DANCE

As the magnificent  Molly Ivins’ wrote, You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You. Someone brought you to the dance of who and where you are now, and good manners instruct us that you can’t abandon them for someone you see across the room whom you are sure would make you shiver with new life forever, plus have more money and cable stations.

So who brung you? Right now, in these Trumpelstiltskin days?

For me, it was some plainspoken, decent women who brung me to the dance:, I celebrated forty years clean and sober last week, the great miracle that led to everything beautiful and of value in my life. I mean that: Everything. I lucked into the gift of desperation, an acronym for God that I now share with newcomers. The sober women with whom I’ve danced for forty years now told me that the God I didn’t believe in was the same God they didn’t believe in. Instead, they believed in a higher power that might be called grace over drama, groups of drunks, good orderly direction, the great out-doors. They predicted that if I didn’t drink one day at a time, and didn’t die, I would end up a great old dame who had survived incredible losses and disappointments, but was filled with daily gratitude and amazement. And voila, c’est moi, still a little funky around the edges but transformed into a person of service.

That was one graceful dance partner.

Yes, things are all in decline hereabouts—memory, balance, vision, hearing,  stamina, and let’s not even mention the knees—but not in heart and soul. Plus, not to brag, but I bet I can beat you at pickleball. I went from July of 1986, when my alcoholic insides were laced with electrical hopelessness and fear, to July of 2026, when I periodically have a different kind of dark and radioactive anxiety, but thank God I am sober, and I turn to them what brung me.

What brung me to my spiritual and political beliefs were Martin Luther King and Gandhi and good old Jesus, who spoke of peace and crazy, reckless love, of one human family, of one overarching truth—that goodness and justice were bigger than any bleak shit the White House could throw at you.

Molly brung me to a fiercer commitment to political activism, to an almost spiritual passion for democracy and justice and loyalty to We the People. I find it very hard, without Molly alive, to survive these days with all my f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s, as Salinger’s Esme put it. But Molly is around in my memory, heart, in her books and in the breathtaking light she cast. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness  has not overcome it. It sure feels like it has some days, and then I remember Molly’s words: “Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government, is on the high road to permanent glory.”

God, she could make me laugh, and laughter fills me with bubbly hope. We are not only surviving, we are fighting back peacefully, and overcoming, not just in the polls, but in our activism and fundraising. The sheer number of people dropping everything else to donate and work on campaigns of good people running for House and Senate seats is beyond inspiring. That’s what Molly would be watching.

I watch Trump’s decompensatiom—his growing insanity in the wake a terrible economy, the ICE killings, the catastrophic and unpopular war in Iran—and I remember the end of the story of Rumpelstiltskin, another tale of cruelty, hubris and greed. The newly-crowned queen turns to the good people of her town for help—she has to figure out the impossible, Rumpelstiltskin’s name, or lose her firstborn. And someone comes up with it! They hear him sing it in a bizarre, crazy narcissistic dance deep in the woods. One wonders if it included small fist bumps in front of his body. Someone was there, paying attention, and heard the answer. When Rumpelstiltskin realizes he’s been had, he flies into a rage. In one version of the tale, he stamps his foot so hard that it gets stuck in the ground, and in his rageful efforts to break free, he tears himself in two.

Let me ask you this: Who brung you? Who gave you faith in yourself and life and the human spirit? Was it a teacher, a friend, a writer, a movie, an experience of trust or service or compassion? Remember them, and breathe. We need you on the dance floor.