Never Sit If You Can Dance

by Jo Giese

  Being Babe’s daughter, I guess it should be no surprise that in stressful transitions I turned to dancing. During the divorce from my first husband, the one I only refer to as the “bad husband,” and the one about whom I never reveal how long we were together because it makes me look like such a slow learner, I line-danced. I ended up so dizzy from twirling and spinning that I had to excuse myself from the line to gather my bearings and catch my breath. But I was grateful for the self-loss, and the self-rescuing I experienced dancing with a line of strangers.

  After the death of my second husband, the man who thought I was lovable and whom I believed, I signed up for swing lessons with the Dance Doctor in Santa Monica. But the lessons were too decorously choreographed, too contained, too formal, too much like following doctor’s orders—foot-ball-change—and in high heels. I craved something—else!

  That’s when I stumbled upon Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, on Sunday mornings—a time slot I was having trouble filling. Fumbling turned out to be improvisational, trancelike group dancing, also called 5Rhythms. In a large warehouse transformed into a dance space, I entered another world—a feverish world—where hundreds of people gathered to dance for the dance of it. After seventeen years of a good marriage that was now gone, I clung to Fumbling to escape being isolated in my too-silent house with only one small dog (sorry, Charmlee) for company. It was always high-quality entertainment—a woman in a pink leotard was an awe-inspiring professional dancer, a Chinese man in an orange, ankle-length, pleated skirt glided by as smoothly as an ice skater, and a belly dancer was swathed in layers of purple edged with tinkling bells and bangles. Since I had no idea what I was doing, I appreciated it when the director said to me, “Anyone can fumble. You can’t get it ‘wrong.’”

  One of my nephews asked, “Is that like a Sunday-morning rave? A mosh pit for adults?” Maybe, I said.

  Sometimes the music was cranked up so loud that I was transported back to the craziness of frat parties at UT. But those were called Friday-night keg parties, not Sunday-morning trance dancing. I was so thrilled with Fumbling that I even took Babe. By then she was in her late eighties, and I got her a chair so she could watch from the sidelines or join in if she wanted to. Afterward she said she didn’t understand why people didn’t dance with partners, or why some men—some of them wearing long skirts—danced with each other. She wasn’t judgmental, just puzzled.

  Flash forward. I no longer spent my Sunday mornings dancing like a dervish, and Babe was no longer dancing. In her nineties, she was walker-bound, and she was not reconciled to her fate. One day when we were going through the old photos, we came across that dreamy one of her and Dad before they went dancing. “I’d give anything if I could dance,” she said. “My feet aren’t suitable now.”

  Although Babe had managed to avoid all major health problems, she suffered from peripheral neuropathy, a nerve disorder where she lost feeling on the soles of her feet, an ironic malady to beset someone who had loved to dance. The condition destroyed her balance and created an urgent need for her to cling to her walker. Since the walker was red, we called it her Ferrari.

  “People should dance more and sit less,” she said.

  I told her that her gorgeous Trianon Ballroom had been converted into an office building.

  “That’s kind of awkward,” she said.

  I wondered if any of the office workers at the Trianon on Third Avenue in Seattle knew they were working in what had once been one of the largest dance halls west of Chicago, the kind where giant mirrored balls rotated on the ceiling and couples fell in love.

  I did not tell Babe that all signs of her popular dance club were long gone, and that the historic Trianon dance hall now housed a gym.

  When Ed and I married in 2009, I asked Babe to walk me down the aisle. Dad had died years earlier, so Babe, my only living parent, was the natural choice.

  “You’d better ask someone else,” she said. At ninety-two, she was turning me down. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Of course you can,” I said, trusting her lifetime of resiliency and spunk.

  The “aisle” was a dirt path on a rugged mountaintop at a nature preserve located in the Santa Monica Mountains. The afternoon of the wedding, some of Ed’s six grandchildren, dressed in colorful cotton wedding sweaters, flew kites from the windy mountaintop. I wore a red bridal gown (see Lesson 10: Don’t Be Drab) with a train that a friend said fluttered in the breeze like a flame. The beautiful mother of the bride was dressed elegantly in a hot-pink Chinese coat with a mandarin collar. Her Ferrari was decorated with so many colorful flowers, it looked like a moving bouquet.

  After the flower girls scattered petals down the aisle, and the ring bearers made their way to the canopy where Ed, the groom, was waiting, the string quartet struck up “Penny Lane.” A gasp passed through the crowd as our friends realized that Babe was walking me down the aisle. Everyone stood and cheered and clapped. And Babe—never sit if you can dance—danced at my wedding.

  LESSON 2:

  MAYBE WE ALL NEED SOMEONE WAITING FOR US IN THE PARKING LOT

  My dad’s business was headquartered—if “headquartered” can be used to describe the warehouse offices of such a small, scrappy enterprise—in what was then the grimy, industrial waterfront section of West Seattle. Dad had learned his area of specialty by sandblasting ships in the Bremerton shipyard during World War II. From hard-earned, firsthand knowledge, he knew what equipment was missing in shipyards, and he thought he knew how to design it better. Later, as the inventor and manufacturer of this new equipment, he made sales trips up and down the coast—from Anacortes to Astoria, Seaside to San Francisco.

  By then my grandmother Josie was living with us and could take care of my brother and me. So Babe, who was also the bookkeeper for Dad’s fledging business, often went on the road with him. While Dad was inside, shooting the breeze, trying to convince the buyer at Todd Shipyard in Portland that his equipment would overhaul, clean, and dry-dock their ships better and faster, Babe was outside in the car, doing needlework.

  Babe always brought along a basket crammed with the supplies she needed for her pastime: packets of needles, thimbles, wooden hoops that kept the fabric taut, twists of the thinnest embroidery thread in a rainbow of colors, tiny scissors for snipping off the ends, and a stash of projects—dish towels, pillowcases, a tablecloth—most with pre-stenciled designs.

  “It’s a nice pastime, and when you finish, you have an accomplishment,” Babe explained years later. She did not do it for the meditative, calming quality of stitch in, stitch out, breathe in, breathe out, which is what I did years later when I took up needlepoint. “I didn’t need any calm down stuff,” she said. “I liked the results. I was always anxious to get through to see what it looked like.”

  I wondered if she ever encouraged her sisters, Evie and Dell, or any of her many friends, especially the women in her pinochle club, to take up embroidery. “I enjoyed doing it myself, but other people I knew didn’t like doing it. Too much work and not enough praise.”

  That wasn’t the whole story. In 1940, her sister Evie cross-stitched a “home sweet home” pictorial, and in 1934, Babe’s oldest friend from kindergarten, Thelma, created a miniature needlework diptych of two houses. I know this because those pieces hang in my home. But probably Babe was right about their not liking it much, because, as far as I know, those pieces were their only output.

  On those road trips with Dad, as Babe waited outside in industrial parking lots, she embroidered. It might have been a precisely stitched set of pillowcases that would get finished with a lacy edge crocheted by my grandmother, who also spun pastel doilies as fine as a spiderweb. Or she might embroider a dish towel that was signed by the artist, MOM, in large block letters.

  “That was when people had dish towels hanging out,” she said. “I stopped that some time ago. Too much work for what they’re worth.”

  More than a decade before Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, I looked down on what I saw as Babe�
��s silly, subservient behavior. A French knot here, a fly stitch there, and Babe—who wasn’t a perfectionist about anything else—was such a perfectionist about her needlework that she proudly showed off the front and back of the fabric. But what difference did it make if she was so skillful you couldn’t tell the topside from the underside of a dish towel? I mean, really—surely, there was something more important for this person to be doing than perfecting French knots. To my little eight-year-old judgmental self, who sometimes got to tag along on these trips, Dad was up to something important, exciting, inside—a business meeting—while Babe was outside stitching?

  Back then, I had almost no exposure to professional women, other than the teachers at school; or Mandy, our neighbor who was a nurse; or Aunt Evie, who was in the Women’s Army Corps. Although Evie was my favorite aunt, her job—as a glorified office worker—didn’t impress me much, either. But at least she got to wear an olive-green army uniform with a matching tie, and a cap she tilted at a jaunty angle. I have no idea where these judgmental (and aspirational) ideas came from, and I’m not sure what I thought Babe should be doing instead. But I was pretty sure what she should not be doing: needlework while waiting for Dad. It seemed so docile and passive.

  Many years later when I was talking to Babe about this, she said, “Your dad always told me how nice it was to come out to the car and have someone to talk to.”

  Oh.

  Babe, the crafter, out there doing raised French knots—stitch in, stitch out, tie it off—had been an active participant in a way that I, the little put-down artist, had never given her credit for. I’d never considered the important supporting role she’d been playing all those years in bolstering her husband and in strengthening their marriage. Dad was a talented but self-taught engineer who had to hire a licensed engineer to sign off on his designs. Though he didn’t like to let on, his lack of formal education had left him with feelings of inferiority. What a deep comfort it must have been to have his wife waiting for him. Maybe his meeting hadn’t gone well and he’d lost a sale. He would come out dejected, and Babe could console him. And when he felt like a million bucks, he had someone to celebrate with. If Willy Loman had had a Babe to kick back with, and laugh with, and have a scotch and soda with after his sales calls, how different his story might have been.

  I couldn’t help but think of all the times I’d been on the road without anyone waiting in the car for me. Once, I was interviewing the groundskeeper for the Detroit Tigers—it was a wonderful public radio story about the first woman groundskeeper in major league baseball and how she’d worked her way up from the minors—but I ended up stuck by myself, working on the script, over a long, lonely weekend in a hotel in a questionable area of downtown Detroit. Boy, what a difference it would have made if I’d had someone like Babe.

  Mom and Dad didn’t need to drive all the way to the Pasadena Auditorium, like I did, to listen to His Holiness the Dalai Lama lecture about the interdependence of all sentient beings, and take notes, and underline key passages with a yellow highlighter. Their common thread was that they had no false ideas about the value of independence. They were not afraid to lean in. There was no stigma attached—except by one scoldy daughter.

  Then the seventies hit, and the counterculture age of free love, flower children, and colorful embroidery burst onto the scene. From denim shirts to designer dresses, all the cool clothing was splashed with high-impact embroidery. Embroidery had acquired fashion chops. I eyed Babe’s handiwork with new, greedy eyes. For my sister and me, she embroidered gorgeous, vibrant flowers on our favorite work shirts, and long, leafy stems that spiraled down the sides of our jeans. Babe’s talent, unleashed from those quiet dish towels and dainty pillowcases, exploded onto our hip clothing. Now she used chunkier threads, in thicker stitches, and the sculptural result resembled a three-dimensional tapestry. Her unbridled work was richer and more complicated than the mass-produced versions. Take that, Ralph Lauren.

  Babe’s largest and longest embroidery project—it took her years to complete—was a tablecloth big enough for a wedding. “Banquet size,” she said. The white linen fabric featured a central oval with spokes of rose-colored, daisy-like flowers on delicate, pale gray stems with wisps of light blue leaves. Its subtle, sophisticated palette—no yellow daisies with green leaves for Babe—matched her Haviland china.

  “It’s a pretty thing, isn’t it?” she said. It was December 2012, and I’d just spread her treasure on the table for Christmas dinner.

  Babe’s masterpiece—which boasts hundreds and hundreds of embroidered flowers, each with a pale blue, perfectly executed French knot in its center—also has matching napkins. “I wound up giving it to you,” she said, “my oldest daughter.”

  Babe was among a legion of unsung women embroiderers of her generation. These needleworkers, who practiced a lost art, rarely received any formal public recognition for their painstakingly crafted pieces. No one collected Babe’s artwork except my sister and me.

  My husband, formerly a whip-smart appellate lawyer in Washington, DC, who had argued many cases at the Supreme Court, said, “I was always litigating issues that you’d read about in the newspapers. But what’s really the long-term impact? Who’s to say that work is any more valuable than your mom’s tablecloth?”

  When there’s yet another wildfire scare in the area where we live, and we go into adrenaline over-drive, scanning the mountains for telltale signs of fire, getting out the suitcases, and the very real possibility of evacuation looms in the smoky air, the first treasure I grab is Babe’s tablecloth.

  Today, in an era that stresses individual self-fulfillment and achievement, hardly anyone is willing to be the one sitting in the car, stitching. But the simple truth is that maybe we all need someone waiting for us in the parking lot.

  LESSON 3:

  NEVER SHOW UP EMPTY-HANDED

  Babe was a child of the original Great Depression, and, although times were tight, she wasn’t.

  My parents would always arrive at a friend’s house with their arms loaded. “It’s a nice way of welcoming yourself into someone’s home,” Babe explained. “Be sure and bring something you’ve made, too.” She might bring a bowl of her homemade clam dip or a Pyrex baking dish of scalloped potatoes—modest 1950’s food. Dad would usually bring a bottle of booze. They always brought flowers, fresh flowers.

  It was unthinkable, impossible, to show up empty-handed.

  My parents had started off married life in Ballard, in northwestern Seattle, where they lived and worked in a two-story shop: Dad sandblasted cars on the first floor, and Mom and Dad and the two kids lived upstairs. (“There was money in sandblasting cars if you did it right,” Babe explained. “And of course Pa did it right. The train ran right through our property day and night. It was a business property.”) Back in the 1940s, they were scraping by, living for two years in an industrial building with aluminum siding until they had the opportunity to sell that building and move out into a cute little redbrick starter house. Today, that industrial loft would qualify as sought-after, hipster housing.

  Later, when I was an adult, I wondered if their generosity was also tinged with a bit of overcompensatory behavior, at least on my father’s part. For someone who’d had such a challenging childhood—his mother was only fourteen when he was born, a mere child herself—he started off behind. So when he arrived loaded with gifts, couldn’t that have helped make a good first impression and pave the way for a warm reception?

  A Croatian friend told me about slatko: in a Serbian home, the host greets guests at the front door, holding a silver tray lined with a lace doily, and offers them a spoonful of rose-petal jam in a glass of water to sweeten the visit. I enjoyed imagining my generous parents, laden with their goodies, being welcomed into such a household, each person sweetening the visit with their own rituals of hospitality.

  Being my parents’ daughter, I, too, learned to err on the side of generosity. Not lavish, “look at me” generosity but—I hope—friendly,
thoughtful generosity. Is it possible to take this generosity business too far, though? A few years back, I tutored a homeless boy, and, although Bobby was in the sixth grade and already sprouting a faint mustache, he had the reading comprehension of a young elementary-school child. However, he excelled in one area: he could draw. Bobby had inherited this ability from his father, an artist who created custom-made medical prosthetics in his garage. When my sister, a painter, learned that the boy I tutored had artistic talent, for Christmas she got him one of those snazzy wooden artist boxes, complete with a carrying handle and stocked with oils, acrylics, and watercolors. When I saw the size of the case, I was afraid it would cramp the tiny room, already crammed with two bunk beds, that Bobby shared with his mom and two sisters at the Salvation Army shelter, and I apologized. “Maybe my sister’s gone overboard—”

  “Overboard’s good!” Bobby grinned. As he walked back into the shelter, carrying his huge wooden case, I swear he seemed taller.

  For Babe, overboard was also cool; underboard, not so much. An unfortunate aspect of this family legacy is that when a guest shows up empty-handed, I struggle not to be small-minded and resentful, as in, How dare she breeze in here without even a tulip for the hostess?

  “Which is probably a little unfair,” says Ed.

  It’s fascinating what family rituals we drag around with us and expect others to know and respect. And, boy, if they don’t . . . Of course, a guest might send something afterward, backloading the experience. But since Babe so enthusiastically favored the frontloading approach, so do I.