Dancing*

Outside it was raining. Because we live in Portland, it had been raining for weeks. Rain is just what winter looks like in the Northwest. Consequently, chidren in the Northwest don’t spent as much time making snow angels as they do splashing in puddles. Which is what I had planned for the day, that my two-year old son and I would get some much needed exercise, don raincoats and galoshes, take the dog to the park and indulge in the very old Oregon tradition of walking in the rain, jumping in the rain, and getting soaked.

            Yet by 11am, I had gotten distracted. My son and I were still in our pajamas; he played trains on the living room floor while I attempted to catch up on the laundry and clean up the state of general disarray that the house had fallen into. But I was beginning to get stir-crazy. I told myself that I would do as much as I could in ten minutes and then we could go.

            My son had other ideas. He pushed his trains aside and stood up.

            “Dance.” He demanded.

            “But we need to fold the laundry, so we can go.” I said. “I want to get out of the house.”

            “Dance.” He demanded again.

            I looked at him doing his in-place-skip-hop-prance-dance-move-thing as he pointed to the stereo.

            “Okay,” I said. “Laundry can wait.”

            I turned on the stereo, and we danced. Some of our favorites songs came on the Pandora station we were listening to. Songs that I sang to him when he was in my belly, songs my husband put into the mix of music that played in the background when I gave birth at home, songs that my son was born to: The Flaming Lips, Do you Realize, Coldplay’s Strawberry Swing, The Beatles, Here Comes the Sun. As we dance around the living room, I sing to him again.

            He is right, I think. We should dance. Someday, he will be at school and not with me during the day. Someday, he will go racing out the front door to play with friends and not with me. Someday, there will be a second child that requires my attention. Someday, his schedule will be more full than mine. Sometimes, I look forward to these somedays. The someday when I can work and write during the day and not at 4am when my family is sleeping. The someday when I can sleep in and spend the day in bed with a book. The someday when I can take a shower and not have to tell anyone because I am no longer responsible for all of their needs.

            But now, in this moment, as he literally dances circles around me, I am glad those somedays have not arrived yet. I am glad we have chosen to dance.

            Half an hour later, my mom calls to tell me that my uncle has died. He was sixty. The news hits me hard, not just because he was one of my favorite uncles and a person whom I admired, or that with my aunt, he had a marriage that inspired me when the marriages of my parents crumbled and I saw other couples constantly bickering, but because he was sixty. And someday I will be forty, and sixty is not much older than forty. Life just got much shorter and much more urgent.  

            It occurs to me then that the songs I sing to my son are about just this, about how fast life goes, that you never have forever. But I don’t sing then. Instead, I look at my son, and quote Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

            

*This article got picked up another website, the The #life Daily! Yay for me!