that bag someday. Look, I’ll take care of it later, all right?”

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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Nonsense and Nonsense Ability

The weekly faceoff between me and my column had just begun. As usual, the battle was closely matched.

“So honey,” I called out to my wife Heather, “what should I write about this week?”

No hesitation.

“Turnips!” she called out.

I laughed, loud and long. After 16 years of marriage, I really should have known better.

The turnips are a running gag that began long before I met Heather. She started making that wisecrack in high school, though she’s no longer clear on why. It may have been due to a random episode of Blackadder or her love of medieval history, where turnips may appear on any random page. It may have even started with her love of  the “Little House on the Prairie” books, which include the deathless words “Carrie loved to eat a raw turnip.”

“I want that tattooed,” she joked. At least, I think she’s joking. With root vegetables, one can never be too sure.

Wherever it came from, it’s been here to stay. Turnips have sneaked onto grocery lists, into text messages and amidst quiet moments in otherwise ordinary conversations. One time, I even called her bluff and brought some home from the store after a grocery run. Heather was surprised, amused and a little perplexed.

In roughly 20 years of turnip jokes, you see, she had never actually used one in a meal.

“I should have had them laminated,” she said.

Weird? You haven’t known us long enough. While turnips may produce (har-har) our best punchlines, it’s far from our only bit of mild insanity. There’s the mandatory sound effect when someone says they’ll be “back like a flash” (psheewwww!), or the back-and-forth razzing about the romantic qualities of Bob Dylan, or singing the names of Heather’s medical conditions. (Yes, if you ever want to enliven the Mozart Requiem, just start singing along with “AN-ky-LOS-ing … SPON-dy-LIT-is!”)

It’s ridiculous. Even silly. And I think it’s why we’ve survived as long as we have.

A lot of things get promised when you enter a marriage: for better or worse, for richer or poorer, for Buffs or Rams, and so on. But I really think that somewhere in the wedding vows needs to be a promise to love each other “in sense and in nonsense.”

Yes, you want to take each other seriously. This is your partner, your love and your best friend, after all. But marriage throws a lot at you, from the life-and-death to the utterly mundane. It’s easy to drown and simply react to the next thing until you’re not one couple, you’re two people with Important Things that all need to be done Right Now.

Silliness is a way of taking the moment back.

It means stepping back and turning life cockeyed for a second, for no other purpose than a moment’s amusement.

It means calling on old memories of odd moments, because the best gags have deep roots.

And it means showing your partner that you still care. That you can reach outside yourself and spend an instant to make them smile, speaking in a language that only the two of you share.

The words may be ridiculous. But getting silly is serious business. “A laugh can be a very powerful thing,” Roger Rabbit once said – and really, if you can’t trust a cartoon rabbit, who can you trust?

OK, maybe that was a bit much even for me. Time to ground myself. To focus. To concentrate on weighty matters and serious things.

Things like … turnips.

Thanks, honey. That’s another one I owe you.