Picture

The Waltz

I'm in love with my ballroom dance teacher.

Everything about the way him from the way he hops, shuffles, and glides to how he always wears his dark sunglasses clear from the parking lot through the building and into our studio before nonchalantly tossing them away whispers of an ancient grace. His massive boom box has a bumper sticker on the front panel that says "Life is great when you're Sicilian."

Then there's his NAME, oh, his name. It's ARTURO. Did you ever hear something so classy in your life? He's got this STYLE, this POISE that just rips through the room and bounces happily from the chandeliers and when we're twirling, oh, how we're twirling; my feet are fleet doves and my ruffles are positively everywhere.

As far as I can see he is the perfect match for me except for this one thing: he's eighty-eight, and I just had my twentieth birthday.

Another time, another time, and until then...until then, I think I'm just going to secretly practice my cha-cha into the wee hours.
Picture

Cheap

It occurs to me that the only person who calls me Baby is the guy who sells me coffee in the morning and as I’m walking away and wondering if this is my special cross to bear in life, the intimacy of strangers, he says, “See you tomorrow—" in a way that sounds encouraging, like a pact, a promise.

The certainty is immediately appealing.

"YES!" I yell back to him, but the thing is, life isn’t really so simple because sometimes I don’t get coffee from him, sometimes I go to the fancier place across from the bus stop and pay $3.75 to avert eyes with the beardo who doesn’t even tell me to have a “happy day!” when I walk away, and then I end up spilling it all over angry people’s young children when the bus lurches down the block and I feel like the whitest girl who ever whited with my stupid winter hat with a knit flower on the side that kind of makes me want to die.

But this guy! This dollar coffee guy! I think he may have just won me over. Because have a ‘happy’ day somehow means so much more than have a nice day or a good day or a great day even. I think it means more.

Although I’ll admit I’m wondering now if he accidentally started to say "Have a happy new year" but caught himself just in time to recover.

I think that betrays a certain smoothness of his character that I would be a fool not to admire. A fool not to revisit!

ALL I’M SAYING is we’re in love and we’re going to get married have a million dollar-coffee babies because that's what life is about, love, and reality, and nothing else.