I overheard a conversation some time ago wherein a mother was talking about a certain medical problem to which her family was prone, for which the doctors had prescribed regular amounts of jumping. When I heard that, I jumped into the conversation and asked the obvious questions about why someone might 'need' to jump. The answer I got intrigued me. She said that there was a certain gland in the body activated only by the act of jumping. When that gland malfunctions, due to the lack of that particular movement, there are certain dangerous results. Now, this is not a medical article so I'm not going to spend the next few paragraphs telling you about the symptoms of this peculiar disease. But I am going to take this jumping thing around the block.
From the time I was old enough to walk I was going to a dance class. Ballet, tap dance, tumbling, clogging; I danced regularly in a classroom setting. But besides that, I lived among people who for any pretext whatever would host a dance. This means that whenever there was a wedding, birthday, anniversary, holiday or just an empty Friday night the whole town would get together and dance. Your partners were everyone from five to ninety-five. It was not uncommon to dance with three generations of one family in the same hour. I learned how to dance from my dad. He didn't dance fancy, but he danced well and you had to have just the right hop,step, kick in order to keep up. I remember seeing him dance with his mother and thinking how beautiful it looked.
I'm happy to say that our family never suffered from the interesting illness I have mentioned above. We were always hopping, dancing and jumping. The family I mentioned was given a small trampoline for their prescription and were told that they HAD to jump on it every day or suffer the consequences. We jumped for fun and had a ball doing it.
The point here is that, to me, the loss of the community dance is more than just the loss of a cultural tradition. It represents an even bigger loss, and just like the symptoms of that strange illness, there are far-reaching symptoms and consequences.
At the dance I would typically see my parents talking with other parents about things that were important to them. I listened in on many of these conversations, hoping to learn more about life and who I was. I learned to respect those people by meeting them in situations where they were in groups of happy adults. When do children see that now? I learned things at those dances about dancing, living, people and music that I have never seen taught anywhere else. There was no gap between me and my father, me and my grandfather, me and my uncles, me and my cousins or me and the rest of the world.
The dance, it turns out, was a sort of miniature life. Like our lives, in the dance you might be with one person one moment and with another the next. Each is important in his time, each must learn the 'steps' of the dance in order to succeed. And if someone is unsure of themselves, you take them aside and show them what they need to do. You talk, listen, dance, laugh and live, all on the dance floor. And it was therapeutic. Nowadays, people read self-help books, buy expensive exercise machines, live virtual lives on the internet, and jump on mini-trampolines. We just danced.
I cherish the memories I have of the hours I spent on the dance floor; not with boys I liked, but with men I loved and respected. These men taught me what it meant to look and act like a lady on the dance floor as well as in my life. Where do girls learn those things today? With so many things added to our lives in the last century, I suppose it's only natural that some things would be eliminated as a result. But in my opinion, the family dance is one thing we should not have left behind. So, before we go back to the future, let's be careful not to leave the gems of the past behind, lest we find ourselves the poorer (and probably sicker) for our loss.
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