Even though I'm not Russian

Here is one of those writings where I've finished a lovely time, and I feel like describing coats and clovers and cheese and cappuccinos and whatever else, and it is just rather self-indulgent.

I may have started in Ithaca, where I now call home, and I may have arrived in Rochester, where I've been stamping around since I was a child. But riding a bus there made me feel the fresh edge of the travel, as if I were almost across seas and unable to speak the language. Just me and a backpack, observing the world, eating figs from my pocket. The power of associations, huh!

Waiting for the bus in the cold, I wore my Grannie's long dark furry coat (this coat my new prized possession, we think it may be as old as my father, my last name stitched into the lining), like a portable nest that fits on my body, and my bah-sheep ear-flap hat. A young man looked at me pointedly and asked me something I couldn't understand. He clarified and I realized I was just asked if I were Russian, in Russian. "Thought maybe you could have been one of my relatives from Russia" he said, a little abashed, but this tickled me so much that we both laughed pleasedly over it. For me, little exchanges like this are just one of the perks of not having a car.

I got off the bus among the tall buildings and cold blowing trash of Rochester, and walked the few blocks to that fortuitous coffee shop, where the most remarkable four leaf clover and stolen bike story was staged (see the entry dated July 5th or 6th, 2014), and amazingly on the way there found two four leaf clovers. There'd been a little abandoned plot of land that someone had thoughtfully covercropped with clovers, and I thought, how brilliant it would be to find a four-leaf clover there. I usually don't find them when I fervently want one, they show up more readily when I'm a little mellowed out, but I still wished I could.  And with no further ado I found two immediately and carried them to the coffee shop and gave one to Mr Barrista who remembered me, and he smelled the clover in a sweet display as if it were a flower, and wouldn't let me pay for my cappuccino. A cappuccino so light and perfectly amalgamated, lofty foam entwined with buttery espresso.

It was the first time in a long time I had walked into a coffee shop and knew no one. That doesn't happen much anymore in Ithaca, even though I've only been there 9 months now.

I met my mother for a ramble about the public market and was squealing over persimmons ($3 EACH in the Ithaca Weggies, but here $2.50 for 5) and buying zatar and soon hefting around no small load to import back into the pricey land of Ithaca.

The traditional Italian cheese shop was one of my favorites; I could almost pretend I was not in America anymore. All the cheeses were unceremoniously set out on the counter--who needs refrigeration--and the lack of prices and sufficient labels was like being back in a hut shop somewhere foreign. I had no idea how to engage with these cheeses, or how to even begin to choose a cheese. So I asked, hopefully, "What's your stinkiest cheese?", and was taken on a fascinating tour of four different types, little flaccid white slabs passed to me by an eager gloved hand. The first was like eating a soft foot fresh from a muggy work boot, with an Italian name I was all good intentions to remember but have since forgotten; the third was the winner...a nose of fresh grass, a little lemony somehow at first, then ending in rich bitter bliss.

The rest of the weekend was being ferried around in the cars of old friends I love dearly, people who have known me over half my life, going from concert to house party, farm house sleepover to cookie making project, cookie party to Thai food dinner....the weekend warming and woven together by food and friends.

What wonder that the magic of travel and feeling somewhere freshly could be combined with the comforting standard of old friends.

Dancing Through Winter. A study in form and function.

These days of flat gray cold leave me feeling flimsily susceptible to weather-influenced soul grayness. I don't reckon I have Seasonal Affected Disorder full blown, but I get that unsettling neutralizing of energy, with gray fading to darkness at 5pm.

I want to live a life of NOT soul-grayness.

I think I will dance my way through winter.

We go about talking and analyzing, and very often this is the default of how we process and move through life. And maybe we do yoga, slow delicious ways of shaping and stretching our physical capsules and processing living.  But dancing, especially the free form type, or adding spontaneous twirls into a contra dance set form, is a completely unrelated and often untouched way of being a human brain and body. Its like a vigorous self-applied massage. Joy in the human experience expressed. Or an attraction and connection with another expressed. The best kind of dance for me--not always accessible but wonderful when it happens-- is when thought and judgement drop away and it becomes an exuberant meditation. Body moving and warm, unstuck and open.

I've been dancing a lot lately. Swing and blues, dance club beats, organized and coordinated contra. God bless you, Ithaca and your venues.

(Or just my kitchen, solo, the Dishes Dancing Blues.)

I can go to these things with or without a partner. I've been here just long enough I can show up on a dance floor Friday night and know people and have dance friends.

Or dancing alone. This was happening Friday for a while on the beating blinking pumping floor and then I overheard somewhere, "You should dance with the hot 80s girl", and wondered who looked like an 80s girl. Then my friend Big Ben, who, amazingly went to college with me back when I had less color and no talking and no style, and he said "I was just told to dance with you". Ha! (Big Ben loves telling people how unrecognizable from my current self I was when he knew me in college.)

Contra dancing was last night.

Contra is a fascinating form, because its the sort of dance that relies less on self expression and more on a moderated structure. Which means it draws all sorts of characters, especially those who may feel a little self-consciousness about the inner spontaneous movement sense, attractive to people who love mathematics and engineering. I say this because I ask my partners what they do, and its very often engineering or complex biological sciences or the like. The swings and do-see-dos that repeat and move the room of bodies along in a pleasing pattern, all to 8-beat lines of bright music. I love it.

Contra is also an amazing study in types of dancers. The following is only a partial compendium, but I wish to share with you a few profiles.

Sweating Ecstatic Men. These are ones so thrilled to be part of this music and movement, they add aerobic embellishments to their dance, working themselves into a joyous frothing frenzy. One asked me to dance and I said yes; "and since I have many shirts I'm going to go get a new shirt," he said and charged off. He changed shirts between every dance he was sweating that much. Stomping like a clogger at every opportunity, hooting "Yeah!" and "Yes!" as the music made a turn to a new phrase. By the end of the night his eyes were wide, his hair like wet ropes on his face; he was so huge and warm and sticky that after going from him to my partner I assuredly transferred moisture. He shouted "YES!" now with a loud quaver in his voice, as if he were transformed with overpowering contra orgasms.

Then you have The Bosses. Old solid men who've likely been doing this for twice my life time. They will spin you in a controlled tight circle, perfectly on beat, never cracking their gravity for a smile, pushing or pulling you to every move so you needn't think. You never mess anything in those dances, floating and propelled in perfect time.

And finally The Young Grinners. College boys, anything from skinny and limp with petrified eager grins, to smooth moving boys who already have shoulders from working out. You both grin with the novelty of all of this, spinning about a room coordinated with all these people and the music.

Ok gray winter: music and endoprhins and Humanity, here I come.