When We’re Alone, We Dance

Charlottesville

May 20, 2025

I may have already published this post. I think I did so with an explanation that my mother gave me a clipping of this article back in the 1980s. I was so unaware I did not appreciate she was telling me she was this girl (not in realty but in spirit). Now, 40 years later, I understand the article. Because I am alone but sometimes I too still dance.

May 20, 1987: When we’re alone, we can dance

Marin Independent Journal

The little cruise ship was crowded with people, many of them retired, all of them off for three days of pleasure.

Ahead of me in the carpeted passageway was a tiny woman in brown polyester slacks, her shoulders hunched, her white hair cut in a short, straight bob.

From the ship’s intercom came a familiar tune, “Begin the Beguine” by Artie Shaw. And, suddenly, a wonderful thing happened. The woman, unaware that anyone was behind her, began to shimmy and shake. She snapped her fingers. She swiveled her hips. She did a quick and graceful Lindy step – back, shuffle, slide.

Then, as she reached the door to the dining salon, she paused, assembled her dignity, and stepped soberly through. She became a hunched old lady again.

That visual fragment has returned to mind many times. I think of it now as I reach another birthday – at an age where most people would not believe that I still shimmy, too. Younger people think folks of my years are beyond music, romance, dancing, or dreams. They see us as age has shaped us: Camouflaged by wrinkles, with thick waists and graying hair. They don’t see all the other people who live inside. We present a certain face to the world, because custom dictates it. We are the wise old codgers, the dignified matrons. We have no leeway to act our other selves – or use our other lives.

No one would ever know, for instance, that I am still the skinny girl would grew up in a leafy suburb of Boston. Inside, I still think of myself as the youngest of four children in a vivacious family, headed by a mother of great beauty and a dad of unfailing good cheer. It doesn’t matter that my parents are long gone, and that the four children are now three.I am still the faintly snobbish child accustomed to long cars and maids – though my dad lost his money in the Depression and I live from paycheck to paycheck.

Born with a Scottish name, I still see myself as Scottish and conduct myself accordingly – I bought tartan neckties for all my kids in Scotland, and have a kilt pin and the framed crest of our clan. But my Scottishness is hidden to everyone but me: My first husband was German-American, my adopted sons are Irish, my present name could not be more English.

Those hidden selves are but a few. The list goes on.

I left Boston 40 years ago, for instance, but I am still a New Englander. New Englanders are thrifty and hardworking and moralistic and reserved, qualities blurred in me by the passage of time and years of bumptious living in California. But ask me. Test me when the chips are down. I am still a New Englander.

I am a graduate of Stanford, but through the quirks of growing up, I am a Harvard man like my dad. We lived in the shadow of Harvard Yard and were steeped in the musty tradition, academic glories and epic games in the Harvard Bowl. My secret self still sings the Harvard songs, but who would know? I am still the shy child who attended 12 different schools, the romantic teenager who longed for love, the young adult who aspired to social respectability – but whom shall I tell?

Now I go to interviews, attend meetings and write stories. No one would suspect that part of me is the person who prepared to be a frontline journalist – living lightly from capital to capital, shaking governments with perspicacious insights and scoops. No one would know that for a long time I wasn’t a journalist, but a wife.

No one would suspect that in my truest self I am still not a journalist, but a mother, whose highest aspiration is the well-being of her sons. These selves do no show. These selves are not the ones that function in the world that is here and now.

We are all like the woman in the passageway of the ship, in whom the music still echoes.

We are the sum of all the lives that once we lived.

We only show the grownup part, but inside we are still the laughing children, the shy teens, the dream-filled youths. There still exists, most real, the matrix of all we were or ever yearned to be.

Birthdays come and go – some of them big birthdays, with serious numbers.

But in our ears, we still hear “Begin the Beguine.” And when we are alone, we dance.

This column was reprinted in Reader’s Digest in June 1988.