Wow, what a day! Okay, I’m going to let myself be distracted a moment first by saying, Lisa, Tina: if only you could have seen all that colorwork on display! Bright silk saris in cheerful fuschia and orange, fuschia and turquoise, fuschia and gold and coral and black, and did I mention fuschia? Reds, reds, reds, orangy-reds mixed with purply deep blues and a flash of teal. Over to the right, blue and purple. Over to the left, resist-dyed bright red with tiny white stars that at first glance looked like Barbara Walker’s Rose Garden lace pattern, as if all our patterns overlap somewhere in space, as if to pronounce, we are universal in our creativity and our humanity.
Bright pink, lime, you name it; down near the stage, weft of sage green, warp of fuschia, shimmering in vertical changes as the wearer walked. Such a glorious intensity everywhere that we so seldom see in our Western culture. Color!
M outshone them all. By far.
We’d been invited to the dance recital of the baby down our street from our New Hampshire days, the adorable little girl whose parents came over and played an evening of Scrabble with us after her family moved out here too; a teen, I think, by the time we ran into them at the Aquarium in Monterey–the time I totally embarrassed her big brother by telling him I remembered him going down their steep (to a three-year-old) old driveway on his Big Wheels. Just what every teenage boy wants so much to be told in public. Right.
We’d visited with the parents since then but the children had been away at college. Now they were graduated and there, and M, long a dancer, had taken to serious study of the religious dances of her parents’ native land. She had studied under a master on two continents.
It was far more than a recital; it was a two hour concert with seven musicians in accompaniment.  The auditorium was packed. As fluid as the river she was portraying here, as determined as the trunk of the elephant there, as graceful as–there simply are no words. M had studied and practiced long towards perfection and it showed. Michelle and I kept glancing at each other and going wow, not wanting to miss a second of it by turning away a moment too long.
At the end her master teacher pronounced that M, too, now, was a master and a guru. She had succeeded.
Her father, taking the podium, wondered out loud at a life’s journey taking such faraway turns: New Hampshire–M totally made my day by looking straight at us, way in the back, immediately as he said that; she had not seen us before the program, but she recognized us–and in their life here in California and visits to way back home. And here we all were together from all these places in celebration of her accomplishments and hard work.
To life!
(p.s. Yes, I finished her wool/silk scarf in time. It is not bright. The colors are quiet. But I think it’ll be okay. And V and V, if it’s not, rat your daughter out for me, wouldja? My needles love to dance.)