Just a thought… Dance is a prayer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of the present. [Amelia Attwater Rhodes]

You can watch a video version of this journal on my Facebook page, or here on YouTube.

I’m sorry to have missed doing a journal earlier this week, but life has been busy in the most joyful of ways. Colin turned seven on Monday which, of course, is just the whipped cream on the pumpkin pie of our Thanksgiving every year. (And there’s birthday cake, too, naturally.)

What we also missed on Monday, besides a journal here, was something Rob and I have been doing for two weeks now. It’s an exercise in intimacy. Now before any pearls get clutched (not that that’s who you are, I know!) it’s not S-E-X. No – although we’ve been warned that it could lead to it! I’m talking about doing something where we’re close, where we’re looking in each other’s direction instead of at a hockey game or a computer screen (guilty!) as we usually are: it’s dance lessons.

Last month for my birthday, Rob gave me a printout of the program he’d signed us up for. I laughed because we had just been telling friends about the last time we took lessons about 20 years ago in north Toronto. It was fun, but he remembers far more about it than I do!

So why take them? Initially we thought we wanted to go on a cruise and look like we knew what we were doing (a bit). Rob’s not a dancer; he’s a bass player and would rather be in the band than one of the people enjoying the music with their feet.

Me? Oh, I can dance – just not sober or without a two-year-old (in Jane’s case) leading the way!

So when we got on the cruise, we took more lessons and they taught us the steps we thought we knew, only backwards, for foxtrot sake! So that was the end of that – ’til now.

There’s something so connecting about touching your partner and letting them lead you around the floor. Because if you know me, I don’t follow very well. Take the pancakes I made last week: instead of a tablespoon of sugar as the recipe required, I put in the same amount of salt. Ugh. Can’t even follow a recipe.

Also, I panic when I’m doing something other than talking in public, and am thinking oh, I look so stupid and then I don’t absorb the instructions. So, we’re going to our third dance lesson in a middle school gym on Monday night, along with about 12 other couples around our age. (Which reminds me – we have not been practising those steps. Bad students!)

This time there will be no cruise at the end, although we have just booked our flights for next May’s Amsterdam-to-Basel river cruise that Mike Cooper and I are hosting with Ama Waterways. 

There will be dances held for our group (still trying to book that entire boat just for us and we have only until Nov. 1 to do so; if you’re interested in more info, click here to send an email to our friend Gerry at New Wave Travel) but Mike, Rob and I will be working those dances, so no reason to kick off our shoes and take to the dance floor!

We’re not doing this for a participation trophy; it’s for Rob and for me. A chance to put on footwear other than slippers or skates (in Rob’s case) and learn something new. As someone wise once said, “We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.”

Have a great weekend and I’ll be back with you here on Monday.