‘Do you find yourself thinking a lot about your hips lately?’, Heather asks me with a completely straight face and no hint of irony.
It is difficult for a middle-aged man who has not once in his life contemplated his hips to respond quickly to such a question. After a moment’s hesitation, I manage to muster an awkward, ‘Umm …. not really.’
Hips, like gravity and air, rarely become the object of one’s contemplation. They are simply there, until late in life one loses one’s limp by having the right or the left one surgically replaced. Unless, that is, one finds oneself the pupil of Heather’s determined offices.
Heather is not my principle instructor at Indianapolis’ Let’s Dance! studio. But as I lurch toward the conclusion of my ‘Social Ease’ course, she occasionally relieves Rebekah of the Sisyphean burden of teaching me to dance, lending me 45 minutes of her practiced observations and endless patience. It is clear that I am being groomed for ‘Bronze’ level, evident that my dangerous forays onto the wood will not yet be banished on public safety grounds.
They could hardly be more different. Rebekah is all charm and correctness, corralling even my most lethal stumbles back into the realm of respectability by countering them with her sheer grace. Heather is no-nonsense, straight-talking, easy laughter. She almost seems to admire the aesthetic gauntlet that I’ve chosen to run, engaging it in the way a master climber might briefly trot along with an out-of-shape plodder on his way up the outer hills of Kilimanjaro.
Heather is a batting coach. She studies my motions, discerns the point at which they roll off the path and into the swamp of absurdity. With a clever technique here, an X-ray comment there, she manages to teach me in a way that few experts can when dealing with the lump of discombobulated rigidity that I have become in these first forty-eight years.
Heather knows when it’s time to stop teaching new steps and simply to dance in place with me in front of a mirror until I begin to feel what I cannot imagine.
‘So do you find yourself thinking a lot about your hips lately?’. The question momentarily stuns me. As a man of words, I am not often struck so perfectly dumb.
Thinking? No. But are the hips beginning to thaw from the Deep Freeze in which five decades have gripped them? Perhaps.
Heather scatters a compliment here, a telling contrast there, in order to keep my will from failing before my hips break loose.
Hmmm. What does one actually think about hips?
Canter Bridge 
LOL! I wonder why nobody have ever replied this post. One must laugh at oneself. But being sincere, sometimes is funnier to laugh at someone else… umhhh! I cannot stop my imagination at the idea of watching you dancing. I recall one moment, when you were trying to mix a kit of copies for us (your students) in one of our Hebrew* classes. I looked at you. You simply couldn’t manage to make it quicky. I wondered how such master of Hebrew was unable to do that simple thing. I was tempted to offer my help, but I didn’t. The view was a silent uplifting – I confess. Well, there is much more to say here, but “again” I prefer something else. Let me read this post again – and this time laugh aloud. May I?
Cheers,
RINA*
P.D. This confession (and laugh) is out of danger, you have no more quiz for me.