My Tango Diaries

It looks like I will finally be able to rejoin the tango community and start going to milongas again. Hubby has informed me that I'm getting grumpy with all this isolation and it's time to be social again.  Masking will still be mandatory for me since I'm a caregiver, though masks seem to have fallen out of favor in my local milongas. We do have vaccinated-only events and I'll probably stick to those.  Hopefully my nerves won't get the better of me. I haven't danced in so long. I stopped dancing due to illness more than a year before COVID hit. I'm out of practice and not as steady as I once was. I've started up solo practice again and I'll probably start out by going to practicas rather than milongas. Just to get my tango-legs, as it were. I'm hopeful. It's been a long few years. I lost my mother, her mother and then her father. I've lost three tango friends, including my best friend in tango. I think losing my friend Renee delayed me ev...

Long, winding, ranting, and babbling . . . How did I forget how hard it was to get here? To do this? How did I forget how elated I was just to be asked to dance? And then to be able to finish a single tanda without pain? When did the picture of how I wanted to dance become more important than the dance, and the leader, in front of me? It seems lately the stronger the emotional need I feel in the moment for tango, the more brittle and unyielding I become in my experience of it. Granted, it was a hard week. A terrible week. Bad news turning to worse news turning to unthinkable news. Plus, I had run out of the medication I use to control pain - and a clerical error (combined with my own poor follow-up) kept me from getting a refill for another 3 days. It was so easy to forget how bad that feels - it had been months since I'd been in that much pain. It's so hard to do the simplest things in that state. Sentences get disjointed. My memory fails me. Trying to explain to my nurse how...

I write less these days. I'm still thinking, dreaming, and being overwhelmed by tango. The words just don't make it to the page fast enough. Everything seems to be going by me so fast. An entire year has gone by so fast. And now a life gone so fast. Yesterday I got the news that a friend and coworker had passed away. I'd known him for 6 years. Breakfast tacos at 10am, the #5 bus in the afternoons, watching him glide down the street on his bike in terrible weather - routines that formed the fabric of a daily work life. Undone. He's gone and all of those tapestries he was woven into are unraveling. Made worse by so many other routines unraveling at my work. Like every other organization, we're worried about our jobs. Our processes are changing for efficiency's sake. We must all daily justify our worth (and expense) to our organization. No wonder we all feel like unraveling. When people are fearful, it's hard to join together. Empathy seems so risky. We scan th...