"Wobble, Baby, Wobble"

If you're feeling shaky, maybe it's time to dance

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Photo by Diego Rosa on Unsplash

Without further ado, today’s pocket. This past week at the high school where I teach, we hosted a Welcome Back event, an hour and a half of face painting, dancing, volleyball playing festivities to remind our students and our future students, feeder schools were invited to, how joyous it can be to be part of a community. As teachers, we are assigned to a station for the evening, and we can state our preferences. This was not a hard choice for me. I had no desire to man the door all night, nor did I want to become a victim of the dunk tank, and my face painting skills are extremely limited and I wouldn’t subject another person to them, so I chose dancing. I’m not a great dancer, but I imagine that only makes kids more confident to join in. Some of the dances we do are in my muscle memory, like the macarena, which brings me back to my own high school days. If only kids still did the electric slide, then I would really show them. However, most of the dances are new, and I watch the leadership kids and the cheerleaders, attempting to follow their moves while trying not to step on the teacher standing next to me. Our kids have a special fondness for the waka waka, and we have done it so many times that I mostly have it down, but they also like to do another dance called the wobble. I definitely don’t have this dance down, but it doesn’t matter. I may be off kilter, but isn’t that what wobbling is all about, and with everyone trying to wobble around me, I somehow feel less conscious about my two left feet.

Back to school is a wobbly time really. One foot lingers in summer while one marches toward the school year. It’s a shaky business. A few weeks ago, when I had returned to work full time, but the students hadn’t arrived yet, I found myself feeling anxious. The time before something starts is often trickier than the thing that is starting.

That weekend before the students returned, I found myself rising early, feeling rested, grateful that rest and ease could still find me after a harried return to work. I sipped my tea on the porch and turned to Danusha Laméris’ Bonfire Opera, a small, gorgeous collection of poetry, hoping it might ground me, as poetry often does.

I requested Danusha’s book from the library, and it arrived with a little card that said it came all the way from Western Washington University’s Library. (It also said don’t misplace this card as the book cannot be returned without it, but that’s a story for another day.) Western is one of the colleges Anna is thinking about. Anna, bless her, wants to be a teacher, and their school of education is well established. Bellingham is a catch as far as cities go with its coastal mountain views and quirky downtown. Anna is starting to put her applications for colleges together. She doesn’t know yet where she’ll land next year. She has one foot in high school and one foot in the beyond. Her walk these days is a wobble.

The other day, she was scrolling through a batch of photos to see if she could find a senior picture that encapsulated her personality. As she did so, the lyrics to “Maria” from The Sound of Music played in my head. “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” Well, not those lyrics, but now that I’ve jogged your memory, you might recall the questions that come later in the song. “How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?” How can Anna possibly choose one picture that captures all that she is? “How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?” Dan showed her a pic he took a few years ago. She’s wearing a red BU hoodie her godparents gifted her, when college was coming but still in the distant horizon. “Too old,” she says. “I need something more current.” Thomas King in The Truth About Stories writes “that photographs are not records of moments but rather imaginative acts.” Anna had given this senior pic a considerable amount of thought. Always the creative, she wasn’t just trying to show who she’d been, she was trying to envision who she might become.

“I’m always forgetting, and remembering, and forgetting,” Danusha writes. I sat on the porch and reread these words as I waited for Anna to ready herself for hiking, trying to hush the voices in my head, the voice that worries she’ll sleep through her classes next year, the voice that wonders How she’ll manage without us? and then the scariest voice of all, that says she’ll manage just fine. Really, what I’m worried about is how we’ll manage. Anna isn’t just a moonbeam, she’s our moon. Many moons ago, we brought her home to our three-bedroom basement condo in Columbia Heights. At the time, I didn’t know how to take care of potted basil let alone a little life, but we loved her immensely, and we did our best.

I wait for her now, tired of waiting, and sad that I won’t always be waiting. Life is funny like that. “I’m always forgetting, and remembering, and forgetting.”

An old friend of mine and I recently connected. Our girls are both seniors in high school this year. They were friends when they were two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight… when we still lived on the East Coast. We were friends then too. She’s the one who took a cake decorating class and gave me the recipe for chocolate ganache cake, the one I used for years for the kids’ birthday parties, when Anna stood on tiptoes beside me, chocolate dotting her nose, in a blue gingham dress, a dress my mom bought her because she knew better than me the importance of marking the occasion. When my kids were little, I couldn’t imagine a time when they wouldn’t be little, Anna’s breath grazing my shoulder as she blew out her candles, but my mom knew. She had saved a little box of my party dresses.

My friend told me she just celebrated a milestone birthday, and she confessed she was feeling wobbly.

I love the word wobbly. If you have one foot in an old place and one foot in a new place, how can you possibly feel anything else?

I think about how I felt on the dance floor, and I wonder if my friend and I can find that calm and maybe even some joy as we wobble through the next phases of our lives. “Wobble, baby, wobble.” At the very least, we can do it together.

I’m going to close with Danusha’s poem “Stone” in case you too are seeking some solid ground. (Shout out to Karen for showing me how to format a poem on Substack.)

Stone 
by Danusha Laméris

And what am I doing here, in a yurt on the side of a hill
at the ragged edge of the tree line, sheltered by conifer and bay,
watching the wind lift, softly, the dry leaves of bamboo?
I lie on the floor and let the sun fall across my back,
as I have been for the past hour, listening to the distant traffic,
to the calls of birds I cannot name. Once, I had so much
I wanted to accomplish. Now, all I know is that I want
to get closer to it—to the rocky slope, the orange petals
of the nasturtium adorning the fence, the wind’s sudden breath.
Close enough that I can almost feel, at night, the slight pressure
of the stars against my skin. Isn’t this what the mystics meant
when they spoke of forsaking the world? Not to turn our backs to it,
only to its elaborate plots, its complicated pleasures—
in favor of the pine’s long shadow, the slow song of the grass.
I’m always forgetting, and remembering, and forgetting.
I want to leave something here in the rough dirt: a twig,
a small stone—perhaps this poem—a reminder to begin,
again, by listening carefully with the body’s rapt attention
—remember? To this, to this.

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