Never Sit If You Can Dance

by Jo Giese

  PRAISE FOR NEVER SIT IF YOU CAN DANCE

  “Stories about life, about love, about family. When she was younger, Jo didn’t understand her mother. When she was older, Jo realized how smart, how special her mother was. You choose the heroine. I choose both.”

  —ILENE BECKERMAN, author of Love, Loss, and What I Wore

  “You could read this book on one plane flight—and leave with the satisfying feeling you have been traveling with a delightful, memorable companion.”

  —RENA PEDERSON, author of The Burma Spring

  “ Babe is a life-embracing role model for anyone seeking to make their days dance with love and joy.”

  —ELIZABETH FORSYTHE HAILEY, author of A Woman of Independent Means

  “ Babe’s lessons are simple, but each is a valuable gem. Her lifelong zest for squeezing pleasure from just about everything is heartwarming and entertaining.”

  —CAROL SALINE, author of Mothers & Daughters

  “ From arm-wrestling to thank-you notes, this breezy tribute from a feminist to her old-fashioned mom celebrates both civility and love.”

  —LESLIE LEHR, author of What a Mother Knows

  “This snappy mother-daughter memoir brings old-fashioned lessons to life with a clever and modern twist.”

  —LINDA GRAY SEXTON, New York Times best-selling author of Searching for Mercy Street

  “We all need a Babe in our lives! Lucky for Jo Giese having hers, and lucky for us that she’s sharing her with us in this uplifting romp through one woman’s well-lived life. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and then you’ll want to read it all over again just to get a little more Babe.”

  —NANCY SPILLER, author of Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mother’s Recipe Box

  Copyright © 2019 by Jo Giese

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published April 23, 2019

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-533-9

  E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-534-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957236

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  In memory of my parents. I’m so sorry they didn’t hang around longer so we could have grown old together.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  LESSON 1:

  Never Sit If You Can Dance

  LESSON 2:

  Maybe We All Need Someone Waiting for Us in the Parking Lot

  LESSON 3:

  Never Show Up Empty-Handed

  LESSON 4:

  Thank-You Notes Are Never Too Plentiful

  LESSON 5:

  Make the Best of It

  LESSON 6:

  Sharing Fun Is the Whole Thing

  LESSON 7:

  The Happiness of Giving and Receiving Flowers

  LESSON 8:

  The Good Goodbye

  LESSON 9:

  People Don’t Like to Be Around Depressed People

  LESSON 10:

  Don’t Be Drab

  LESSON 11:

  Never Leave a Compliment Unsaid

  LESSON 12:

  Go! While You Can

  LESSON 13:

  Sometimes Life Begins Again at Ninety-Five

  The Last Lesson

  Timeline

  INTRODUCTION

  One day Babe and I were discussing why some people we knew were so unhappy and cranky. I asked her, “Okay, so why do you think I turned out so happy?”

  “Because you take after me,” she said.

  That’s when the idea of Never Sit If You Can Dance was born. I’d been a seventies-bell-bottom-wearing, Ms. magazine-writing daughter who was sorely disappointed with my stay-at-home-housewife mom. She seemed so behind the times. I’d look at her and think, Lord, I do not want to turn out like that!

  But, half a century later, this baby boomer has lived long enough to realize how seriously I underestimated her. Maybe we weren’t members of such different generations after all. She might have had stewed rhubarb and tomato aspic salad in her fridge, while I have organic kale and soy milk in mine, but maybe, in more important ways, we’re much closer in spirit than I thought. And at ninety-five and a half, she’d put up with me long enough to hear me start singing her praises publicly in a Houston magazine.

  I called Mom “Babe” because she asked me to—she disliked her given name, Gladys. Besides, Babe was fun to say, and it suited her. She was the youngest in her family, the baby. But even after she’d outlived three sisters, her husband, and everybody else, the name still fit. She was some Babe.

  I’m especially delighted that in this Instagram age, a woman who never touched a computer or owned a cell phone or played solitaire on an iPad had wisdom—earned from a lifetime of living—that has turned out to be timeless.

  Probably nobody is more surprised than I am that, stitch by stitch, I embroidered Babe’s pronouncements into life lessons. And many of these lessons weren’t necessarily even spoken until we sat down together, and I asked about all that dancing she and Dad had done. That’s when she blurted out, “Never sit if you can dance.”

  If I’ve been successful, I’ve communicated her grace, her wit, and her playfulness. (“Let’s goof off today” was one of her favorite sayings.) Taken together, these lessons show there’s a celebratory life waiting for each of us—if we embrace it.

  As you come to know Babe, you’ll see that she was no Goody Two-Shoes. She drank, danced, and stayed up very late. She was so much livelier than most mothers I’ve known. And since I frown on manuals telling me which fork or word to use, this is not that. Instead, these lessons, defined by love, rather than by prohibition, are stories about what worked pretty well for Babe. They are about the simplest, most basic things: how to get along with other people, how to make a marriage work, how to make life more agreeable.

  I got such a kick out of focusing on Babe that I had no intention of having much of a presence in these pages myself. But as her stories unfolded, they naturally evolved into mother-daughter stories. How could they not? And, again, why should I have been so surprised? Because Babe’s lessons show not just how she lived, but the impact her attitudes and ideas had on me and the others lucky enough to have known her.

  It’s been said that our gifts are not fully ours until we give them away. I wrote this collection as a gift for Babe and for all mothers everywhere who laid the groundwork that shaped us, even if we didn’t exactly recognize it or appreciate it—or them—at the time. Babe gave me these gifts, and in this book, I’m giving them to you.

  LESSON 1:

  NEVER SIT IF YOU CAN DANCE

  Neither of my parents pursued any activity that today would qualify as exercise. Theirs was many generations before Jane Fonda’s “feel the burn!” workout videos, before isometrics and aerobics, before Lululemon and Under Armour, before they even knew that regular exercise was good for them. And, as my father would have told you, he was too damn busy making a buck to take up idle, elitist pursuits—like tennis, golf, or, God forbid, skiing—that are a waste of time, not to mention money. Whizzing down a mountain on boards—what’s the point of that?

  B
abe’s specialty was the standing backbend. Although I never saw her execute one, she explained that she’d put her fingers on the wall behind her and climb down the wall backward. “My back was flexible,” she said. “That was my most important exercise.”

  And she could arm-wrestle. It’s curious how someone so ladylike, someone who preferred blouses with ruffles, didn’t look anything like a wrestler, and never honed her skill with wrist-strengthening exercises would invite anyone to a bout. In between hands of pinochle or gin rummy, she’d challenge someone new, and it had to be someone who wasn’t wise to her trick. She’d push her cards aside, place her right elbow on the card table at a ninety-degree angle, fist up, place her left hand across her upper arm to steady it, lock it with her opponent’s, and—wham!—before they knew what had happened, their wrist would be pinned down to the table, and Babe would bask in another moment of glory. Take that, Jane Fonda. The success of her trick relied on the element of surprise, coupled with a natural technique in which she leveraged the strength in her shoulder. And Babe—who had no gym routine, no personal trainer, no arm-wrestling coach—always won.

  Years later, as I lifted free weights to maintain what bicep-forearm strength I had, Babe’s naturally powerful grip puzzled me. But then maybe I was puzzled by Babe’s many strengths in general. Her physical stamina—and not just with arm-wrestling—amazed me. How she could stay up so late, as long as there were friends to socialize with, while I was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person who was happiest when I could also sneak in a delicious afternoon nap? I was a napper; Babe never napped.

  The only exercise Dad mentioned was jumping jacks in the sixth grade, and it was those jumping jacks that cut his education short. Very short. According to Dad, the teacher, who was a man, yelled at him, criticizing how he was executing the jumping jacks.

  “If the instructor didn’t think you were doing it right,” said Dad, “or doing your best, he had kids bend down and touch the floor, and he’d whack ’em. Hell, I was about as big as him—maybe a little bigger. If he was gonna whack me, I’d whack him.” Dad resisted hitting the teacher and instead exited that elementary school, and never returned. (Though later in life, as a self-trained engineer, he felt hamstrung by having shortchanged his education.)

  Just because Dad lacked formal training, educational or otherwise, didn’t mean he was physically inactive. Every Christmas he’d climb the tallest evergreen tree in our backyard in Seattle—it was at least two or three stories high—and top it off with a five-pointed star outlined in white lights. Imagine my dad—six feet tall, thirty-five years old, muscular but bare-bones skinny because, as he said, he ate to live, rather than living to eat—scaling those prickly Douglas-fir branches. First he found a toehold; then he placed a foot there, found another branch to perch on, grabbed a handhold, and hoisted himself up—all while carrying that huge star and dragging a long extension cord while as Perry Como crooned carols from an outdoor speaker: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas. . . .”

  His nervous wife and his two little kids were staring up from way down below. And now I wonder, how did he know how to do that? He certainly never trained on any indoor climbing wall. If my husband, Ed, or I attempted such a feat, we’d break our ankle before we reached the first branch. (As crazy-scary as that incident was, it imprinted me for life: Christmas isn’t Christmas without lights outside. And whenever we hang lights—or a more agile friend hangs them for us—there must be holiday music blaring loudly, the cornier the better. Our lights end up looking hokey and just right.)

  My parents didn’t even know how to swim, except in a pinch Dad could dog-paddle. But, boy, could they dance.

  One of my favorite black-and-white photos from a family scrapbook was of my parents dressed up to attend a dance at the Washington Athletic Club in their courtship days. Mom was wearing a graceful black, floor-length gown, an unusual choice for someone who clearly favored color. At twenty-seven, she probably thought it made her look sophisticated, and it did. That languid dress was clingy enough to show some curves, and her auburn hair was done in deep finger waves, a flirty hairstyle that was popular back then. Dad was wearing a black tuxedo. Imagine that: Dad—who ended up favoring one-piece, baby-blue polyester jumpsuits from Penney’s—at thirty, and courting Babe, was dressed to kill in a gorgeous black tuxedo. That photo captured a man and a woman who were clearly a hot couple. They looked so fresh and young, so glamorous and romantic, so pre-children. Since Babe had also told me that Dad sometimes took a room at the Washington Athletic Club, over the years I nagged her to tell me if she’d ever stayed there with him before they married. “You can tell me, Mom. It’ll just be between us.” She never said. What she did say, which was so disappointing and unsatisfying, was, “I think that’s private.”

  Every Saturday my mom and dad, before they were my mom and dad, went to a dance hall, often the Trianon Ballroom in downtown Seattle. Babe said it was beautiful, with polished hardwood floors, and it was so packed that on Saturday nights you could hardly get in.

  “We never went anywhere that didn’t have an orchestra. It was first class all the way. You would’ve liked that place,” she said to me.

  When I googled the Trianon, which is located in what is now a hipster area north of Seattle called Belltown, I learned that the dance floor had accommodated five thousand dancers.

  “Pa always had a corsage for me.”

  “You danced with a corsage?” I said. “Didn’t it flop all over the place?”

  “Once in a while, but he never came without one.”

  Babe said that everyone in their crowd was a dancer, a smooth dancer, and they danced to beautiful music, not the “junk” people listen to today. If, as the saying goes, dancing is sex standing up, then my parents and their friends must have had a really good erotic time gliding around those beautiful ballrooms.

  Her crowd did the foxtrot, the swing, the two-step, but nothing jumpy like the jitterbug or boogie-woogie. Babe said that sometimes the dance hall had a Charleston contest—“but we weren’t Charleston people.”

  Their marriage and the arrival of my brother, Jimmy, and me coincided with the passing of the bigband era and the closing of the dance halls, but our parents kept dancing. At home. Babe and Dad were a popular couple, and by then they had the largest house in their group—not large by current standards, but big enough by post-World War II, 1950’s, middle-class standards—so the parties were always at our place. Dad had turned a daylight basement into a rec room with a highly waxed, green linoleum dance floor that he’d glued down tile by tile using a disgusting, black, tar-like adhesive. That danceable space was where my brother and I skidded around in our stocking feet, and where I cradled my new baby sister, Wendy, as I danced her to sleep. That’s also where the adults—young couples with young children, hardworking and hard-partying—danced and drank and smoked and celebrated into the wee hours. That was my instructional template for being a grown-up: gather a bunch of friends, some aunts and uncles, coworkers, and neighbors; roll up the rugs; and drink and dance.

  “Your dad and I definitely never sat and just drank alcohol,” said Babe.

  “Well, so what did you do, if you didn’t just sit and drink?” I asked, reverting to my best professional interview style. Neither of my parents were easy to interview; they would glare at me, knowing I already knew the answer. But I needed them to say it in their own words.

  “We danced!” she said, as if I were an idiot for even asking. “Never sit if you can dance.”

  When Herb Alpert and his trumpet blasted onto the scene with the Tijuana Brass and The Lonely Bull, Babe wore a bias-cut, flared taffeta skirt, which she’d sewn herself, that swayed when she danced to “Whipped Cream” and “A Taste of Honey.” By then Dad had installed a handy beer keg in the kitchen, and the adults stayed up even later.

  Babe and Dad’s party drugs of choice were drinking and dancing—D & D. Dave Barry, in writing about his parents drinking and partying, said, “My parents and their fri
ends probably would have lived longer if their lifestyle choices had been healthier.” As you’ll see, Babe lived a very long and full life, and she and her friends worked hard, played hard, and had a lot of fun. What’s healthier than that, Dave?

  I pretty much caught Babe’s sassy sense of rhythm and enthusiasm for dancing: in elementary school I raced home to dance with Dick Clark’s American Bandstand on our black-and-white TV.

  That was also when my least favorite aunt, the one who’d worked her entire life as a secretary at the Trick & Murray office supply store, got tickets for the two of us to attend the Elvis Presley concert at the Seattle Rainiers’ baseball stadium. How Aunt Dell, of all people, got those tickets, and just a few rows back, I’ll never know. When Elvis took the stage in person, right in front of us, with that lock of dark hair falling over his eye and his guitar slung suggestively over his pelvis, and sang “Hound Dog,” the place went wild. Like everyone else in that packed stadium, my Aunt Dell and I stood on our chairs and screamed. As Elvis gyrated his hips to “Don’t Be Cruel,” we jumped up and down and danced in the aisles.

  I never saw Aunt Dell so uninhibited and joyous. Often she had a sour frown on her face, and she usually complained to her sister, Babe, when they went out, “Why is everyone giving you compliments?” It was only after reading Dancing in the Streets, by Barbara Ehrenreich, that I understood my aunt’s one-time transformation. Ehrenreich had been writing about teenage girls at rock-and-roll concerts, but she might as well have been writing about Aunt Dell: “The crowd mania unleashed something in girls who individually might have been timid and obedient.”

  By my freshman year at the University of Texas, during the legendary Texas-OU weekend celebrating one of the biggest rivalries in college football, I was having crazy fun at a fraternity party. The first in my family to go to college, there I was, down on all fours on a beer-soaked dance floor, “gatoring” to the Grateful Dead’s “Gloria.” I’m not sure that’s what Babe had in mind when she advised, “Never sit if you can dance.”