Silence the Pianos

I led my dance party's review of the Shim Sham a week ago last Sunday, and the next day something terrible happened. 

One of our swing-dance teachers died. 

We knew she was sick, and we knew she was in hospital. Our priest had said that day's Mass for her, and I told our little group that, too. The night before the party I had prayed the Rosary for her on my knees. 

I knew that she had cancer, and so did Benedict Ambrose. The two patients talked about it together at last month's party. She told B.A. that she was more worried for her husband than for herself, and B.A. told her that he was more worried for me than for himself. But none of us knew she was so close to death.

It was a week before I found out what had happened, for I didn't get around to writing to them to tell them about our Shim Sham review until the next Sunday. The surviving teacher, her husband, wrote that he was glad that we were keeping up with the Shim Sham, and it was a lovely legacy. 

It's so terrible that a lovely married couple who spread so much happiness through sharing their love of joyful dancing are now divided by death. It's unbelievably sad. I'm crushed, and I only got to know our teachers from November.

Of course, I also remembered them from classes I took a decade ago. When I contemplated adding swing dance to the Waltzing Party, they were the only swing teachers in town I was willing to risk introducing to our youngsters. To this day I don't know anything about their religious beliefs, philosophy or politics, but I did know that they were good teachers and had been married for over 20 years. 

It's so disheartening. First, it's an appalling tragedy for the widower, who has lost at one stroke both his wife and his dance partner. Second--or last, in the grand scheme of things, but second for me--my group have lost our teachers. And we weren't taught just dancing: we were shown what a very happy, companionate marriage can look like, even among (whisper it) non-Catholics. We watched a great lead interact with a great follow, and we saw how the two roles complemented each other. And at no point did our kind teachers ever betray that they might have thought we all might be the tiniest bit weird. Au contraire--they mentioned that we were snappy dressers, as indeed we are on Sundays. In fact, I would not  have been surprised to discover that their religion was jazz, their philosophy great pedagogy, and their politics vintage-style clothing.  

Am I ever likely to find such great teachers again? Today it seems unlikely. 

But I will carry on doing my bit to promote social dancing to tradition-minded Catholics because I firmly believe that good music and social dancing has a role to play in enriching and and consolidating the Catholic community. As we all know, Catholicism isn't just for Sundays, and it's not just for inside churches. It's for Friday and Saturday nights, too, and it encompasses not only explicitly devotional activities but traditional music and dancing, too. I just hope I can convince more Catholics of that. 

 

Pilgrimages and Gallantry

Bifil that in that seson on a day, 

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay, 

Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage 

To Caunterbury with ful devout corage, 

At nyght were come into that hostelrye 

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye 

Of sondry folk, by áventure y-falle 

In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle, 

That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde. 

Perhaps I am getting old, but I cannot imagine flirtation on the Chartres Pilgrimage. The morning start is too early, the streets bewildering, the banlieus menacing, the feet soon hurting. The woods are muddy and teem with ticks. Loud prayers, hymns and reflections shout from megaphones. Students assuage the pain with raucous songs. The campgrounds are ludicrously crowded. The pace is incredible. The queues for the portaloos would strike despair in the heart of a saint.

The Chartres Pilgrimage is meant to be penitential, and it is. The more people who go, the more penitential it is, and its leadership, like Europe, seems to be simultaneously proud of and dismayed by the ever-larger number of foreigners who turn up. At any rate, it would seem that Sartre-like resentment has been added to the rigours of Chartres, and Rosbif et Les Autres are being encouraged to stay at home and have our own pilgrimages, t*******, h*****. *

There are already kinder, gentler pilgrimages, and I'm not even thinking about the kind that involve busses, aeroplanes and a superabundance of Old Age Pensioners. I'm thinking of good old (i.e. new) devotional walking holidays, where feet do get a bit tired, but there's a glass of beer at some friendly hostelry at the end of the day. The pace is slower, and nobody shouts at anyone in French. I would like to go on such a pilgrimage myself, but my husband's health prevents it. So far I have only heard about them. 

And one thing I hear is that there is definitely scope for flirtation on such easy-going traditional pilgrimages. Young men who consider themselves of marriageable age survey the teenage girls before them and plan their attack, fall like wolves upon the fold, strike up conversations and introduce themselves. The teenage girls, carefully and tenderly guarded at home or in convent schools, discover that, as surely as if they were introduced at a Debutante Ball, they are now Out. 

This can be good, and this can be bad. It's good because traditional Catholic communities are small and far-flung and members meeting each other on pilgrimage unites, develops, and strengthens them. It's good because young men and women of marriageable age (although for the record I do not consider teenagers to be of marriageable age) should have plentiful opportunities to find a spouse within the Church. It's good because teenage girls need to learn how to handle male attention some time, and pilgrimage is a relatively safe place to do that. 

But only relatively. For one thing, not everyone brings their parents, so there is no natural check or guard upon the behaviour of the young people who are, after all, strangers or near-strangers to each other. A 40-year-old father of six knows that his 15-year-old daughter is too young to be chatted up by a pipe-smoking 22-year-old, but the 22-year-old might not think so. A mother who has prayed all his life for her son to be spared the chaos she grew up in will not be delighted when he attaches his affections to a young convert whose family are the terror of their housing estate. **

For another, some pilgrims are weird. Let no-one doubt my attachment to the Traditional Latin Mass or the communities that spring up about it! I have poured out time, treasure and tea on behalf of the local TLM for fifteen years now, and I demand the right to tell the unfortunate truth that not all Trads are good, Harry. Some--I hope only a few--have ideas about women shared by the godless Boomers who ran communes in the 1960s. 

Were I the queen of the world, I would have a designated chaperone--a woman over 30--for every five young pilgrims under 25. My ideal chaplain chaperone would be quiet but watchful, someone who likes young people and can be trusted with their secrets but also will know when to tell a young man to buzz off and how to tell a young lady without offence to cool it. 

It seems crazy to me that chaperonage--one of the very useful roles of older women--was killed off in or by World War II, when it continues to be so clearly necessary. The fact is that most girls do not leave the home- or all-female schoolroom equipped to deal with male attention, let alone with the ability to discover swiftly what kind of men they are meeting or what kind of homes produced them. There should be a social halfway house, and well-chaperoned events, like pilgrimages, could be it.

All that said, in the absence of properly designated chaperones, there are, I believe, usually older women around on a pilgrimage, and if a girl finds herself unable to cope with ardent male attention, she should ask one of them for help. (Of course, she might also try the priest chaplain.) 

This rule-of-thumb is true for the public street, by the way. Many years ago I was the object of North African gallantry in a bus station in Frankfurt, and although I managed at last to extricate myself, the German student I complained to afterwards asked in bewilderment why I had not simply asked one of the old German ladies around to help me. The reasons were that I was too embarrassed and that I didn't realize then that the OGL were longing to save me from the Young Man of Southern Appearance (to quote Frankfurter "Wanted" posters) and were only waiting for me to say the word. 

Thus, dear young ladies, if ever in over your heads in a social situation, please say the word so that your spiritual mothers can save you. In their absence, shouting LEAVE ME ALONE is known to be effective, as is simply running away. 

*To be honest, these are Canadian French swears. I don't know any France French swears. 

** In case I have inadvertently hit the mark, know that I am not referring to specific individuals. I am  definitely too old and beset by earthly cares to enjoy creating Drama.

August Dance with Jug

Surely I cannot be the only hostess in the world who consistently has more young men than, or as many young men as, young women at her dances. Nevertheless, this seems to be an unusual occurrence elsewhere. And it is too bad for elsewhere for, as it happens, gentlemen are usually the leads and therefore the ones who really have to know the steps. Ladies just need a general idea and the willingness to read directional cues, like thoughtful lawnmowers. 

At any rate, our waltzing teacher was not at all nonplussed when, at 2:30 pm, I presented her with five young men and no women. (Two girls turned up about 10 minutes afterwards, and very glad was I to see them.) She simply gathered the boys up and led them down the floor in British Dance Council-approved fashion. After some time, she turned her attention to the ladies' auxiliary, and we meekly backed down the hall, also according to the strictures of the BDC. Eventually we were asked to form couples, and I could see my partner's fierce masculine intelligence ticking away. How happy was I not to be a lead; thinking while dancing is not my USP.  

For some reason Natural Turn--Closed Change--Reverse Turn--Closed Change is much more difficult done according to Ballroom than according to YouTube. However, practice makes perfect, and it is great fun to watch the boys dance up the wooden floor like the Jets in West Side Story. Meanwhile I am still slavishly grateful to have found a professional ballroom instructor. When she asked if we would like to learn the chassé and the whisk, I trembled but affirmed. 

After our hesitant beginning with the chassé and the whisk, we had a break. Break featured chocolate chip cookies and a plastic jug of blackcurrant squash. Having been caught plastic jug-stealing in the parish hall by my Novus Ordo Opposite Number, this month I decided it was time to buy my own, no excuses. Happily, Tesco was having a sale, so I got a decent one for about £4. 

A short discursion for potential hostesses: one factor in planning dance parties is calculating how few utensils you can decently provide. Having begun my parties in our well-stocked parish hall, I expected always to provide a proper tea-and-coffee set, with biscuits and cakes on porcelain plates and crisps (chips) in capacious bowls. However, when we moved to a bigger hall down the street, I discovered that I would have to bring my own tea-and-coffee set, plus coffee and tea making equipment, and this necessitated a car. My husband and I do not have a car, and although two or three of the guests do have cars, it seems a great pity to get them to drive out to our far-flung neighbourhood more than twice a year.

Fortunately, I discovered that the guests are not very interested in mid-afternoon tea-and-coffee after all. They also do not seem to feel that the use of paper cups for squash betrays the goal of shoring up Western Civilization. Thus, yesterday I was able to pack everything needed for the dance in my knapsack and my husband's wheelchair bag: notebook, pen, donation box, Bluetooth speaker, biscuit tin, squash, paper napkins, paper cups, marker (to write names on paper cups), and jug. 

But I am forgetting my skinny 4-foot-high cardboard box. This was my instructional poster, scrawled out by me on Saturday morning after my Shim Sham rehearsal. Sadly, one of our swing-dancing teachers is sick, so leading the swing component of the dance party fell to me. Like striking up conversations in Polish when you're not, this is an example of stretching your comfort zone, by the way. I highly recommend it for civilization-preserving activities. And, like dancing, the more often you stretch your comfort zone, the easier it gets. 

Anyway, I taped up my poster during the break, and at 3:50 pm I began a half-hour Shim Sham review. It was difficult to gauge how this was going, as I had my back towards everybody, but Benedict Ambrose assured me afterwards that there had been a very energetic and cheerful atmosphere. 

There followed the "Free Dance" period during which there was some dancing. However, there was as much or more sitting about silently or chatting with other guests or with the hosts, if we count Benedict Ambrose as a host, and perhaps we should. Free Dance, by the way, is an excellent opportunity for girls to practise sitting suffering in silence (or making desultory chitchat) while waiting to be asked to dance. I could write an entire and extremely unpopular blogpost on this topic. 

Summed up, my logic is this: if women constantly ask men to dance, men will not ask women to dance because they know they don't have to. And if they don't have to, they will never develop the courage necessary to ask women to dance. (Or, worse, they will stop going to dances altogether because sometimes a fellow just wants to rest, gosh darn it.) And if they don't develop the courage necessary to ask women to dance, they won't develop the easy charm helpful for asking women out for coffee, let alone asking us to marry them. And if men don't ask women to marry them, Western Civilization will tank. 

Update: Meanwhile, there is a number of other reasons why men don't ask women to dance. The music might be too fast for them, or they're uncertain of the steps, or they need to take a breather, or they've just been refused/criticized by other girls and are regrowing their courage, or all the women seem to be in deep conversations and they don't want to bother them. 

As I myself practise suffering in silence at big public swing-dances while waiting to be asked, I notice women of great talent--veterans of the Edinburgh swing-dance scene--rushing about to ask men to dance with them. I have also introduced male veterans to female friends and been aggrieved these men didn't ask the women to dance. Fortunately, this was not true of the last big public ceilidh dance I attended. Boomer and Gen-X men were out in full force, asking women of all generations to dance with them. They were delightful, and they made the ceilidh night a great success.  

Update: To be strictly honest, because I am not at all certain of being asked to dance at big public swing-dances, I don't often go to them. After public swing lessons I don't stay for socials unless I am with friends. There's a lesson for me as an organizer in that. 

As promised, "Ain't What You Do" sounded forth at one point, and I leapt before the poster to lead the Shim Sham anew. The mad lazy license of the "Free Dance" will always be tempered by the stern call of the Shim Sham from now on, so that all guests (and I) will become note perfect. How grateful they will be when, alone and palely loitering in some foreign dance hall, the crowd erupts into the Shim Sham and for 2 minutes and 35 seconds, they will be at one with it. The psychological boost they derive thereby may be a game changer. 

B.A. held court from his wheelchair, from which he had watched the dancing lessons when not reading the Spectator. The dance pro offered to teach him how to waltz using his wheelchair, but B.A. demurred.  

Anyway, although the company was small, the dance was great fun and also highly instructive from a skillset point of view. I am now looking forward to September's party and the return of those currently on holiday from Auld Reekie. 

When I was a Spider

I went looking for emails related to my spider role and was pleased to discover I wrote it up for the Scottish Catholic Observer in 2017. The Guides have now grown up and our TLM demographics have shifted even more, so posting this is really an exercise in nostalgia.  

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Catholic lady without children must be in want of a Brownie troop. So my friend Julienne, the co-founder of the Guides of Saint Joseph, apparently believes. She brings up the possibility at the end of Committee meetings, and I am invited to Guide events. Sometimes Claire, the Guide Leader, just needs an extra adult around, but I suspect that a plot to overcome my reluctance to found the Brownies is afoot. 

When I first came to Scotland, I wondered at Mass where all the young women were. It was a strange quirk of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter’s Mass then that men outnumbered women 3:1. The choir were all men. The servers were (and are) all men. Young university men came on Sundays bleary-eyed from the night before. There were no other single women aged between 25 and 40; my husband-to-be proposed marriage within ten days of meeting me. This was quite nice, and I befriended the single women who appeared later, but there didn’t seem much for us to do. I couldn’t believe my eyes the Sunday a band of girls in navy berets and homemade Guide uniforms came marching up the aisle.  

The mothers had organized something! In my excitement, I suggested to the foundress that the Guides come to my house for tea. Ann, mother of four, smiled craftily and added me to her mental Rolodex. Before I knew it, there were eight Guides camping in our dining-room and two twenty-something leaders in possession of my study. I gave them lectures about Courageous Catholic Women, we fed them dinner on the front lawn, and we showed them the first half of Quo Vadis through a projector on the wall. The next morning, the leaders had the Guides up to do calisthenics and marched us all off to Mass.

The next step was to add me to the Committee. Thoroughly charmed by the girls and their leaders, I agreed to join. I was asked for the first time if I would like to become the future Brownie leader and was invited to go to the Guides’ weekend camp. 

The Guides of Saint Joseph are mad about camping. In the summer they camp for two weeks straight. They camp in all weathers. At this first weekend camp, I ended up on my knees, praying five decades of the Rosary in the mud. Since their French leaders belong to the Scouts and Guides of Riaumont, traditional Catholic devotions are at the heart of the Guides’ activities. 

The girls’ natural piety really warms the heart of an old Canadian Girl Guide like me. When I was a Girl Guide thirty-odd years ago, camping involved passing a copy of The Thorn Birds around a tent. When I helped out with the Guides of Saint Joseph’s summer camp, I overheard two dish-washers discussing the liturgy. I don’t think they know about The Thorn Birds, and they’d be horrified if I told them.   

The Guides had made a kitchen out of sticks, complete with space for the washbasins. By the end of the first week, they had a flagpole, a parade ground with benches, a kitchen, a latrine, showers, and three separate camps, one per patrol and one for the leaders. Their days began and ended with prayer. The campfires—which included songs, skits and dramatic presentations—involved an astonishing level of creativity. I thought the leaders’ play—in which Claire played Robert the Bruce and I played the famous spider---was clever, but the Guides put us to shame. Needless to say, Scottish history and citizenship is also very important to the Guides of Saint Joseph, who gather from all over Scotland.  

What kind of girls do we want to raise? I don’t have children myself, but as a resident of Scotland and a Catholic, I feel I have a stake in this question. If you are what you consume, and if girls consume nothing but pop culture, we may be in for a nation of wannabe glamour models and reality TV stars. Organisations like the Girl Guides of Saint Joseph offer a world apart from the smartphone; indeed they offer a world of camping, woodcraft, history, citizenship, creativity, sisterhood and living faith. They offer an antidote to adolescent angst and boredom. When they last got together, four of the teenaged Guides spent their Saturday dressed up in costumes playing whist, running around outdoors, and then acting out the French Revolution. 

“Did the aristos die well or screaming?” I asked.

“Oh, very well,” said their executioner. “They sang Aves.”

We never did found the Brownies.  Well, never say never, I suppose! 

Hanging in there

I have a dream that one day I will get right back down to the business of writing on a single theme every day. In the meantime, I have been adding "project manager" to my collection of titles. The most recently completed project is a new fence and gate surrounding our back garden. There is also a new patio awaiting a new shed/electric wheelchair garage. 

Eventually I will have to leave a nice message on the "Trusted Tradesperson" site, suppressing my gloom over the state of the raised bed (now an unhappy mass of earth, rubble and distressed blackcurrant bush)  and dismay that the workmen put the large half-barrel of herb garden in the noxious shade. However, I solved the latter problem by appealing to one male neighbour and then another, and between the two of them, they got the rosemary & co. back into the sun. 

This brought our downstairs neighbour outside, and thus there was an impromptu meeting of the building association, as it were, the retired housekeeper and retired ship's cook exchanging enthusiasms over our new gate and the barber shrugging off admiration for his superhuman strength to go back to his pigeons. This little gang is a large part of the reason why Benedict Ambrose and I do not pack it in, get back on the mortgage treadmill, and buy a ground floor flat somewhere. You can't buy good neighbours.

This incidentally reminds me of an old sorrow of my mother's, back when she was in her twenties and thirties. In short, her mother often chatted with her next door neighbour over the fence (was there even a fence?), and so she envisioned talking to her own neighbours over her own fence. Alas, for ten years at least, the neighbours weren't available to speak to. On one side was a housebound very elderly woman and her housekeeper, and on the other a very cranky old woman who didn't like children, until a couple with two jobs but no children moved in and hemmed themselves behind high (to me) wooden slats. 

I often think of this when I put the laundry out when one or another of my neighbours is hanging theirs up.  We generally exchange comfortable remarks about the weather, and how B.A. is, and whether or not it is time again to cut the grass. Mercifully nobody mentions politics, although one neighbour occasionally solicits my opinion of the latest natural disaster (usually forest fires) to befall Canada. 

Another first: yesterday I clambered up a ladder to put up a blind with the help of borrowed cordless drill. I was surprised at how physically demanding this was and also frustrated that my initial measurements were off by a small but nevertheless important fraction. Benedict Ambrose, who showed me how to put the drill bit in, shouted encouragement from the sitting room until he decided he'd better wheel directly into multipurpose room to watch. At last the job was done, and we are another step forward in improving the flat. 

I was hoping to add space and colour to our sad little hall, but that will have to wait.