Dancing

Thirty years later, I sit by the fire after a long day feeling rather alone in my battle against life's sharp arrows.  The radio plays softly from the kitchen as I finally put down the day's work and prop my feet up.  Just as my head hits the curve of the chair back, the sweet call of an old song conjures another dark evening, in another dark living room where two young, gullible lovers stood in embrace.  Roy Orbison was crying, and we were swooning.

My husband worked and attended college, I worked days and rarely saw him at night.  His schedule, ever-changing and mine immovable, we almost existed in different dimensions.  Perhaps absence made our hearts fonder.

"You're making a foolish decision!" His dad boomed at him one Sunday afternoon.  "You're too young to know whether she's the right girl for you!
Look at her family! You want to marry into that?" Red-faced, he stormed off as my future husband stared at his feet, too intimidated to talk back.  

My heart ached for him in that moment, and it ached for me, too.  Was I so unlovable and so wrong for him?  Was I right for anyone--what with my family and all.

Others implored me, "Don't you want to wait until he finishes college?"  

No.  I was sure.  More sure than I ever was of anything before or after the day I married him.  I knew we were meant to spend a lifetime together. 

I knew it on Saturday nights when we made out on my sister's couch and then felt guilty about it later.  I knew when his bumbling, awkward ways endeared him to me, pulling him ever-nearer to my heart.  

We did love one another.  We loved wildly and fiercely and yes, even foolishly.  People even told us, "You're being foolish!" while we planned our wedding and started a joint bank account to save for the honeymoon.  My parents seemed to think of my choice as sound, a "marrying up" sort of deal.  His parents, well they never lost any love for me.  

We loved as hard as we could, despite the binds of religion our church imposed upon us.  It was there we met and there that we fell for one another, sitting side by side passing notes during mind-numbingly redundant sermons, spewed from the pulpit in shouts and stomps.  We reveled in our sentimentality so much that somewhere, those notes lie, still tucked away for someone to find and read, and not understand.

Independent Baptists, that's what we were, and how we were raised.  His dad a preacher, mine a deacon.  There our fathers' similarities parted.  We didn't know it at the time, but we were a 1980's big-haired, white sneakered version of Romeo and Juliet--with a Southern drawl.  Never allowed to dance or drink alcohol or go to movies, we, even as teenagers, never tried to buck the system.  We followed the rules as closely as we could--except on Saturday nights of course.  We prayed extra hard on Sundays for the strength to endure temptation, and we loved.

We loved with abandon of all reason, with a kind of insanity that could only come from unspoiled hearts that never considered the pain of being broken.

What is love though, if not the most foolish of concepts known to man?  Yet we yield to it so easily.  We let it wrap around us, pull us close, make us believe in forever.

And so, we stood in our dark living room in Six Mile, nearly 30 years ago holding one another close, gently rocking from side to side to the sweet falsetto of Roy Orbison's  "Crying."  My husband said softly in my ear, "I wish we really knew how to dance."

"Me too." I said back, as Roy Orbison faded into the background and we remained tangled together,  obliviously still swooning to the music.