You can’t tell me that they’re always trying to get somewhere. Most of the time, it looks like they’re playing in the wind. Dancing even. These birds so elegantly bouncing and bounding above. And why wouldn’t they dance, they already have the song.
She never wore a tutu, nor spandex dresses, but oh how my mother could dance. She would teach me on the carpet of the living room floor. It was slower. But when I had mastered the steps, she’d lead me to the kitchen floor, and I barely felt my stockinged feet touch the linoleum. She’d sing along to the boombox, pull me in and spin me out and I knew I was flying. I asked her if she had dance instructors? No, she said. In school? I asked. No. Did grandma teach you. She laughed (sure it was a bit of a dance maneuvering through all those people in the farm kitchen), but no. Then how did you know you could dance? I asked. I could always hear the song, she said, and pulled me in once again.
And wasn’t that belief? Wasn’t that the true art of living? Just listening for the music. Trusting your feet would follow. Believing, one way or another, you were going to fly!
I’m not sure where heaven begins. How high up it actually is… but when I saw the mannequins on the fifth floor of this New York walk up in the fashion district, I thought perhaps, for my mother, it starts right here.
You could say she loved clothes, but that’s not the complete story. She loved fashion. What’s the difference? I would equate it to the comparison of house and home. Fashion is about the design. The putting together. Accessorizing. For her it was not about what she was wearing, but how she wore it.
Certainly no one mistook it for the promised land — the Woolworth’s on Broadway in Alexandria, Minnesota — but when I watched her thumbing through the Butterick patterns, or the McCall’s, on Saturday mornings, when I watched the dream come alive as she swooped her hands from waist to knees, stretched her arms out in the make believe dress, for me I was certain I was in the presence of an angel.
It had always been her dream to be a dress designer. I imagine her now, so easily she bypasses the stairs and floats her way to the upper floor. How joyfully she passes on her heart and knowledge to the young people amid the mannequins awaiting. How she drapes and flows. So elegant. So possible. And they can feel it. Beyond their pin pricked fingers and weary eyes, they are Woolworthed into her sense of magic. And it’s Saturday morning, every day. And they dare to dream because of her. Just like me.
I heard of them long before I ever heard of “sea legs.” I could see them at eye level. I put my hands up like a director holding the camera to keep my mother’s legs in constant sight as she danced and weaved through the hangered racks.
I was near her eye level once we graduated from Herberger’s basement to Dayton’s in Minneapolis — getting into the rhythm of my own “shopping legs.” And never were we more tested than on Black Fridays. Some said the crowds were too much, but not my mother. She saw it as the dance floor being full. Perhaps it was from practicing each weekend in her heels of youth at the Glenwood Lakeside Ballroom. I didn’t always know who was playing in her head. Was it Glen Miller? Tommy Dorsey? But it was something to see. The pulling of the ruffled blouse off the rack. Holding out at arms’ length. The wink of admiration, when yes, it was decided, they were going to dance.
It’s not just today. There are constant crowds of opposition and misinformation. And some choose to plant their feet. But I was taught to listen. To watch. To sway. To see not the crowd, but the dance.
