I think God has blessed(cursed) me with an incredible appreciation for women. This is what drives the poet in me to words at 5 a.m. when I can’t sleep until I pen an ode to a particularly alluring tanguera. I was told by another river guide, “I’ve never met a man so in love with women!” I think my tango obsession is the natural evolution of my passion for the opposite sex, going from the headwaters of the Lehigh River down to where they nest: in the cities.
Last night I had a dream about a tanguera who has always fascinated me. I was working in a city building, tall, built of bricks. We were in an office, maybe that of a magazine publisher, with cubicles and a foyer with a desk. Every time I saw the woman she was dressed differently. At one point she had a necktie holding up her curly hair in a bun, red sweater, short plaid skirt.
She ask me to get her coffee and we both went. Then she was in my apartment, lying on the bed in jeans and a tank top. It started raining heavily and my front doorway was leaking; water was spraying in all around it. My clean socks were by the front door and I tried to move them away but there were always more. I kept throwing the socks from the entrance into another room. This lasted too long. We had to go back to the office and hadn’t even gotten the coffee yet.
Instantly, we were back in the office. I said I’d get the coffee but my infatuation had gotten it already and gave it to an elderly black man leaning on a counter.
This is the dream of a hopeless tanguero. I’m not actually hopeless, I’m just in a vagabond state of mind. I knew there would be a terrific hole in my life after twenty years of parenting. I filled it with tango but I’m not quite done parenting yet, never will be, and now I’m laid off so I’ve got to ‘rediscover’ my role in the modern workplace. It’ll be awhile before I can settle down.
I think that is why my front door was leaking in my dream: I needed to fix the door before I went back to the woman on the bed; it’s not like I didn’t want to, I was lost in a sea of socks getting wet from rain forcing its way past cracks in the entrance. She looked good. C’est la vie or c’est la reve, in this case.
This is one of the permanent effects of tango: lingering infatuation. I think it stems from the fact that we each see the universe in a different way and therefore, we are each universes unto ourselves. When I dance with another woman, sometimes, but not all the time, I make a connection and am able to see into the universe as she sees it. I probably tap into her dreams and desires as well as her fears and idiosyncrasies.
If I dance with a woman often enough and I'm able to establish that deep connection repeatedly, then I think a part of that woman’s essence lingers inside of me. Sometimes this happens on the first encounter: a good reason to take up tango.
Here is a short essay I wrote on that subject:
When we dance tango, sometimes, not all the time, but often enough
to repeat in hopes of it happening again, sometimes, wisps of smoke from the
ethereal fire of our souls intermingle with wisps of smoke from the
ethereal fire of the soul of our dance partner...then the song ends, the dance
stops and the smoke dissipates. We walk away, affected deeply by the experience
and no longer the same person...trailing a few particles of smoke from the soul
of our dance partner.
So there you go, a look into the mind of a hopeless romantic, obsessed with tango and dreaming of tangueras. This can’t go on forever. Hopefully, I will be able to settle down in a few years and do some serious canoe camping. In the meantime, I’m truly enjoying the ride:-)
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