Skip to main content

Driving, Dancing, Dad


As a daughter who enjoys a deeply bonded relationship with her father, a memory springs to mind now, on the eve of my wedding anniversary; a memory concerning a tradition I imagine might be perfunctory for some, but that for me was anything but: the father-daughter dance. I remember, in the months leading up to the wedding, agonizing over what song we should dance to. Whose idea was it, finally, to choose a song by Alan Jackson? By default, I assume it was my idea, but I can't remember the notion actually coming to me; it's possible he made the suggestion. Really, it seems just as appropriate (emotionally, if maybe not technically accurate) to say that we found the song together, both of us owning the idea equally. My father had been a fan of Alan Jackson since way back. I remember being college age when I first borrowed his album, Don't Rock the Jukebox, and heard Jackson's accented voice and his clever lyrics, humorous and soulful, for the first time. I appreciated his songs, but I didn't follow his music on my own. I leaned toward Patsy Cline later on, then abandoned country altogether for a while. But country was how my father grew up, and some part of it—cornbread and chicken!—was undeniably my legacy to claim, too. The song we danced to was a song called "Drive," and it tells an intergenerational story of parenting and the way a parent and child can feel as a certain exhilarating freedom of control, of transportation, is transferred. The song's narrator recalls how his father taught him to drive—first a plywood boat, then a hand-me-down Ford—and then how he in turn taught his daughters. He imagines the girls, grown, thinking back and remembering with a smile:

It was just an old worn out Jeep
Rusty old floorboard, hot on my feet
A young girl, two hands on the wheel
I can't replace the way it made me feel
And he'd say, "turn it left and steer it right,
Straighten up girl, you're doing just fine"
Just a little valley by the river where we'd ride
But I was high on a mountain
When daddy let me drive

My father taught me to drive, too. We had some mishaps (including barreling in reverse through a closed garage door—don't ask!), lots of stalling on hills when I was learning a manual transmission, but he was patient and encouraging, and the words of the Jackson song capture perfectly how I felt when he gave me these keys to a more independent life. Of course this was always about more than just driving a car, which is why my next big life transition, this shift to being someone with a separate family life (no matter that our nuclear family would never suffer for it), was such an appropriate moment for this particular song. So, this was it. I couldn't recall having ever danced with my father before—though perhaps we did once, at some adult function I attended when still a teen or even preteen—and the wedding would be such a public performance, I decided to sign up for a series of private lessons at a dance studio on Broadway in the West 60s. I used half the lessons with my father, half with my husband-to-be (who, bless him, has two left feet and not much sense of rhythm on a dance floor). It was a series of four Tuesdays, in the afternoons. Our instructor was a young Russian dancer—the kind who was a pussycat, but also very proud of her reputation: she played the role of the strict Russian dance mistress to the hilt. She taught us a modified swing, and I can still hear us counting in fours: right, left, back-step . . . right, left, back-step . . . We worked on a routine that lasted the duration of the song, and at the wedding, nerves perhaps had us leaving out one step along the way, but otherwise the dance was perfect. I am willing to bet that if we were tossed together on a dance floor today and the song put on, we'd have that kind of muscle-memory to carry us through even now. Of course time has passed, and we've both aged somewhat. Neither of us is in the shape we were in back then, and my dad has since had knee replacement, so maybe the actual dancing wouldn't work out as well. It doesn't matter, though. The memory is there: of those Tuesday afternoon sessions we both looked forward to so much, and of the big day, when to be completely honest, the best dance of all was the one I did with my father—all the more valued in being a unique opportunity—a dance to a song called "Drive".

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ships (Westport, CT)

I graduated from high school in 1987, and although I had applied to college (one only, I knew what I wanted) and gotten my acceptance, I deferred matriculation for a year. It was for the best. Teen angst and anger were peaking, I was sick of school, and really it would've been a waste for me to go straight through when all I could think of was living on my own in the "real" world. Well, I got a dose of that. A good dose of what I could expect to do with a high school diploma and—let it be said—a bunch of shifty slackers for roommates, whose only ambition was to get wasted and stay that way all day. Except that I was not a slacker; that's something I never have been. And even if I had wanted to party—illegally, mind you, I was still underage for beer let alone the rest of what was out there to be had—well, there wasn't the time or energy for it. After a somewhat lost summer following graduation, I set about getting a job, a checking account, and an apartment, tryin...

Touch Club

Another experience to come out of my father's L.A. years with Playboy was involvement with a private, membership-based Beverly Hills supper club called Touch. The connections are fuzzy in my mind. I always want to say that the club was backed financially by Playboy Enterprises, but I'm not sure this is accurate. It may have just been that one of the club's owners belonged to Hefner's entourage—being one of the many who made it their business to stop by the Playboy mansion on a regular basis. Or perhaps he (I forget his name, despite having heard it regularly at one point in my life) was a salaried employee of the company, linked somehow to club/casino operations? However it came into being, the Touch Club opened in the early 1980s (perhaps it was the year 1980; it was eventually sold in 1986), and we dined there sometimes, my parents and I; this was always a special occasion I got to dress up for. I don't remember the menu, but based on the intended clientele, I...

Keith Jarrett, Carnegie Hall

It was only last night, but already it rates among my most powerful memories—one I know will reverberate down time's lonely corridors, enduring where the daily slush of logistical life (thankfully) does not. Yesterday contained plenty of logistical craziness, but by 8:00 PM I was seated in the last row of the dress circle at Carnegie Hall next to my father, looking down on a stage empty but for a single piano, a bench, and a collection of microphones wired for the live recording of Keith Jarrett's solo improvisational performance. I have always loved these charged moments of anticipation before a performance, and I expected this concert to be something special—that much more so because the tickets came through a friend of a very dear friend in California, a last-minute opportunity to be seized, and because a love of Keith Jarrett was transmitted to me by my father, and this was a great way to thank him for bringing awareness of this man's music into my life. But this is all...