No tango tonight for me, I plead poverty. Not really, I’m just too tired after a weekend of dancing. It seems I have just enough energy to blog all week, take two eight mile jogs and attend three milongas. Also, blogging is addicting. I’ve been writing all day and I’m loving it. Probably because it is about my favorite subject: tango!
I said something unkind about my last girlfriend, as a comment on another blog and had to take it back. When I think about why I did that, my initial conclusion was that I’m angry with her. After further thought, the real reason became clear and it is the subject of this post: poverty.
First, let me explain the lavish lifestyle I enjoyed up until January 1st, 2011. Employed as a technician for a cellular network operator, I had a company truck, worked from home and lived two blocks from the whitewater section of the Lehigh River, in White Haven. I had a green, GMC Safari Van that went on all sorts of river adventures with me and my kids. I loved that van. I love the river. I had everything but the girl.
That is a big problem with the headwaters of whitewater rivers: there’s no women there. Especially, ladies my age. Maybe I should say, there’s no sober women there. That’s mean. There’s plenty of sober women there, just no sober women interested in me. So I had to go find them and that’s how I got into dancing tango.
Eventually, I found someone who also enjoyed the river and we employed the ‘Safari Van’ in yet another kind of adventure: the Tango Adventure. This post is not about that someone, it is about poverty, the Safari Van and me. The Safari Van became the ‘Tango Van’ and we put close to 100,000 miles on it, going to and from tango events, over the course of four years.
In hindsight, I should have been taking night classes to get my degree or writing more to establish a literary career. I regret that now, definitely a reason for that malicious remark. I am the proverbial grasshopper who didn’t prepare for winter. Now, I’m freezing and I am mad at myself and, in a moment of weakness, I let a negative comment fly from my fingertips onto another blogger’s comment section. I shouldn’t have done that. I know better but I’m not perfect….so there you go.
Now, let me describe my current state of poverty. I had to rent out my house to cut expenses while I look for contract work. The Tango Van’s transmission blew and I replaced it with a Toyota Prius. When I am not working, I live at my parents’ house, forty-five minutes from the headwaters of the Lehigh River. It’s been two months since my last contract and it looks like I won’t get another job until the beginning of the year. I haven't been on the river for six months:-(
All this has been a shock to my system. It was difficult acclimating to the smaller car from the large van. I always kept spare clothes and shoes in the van and could embark on a tango adventure, or a river trip, with very little preparation.
I miss my house and I miss the river. My canoes and kayaks are all there, as is all my gear. It’s a big house so, the family renting it, just moved all my stuff into two rooms. I miss White Haven, eating at The Family Diner, jogging down by the river, making spur of the moment trips down the rapids of the Lehigh River Gorge State Park.
Now, I live out of my suitcases and blog when I am not dancing tango or working. It’s quite a transformation and sometimes I get depressed. Yesterday, I lashed out. Sometimes, I look back on all the time I spent working on this dance with regret. I was looking for someone to blame.
You don’t make it across 1500 miles of a stormy North Atlantic Ocean in a 40’ sailboat without being able to see things in a positive light. Change is good. I don’t need a big house. My mom cooks about three times a week. Those aren’t meals ‘just like Mom’s’, those ARE Mom’s meals. I have a large extended family and two of my siblings are here. I don’t jog down by the river anymore, now I jog by Mauch Chunk Creek, along an old path that ends up in the beautiful town of Jim Thorpe.
My career had been languishing when I had the company truck. I needed to be free to move and take the jobs necessary to advance my career. I only stayed to be near my children and they are now grown. I am free to move about the country.
Here’s the best part. I love tango. This year I danced all over North and South Carolina and Texas. When I am home, I go to NYC, Philadelphia and New Jersey for tango. Philly is now twenty minutes closer for me than it was before. For me, going to a milonga is like Thanksgiving dinner, a real feast!
But that’s not all. Just like Ronco, when you order now, you get the second knife FREE! Tango, too, has a special deal: friends. This morning, my friend and tango instructor, emailed me to say my comment was hurtful and maybe I didn’t want to have it out there. He was right, I didn’t want to have it out there and I removed it. That’s what friends are for, and that’s a tango friend. That’s what tango people are like.
When I describe an event, I try not to say anything negative because it doesn’t really do the reader any good. All the reader learns from a negative comment is what I don’t like, he/she learns about me and not the event. A positive statement gives the reader something useful for her/him to picture the place/thing being described by me/perri, and that’s of value.
And this is something for all of us to strive for: staying positive. I had an epiphany today. My negative comment did nothing for me and may have hurt someone else. It also marred someone else’s blog and definitely devalued everything I say as long as it was out there for others to read.
No comments:
Post a Comment