I am on time, but my dance class is missing. I run down the deep stairwell at the City Rec Center, past the rock-climbing wall, where the bored instructor in the ballcap sits student-less as usual and yell to him, “Next time! Really going to try it soon!” which is a well-intended promise, but when push comes to shove, I always eye that towering, two-story wall with its dangling ropes, and wonder if that’s how I want to die. 

I continue down the stairs, cheers from a basketball game surging over me in waves, and sure enough, the room where we danced last week is dark, the door closed, and I’m momentarily confused and disappointed. This is our second session of Latin Dancing and I went all out in preparation, meaning, as the instructor suggested, I wore a skirt this time and I’ve got a hair tie on my wrist in case the room heats up again.

The women in this class are strangers to me, although a couple seem to know each other. There were eight of us at the first class, and for the instructor’s sake, I have been praying that everyone came back tonight, because she can’t afford to lose students. Her name is Nancy, she’s about 28 years old, wears a ponytail and glasses, and is a professional choreographer who calls out instructions in a lilting Spanish accent. 

As I hit the last step, a woman from my class runs out of a nearby room and smiles at me—“We’re in here! I came to get you.” And I smile back; the tiniest kindnesses are ridiculous in their impact. 

I feel the beginnings of a tribe stir my heart.

So, we are in a smaller and better room where the mirrors are unobstructed. And everyone returned! A couple of other students are wearing skirts as well. We practice the dance we learned last week, Fireball, and then move on to the Mambo. Then back to Fireball because we have the mental retention of bricks. 

But the more we practice the more control we have and the freer we get, the less we concentrate on the instructor and begin inhabiting our own bodies, dancing for whoever we are dancing for. You. Memory. Imagination. 

Sometimes I think we dance because of the days we didn’t, and for the days to come when dancing will no longer be on the syllabus. We have been briefly given another moment in which to defy gravity and the limitations of time. I was born in a flame, everybody gonna know my name, the music imagines. And like adolescents, who still believe there is no one they can’t be, and nothing they can’t do, for the length of the dance, we imagine that, too.

As we learn the Mambo, which is essentially another word for “shake it,” I am fixated on Nancy as she breaks down new moves. Like how to swing your hips as you rotate in a circle, swinging out slooowww, then fast- fast, slooowww, fast- fast. 

This is much harder than it sounds. Rotating your hips without moving your torso starts with your feet. Watch a hula dancer sometime. All that mesmerizing rhythm and grace are being engineered elsewhere. That’s the trick, isn’t it? To hide the mechanics of grace?

 When I compliment the woman dancing next to me, she suggests I move like I’ve got a hula hoop around my waist. Elbows up to keep our frame.

This makes me think of the first dance I ever learned. One day my father brought a hula hoop home from work, a new toy, then set it aside and taught us the Twist. It’s a new dance, he said, demonstrating. Just move like you are drying your backside with either end of a bath towel while putting out a cigarette with the toe of each shoe. 

Well. He wasn’t wrong. 

Funny the things that stay with you. 

I participate in another class at the Rec Center called Cardio Dance. Like Nancy, Leandra, who teaches it, is a pro, a joy to watch, and a challenge to emulate. But Leandra goes through the moves slowly, lets you think you’ve gotten them, then does a bait and switch, whipping them out at triple speed. Or she changes direction! 

We are all facing one way and suddenly she spins around, and we are supposed to be going in the opposite direction, leaderless—or sometimes, in any direction, it’s a spontaneous free-for-all. Decorum breaks down, and we rollick like teams in the Puppy Bowl. You can’t help but laugh, dancing with the rules tossed out, responsible for your own moves. Wait! I’ve got moves?

Wait… I have to change direction?

Sometimes Leandra just shouts for joy over the music or laughingly yells, “Uh-oh!” Like someone’s in big trouble now, like her body just got away from her, and who knows what’s going to happen. Even she doesn’t know; she’s following wherever spirit leads her. 

I always laugh because “Uh-oh!” means, “Let go,” and the words break something open inside me. A container of some kind that keeps me in here and you out there. 

But in that moment, façades fall away, and spirit takes us higher.

Time is our partner, beloveds.

Dance like the roof’s on fire. 

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I got caught while on a secret mission the other day. I was rushing to make my flight at Heathrow after a week of visiting my daughter in England, when I decided to hide a note for my British grandsons to find after I was back in America—maybe a riddle to figure out, or perhaps a clue to a present I could quickly tuck under a sofa cushion in the playroom.

The hope was to extend my presence, to keep my identity and love for them in mind for just a few more days. That’s what we all want, right? To extend love’s memory? When your family lives an ocean away, and school and athletic activities consume every minute of a time zone five hours ahead of your own, it’s hard to teach a 6 and 7-year-old who you are to them in any meaningful way.

I’m Mummy’s mommy.

Incredulity and disbelief. (Okay, mine, but theirs as well.)

So, I got busted. Those astute rascals slipped up behind me where I was madly scribbling with their colored markers, and said, “What are you doing? Are you writing us a note?”

Hunching over it, I said, “Of course not. Go away.”

I used to tuck notes in sports jacket pockets and under bedsheets when I was the one leaving. I’d hide messages in weird places like the microwave, the medicine cabinet, among the coffee filters, or taped to the bathroom mirror. It could take the whole time I was gone to find them all.

When we were kids, my older sister used to lock her room and leave me notes with dire warnings to stay out (or else!) while she was babysitting or on a date. To make it
anonymously threatening she would sign her notes, “The Black Hand,” and draw one on as the signature.

I knew it was her.

And those threats inspired great creativity. I once crawled out my bedroom window, edged along the garage roof between our rooms, and let myself into her bedroom window to purloin an orange hip-hugger swimsuit which I wore swimming all afternoon at the community beach and sneaked back into her drawer before she got home. Damp.

I am a terrible criminal.

I left myself notes as well. When I was feeling super victimized by virtue of being the powerless youngest, I’d write down all the reasons I wasn’t speaking to my sister, and a list of her crimes, because without the list to consult, I’d forget in about an hour.

This same sister was fastidious; her room was perennially perfect, so for some reason, when she left for Girl Scout Camp, my parents wrote her letters informing her that they had rented her bedroom out to a tribe of Woodland Indians who had built a small cookfire on her rug and were dancing around it in there. Every day, there was another update mailed to camp as to what the tribe was up to. This was probably my father’s idea. Creative but not terribly empathetic.

My mother left me a note in my suitcase when I went away to college. As a single parent who worked, she had to drop me off a day before the move-in day for all the other students. It was weird to arrive at my future alone. I opened her note by the ancient elm in the center of campus after she’d headed home. Life is full of leaving, I read, and there would only be more from that moment on. Then she reminded me of the things that are eternal, like telephones, letters from home, and mother love.

My teachers sent my parents notes, and they all said pretty much the same thing: “Laura is not working up to her potential.” I didn’t see the point. Half potential was working well enough.

Now this is my number one fear.
Not kidding. My number one fear.

I’ve been finding a lot of notes on my front door lately. It is election season here in town— mayor and alderman are up for grabs, and there is an extensive field of candidates. The notes all say they are sorry they missed me.

They didn’t miss me. I was home and holding very still.

Notes can end up in the wrong hands. Mr. Oliver wrote a note to Linda Hale in second grade. He was six. She was seven. But Mrs. Durbeck, peering inside her students’ desks, found Mr. Oliver’s to be an appalling mess (so young and so already himself), so she dumped the contents on the floor in a furious demonstration of what happens to untidy little boys, and the note spilled out on the floor.

It was addressed to the alluring Miss Hale, Mrs. Durbeck announced, triumphantly waving it around. She read it to herself, then aloud to the class as punishment.

“I like you. I will kiss you at recess.”

Really, Mrs. Durbeck?

Wow, I just got this. I’m leaving you notes every Sunday morning, but only you, because now I don’t so much leave notes as take notes—noticing is a devotional practice as is sharing the wonders we see and the mysteries we can’t solve. Like how to hang on to each other.

Memory is malleable, and time an eraser. But at some point in the past, we learned to name things, and in that moment, when letters turned into words, and words into memory, we wrote them down, to extend our days, to buy ourselves a little more time.

To say, remember who I was to you when I am gone.

 

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

My mother and I had a code word that she would send me after she died, 

If life continues, and she were around, I would see, notice, or hear the word in an unusual place and know it was her. 

After she died, the word first appeared in the form of an email that arrived in my inbox from an unknown source —a sender I initially dismissed as spam due to the strange message it delivered. But when I looked at it again, I saw that our chosen word was in the sender’s address. 

The email said nothing more than this:

“There is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Intrigued, I looked around my office as in, Okaaay, way cool. I’m truly impressed. Where are you? But I could only say, “Working on it, Mom. (Nicely done by the way!) But still working on it.”

I have a friend with whom I study these things, and we agreed we needed a word as well. Whoever dies first will send it to the other. By the time that happens, we may have been long gone from each other’s lives—we may have no one in common who would even alert us to the news, no one even in possession of contact info, but the word he suggested is as common as “table,” so I don’t see how that’s going to work.

I guess I’m going to have to see it written in the clouds or on the crest of a wave or spelled out in swan feathers on the beach to know he is conveying the devastating news that he has left, along with the extraordinary news he’s not gone. 

The same is true of the children’s father. Our word is way too general and commonplace. We believe we have time to pick another. 

I should arrange a code with each of my children, and I think you and I should have a word as well. So I can tell you it’s true if it is—and you can confirm for me that love doesn’t end, life doesn’t end, the universe doesn’t end. The Big Bang was not a beginning; it was a transition. A mature universe transforming to become new again, as a natural cycle, like the beat of a heart, an exhalation of breath. Emerging from the singularity we call the Big Bang, as if through a portal, a birth canal, carrying the potential of all that ever was or could be —much like you when you were born. 

Pick a word and let me know. Make it unique. What word or phrase could mean only you?

Would you believe that now, eight years after receiving that email, I finally looked up the lines in that message? They are the last lines of a Rainer Maria Rilke poem about a damaged Greek sculpture, the torso of the god Apollo. The poem expresses the belief that its incompleteness, its missing parts, cannot diminish the radiant beauty of what remains. The original power emanates from what is left because beauty comes from the inside out. No missing part can dim the essence of what shines.

From all the borders of itself, beauty bursts like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

I like to think that was the message. The change-your-life thing just makes me anxious. Like…in exactly what way? I can guess, but how do I know we are on the same page? I hope the real takeaway is that we can find beauty in the incomplete.

 Because, well, who isn’t?

And is incomplete the same as broken? Not necessarily. I hear that ideology a lot. “I was broken, and xyz made me whole.” But I’m placing my attention on incomplete. On becoming. On building upon and growing what is good. 

So what’s our word? I hope it brings us joy and connects us instantly across space and time.

When I was little, my friend Peggy and I believed in mind over matter, mental telepathy, and life after death. We were blood sisters. We had smeared two bloody mosquito bites together to seal our bond. 

What will be our secret code we asked each other. We sat crossed-legged by the redbud tree in the company of a river we would carry with us all our days. The dry grass pricked our thighs, leaving hatch marks in the tender skin when we lay back to study the sky.

How should we contact each other if there is life after death?

 “If it’s true,” Peggy said, “I’ll just say ‘It’s real.’” 

 “If it’s real,” I said, smiling, “I’ll just say ‘It’s me.’”

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.