I Came Upon A Wedding

When I was seven years old, I used to chase girls around the school yard and try to kiss them. Especially Elizabeth, whom I loved because she had long pig-tails.

I can't remember a stage of life where I didn't like girls. Just loved them. I loved the way they looked, the way they talked, the way they walked.... I had girl "friends" when none of the boys I played with wanted anything to do with girls. I had an immense crush on my Sunday School teacher, and dreams about her. I had a crush on a bride I saw at a wedding in Holland.  A substitute teacher. A friend's mother. The babysitter.  Well, not my babysitter, like Paul Anka.  Someone else's babysitter.  She was fifteen and I was about thirteen and she invited me upstairs to watch tv and "neck" during the commercials.  She really wanted my older brother, Al, but I was a temporary fix, I guess. Our relationship started to deteriorate when she kept asking me to get her some milk for her "ulcer". 

Tonight, I went to a wedding, that two college students had contrived. It was held in the Court House Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the scene of my very first date with a girl named Leslie, to see a musical based on the music of Leonard Cohen called "The Sisters of Mercy".  We thought it was great.  It was our first play.   I think it closed a week later.

The reception itself was right in the auditorium. The
stage, the proscenium, is still there. I still like girls, and I especially like watching them dance.  There were two spirited young women at this party: Christine, who danced like a maniac, all arms and legs and outrage and torrential energy unleashed, with earrings in her nose, and a tattoo, and who was more interesting to talk to than anybody else. And then there was Kim, who was dark and mysterious looking, who teaches dance, and who moved with elegance and style, but also exuberance.  Kim was dramatic in a black dress, with spaghetti straps, and long black hair, moving around the floor like some healing gypsy with a gift of uncharted rhythms for everybody.

It was wonderful night until-- I'm not kidding-- they played a polka. The halls of my beloved courthouse rang with "e-i-e-i-e-i-o". 

I watched someone make a move on an attractive young woman with big hair. I watched them intently. He couldn't dance worth a lick, but she was sporting and patient and tried to teach him the steps and keep her feet out from under his. I went out for a smoke and found good conversation with a gent who looked like Einstein and had traveled to the Arctic. I wasn't sure I believed him. He said that when aircraft land in the Arctic, they have to keep their engines running because it is too cold to restart them. Once, a C-145 Transport was shut down for two hours. It never flew again. It is now somewhere beneath the pack-ice, a hundred miles from where it stopped.

So I learned four things tonight. Firstly, always keep your engines running. Secondly, there is a dance for everything, and for some people, that dance is a polka. I don't know if that guy went home with the girl, but he at least had a polka. Thirdly,: in the dance of spirituality, someone, somewhere always needs a polka. Fourth: dancing is like keeping your engines running. In this arctic life of ours, this world of spiritless tundra, if it takes a polka to keep your engines running, go outside for a smoke.

Copyright © 1998 Bill Van Dyk  All rights reserved.