Jasmine and Tango Lessons

For weeks, all I smelled was jasmine. It was everywhere—lining every sidewalk and drifting to my windshield where I’d find it stuck after the rain. It feels distant now, even though it was just a couple of months ago. But I suspect already that Jasmine will always be New Orleans for me, no matter where I find myself next. It will always remind me of those last weeks of my grandfather’s life, and poring over photo albums in my grandparents’ house after he was gone, looking for happier memories to hold onto. Of those weeks drifting between feeling hopeful and defeated and numb. But it will also remind me of the Big Dipper and thunderstorms. Of jazz and hibiscus tea and bike rides and blackberries. Of dancing in my kitchen and finding moments of brightness in places I never expected to find them.

A friend asked me if I ever recognize that I’m happy when I’m happy. I thought about it for a while. We notice the absence of happiness, but we sometimes don’t notice its presence. Sometimes happiness feels misplaced, and it’s hard to make sense of why it feels present in spite of the grief that surrounds it. I like that these things can co-exist. 

The jasmine is gone, and the temperatures have turned suffocating now. The roaches and termites are back. A flying cockroach landed on my arm yesterday. I brushed it off and forgot to feel afraid.

I started tango dancing a month ago. It’s not the obvious choice for someone whose last dance experience was when my mom tried to make me take dancing lessons against my will when I was three. (I’d sit in her lap and refuse to participate.) Tango is danced in what feels essentially like a loose hug. I am not used to being so close to strangers, but it’s remarkable what we can get used to. There is still a version of me not too far below the surface who felt nervous at the thought of holding hands with my classmates during obligatory prayer circles at youth group. I would like to pass her a discreet note letting her know that one day she’ll willingly dance with six-and-a-half feet tall men who are twice her age, and it will be just fine when they step on each other’s feet.

And all of a sudden, I’ve become a person who looks for social dancing events online each week. The tango community is another of these communities New Orleans keeps revealing to me of characters who make no sense together and who make perfect sense together. (There’s me, who you couldn’t have paid $10,000 to take a dance class a year ago, but who read a book on tango in the fall and couldn’t stop thinking about it. There’s the retired carriage driver and former boat maker. The metaphor painter. The electrician. The glamorous 70-year-old woman who flirts with the younger men. The middle-aged mom and her daughter. The avid rock climber who bikes 20 miles a day. How did we find ourselves in the same room?) We look like stiff stilt walkers as we stagger around in circles. But it’s one of those rare things that lives up to the fascination I imagined myself having for it when it was still an abstract. There are tango videos in my phone search history and heels in my closet.

Last week I got a dog that’s almost mine but not quite. Technically I’m fostering him, but I know in my heart I have no intention of giving him back. He’s elderly and mostly deaf and his tongue droops out of the side of his overbite, and you can see two of his four teeth like little tusks, but he has the happiest smile, and no one is more thrilled to see me every day. There is no part of his spirit that is old. 

I brought a peace lily home after my grandfather’s funeral. I come home from work a few days a week to find it drooping, exhausted and defeated. Those days, I pour so much water in that it seeps out on the floor and rolls toward my stove. (It turns out my floor is tilted.) The next morning, the peace lily stands back up, meek and grateful. When I brought Harry home, I googled my plants and found out this one is poisonous to dogs. Now the peace lily navigates around my house from chair to table top, drooping because it knows it’s no longer the priority. 

Harry has this dry cough. Last night his coughing and gagging woke me up, and I realized that I didn’t know what to do in the case of a middle-of-the-night dog emergency. There are emergency vet clinics, right? But why on Earth had I not looked up the location of the nearest one in the safety of daylight and before an elderly dog was sleeping in my bed? (I spoke with the rescue group on the phone today. They think it’s just kennel cough.) I list the beings that count on me the most. And then I make a separate list of the beings I most care about to see if they are the same. I think about the two months Harry spent in the kill shelter and then the rescue before I saw him, learned he was 15 years old, and decided that I needed to get him out of that cage. Is he happy now because he has people who adore him and pet him for hours and because he has free reign of a couch and a bed? Or has he spent his entire life happy regardless of his circumstances? Harry’s spirit and prance is inspiring. Sometimes lately words have felt far away. I climb ropes and dance with strangers and hold Harry instead.

On the Megabus between San Antonio and Austin a couple of weeks ago, the driver casually announced over the speaker, “It’s really windy, so if you feel the bus moving around a lot, it’s not my fault!” I looked out the window, waiting for a wind gust to tip us over into the bridge railings. I got bored of waiting before the Austin skyline came into sight. It’s amazing the things we can get used to.

I had a long conversation with Elijah a few weeks ago about the capacity for awe and why people lose it and why it is that the people I’m drawn to the most never do. There are things worth hanging onto as hard as you can. There are people worth hanging onto as hard as you can.

A person I care about recently revealed in a roundabout way that they aren’t sure if they find writing to be a great or worthwhile ambition. I thought for a long time about whether I’d ever made someone feel that their dreams were insignificant to me. What is the difference between challenging someone’s values and diminishing them? Do you define yourself by what you are in this moment or by what you want most? Where does awe come from, and how selective is awe for those of us who never lost it? Do our questions matter more than our answers?