Jive an' Wail

The coolest I might ever have been as an adult was in the summer of 1998. It was the waning years of the nineties when the papers rambled about Monica and the markets raged with online drug stores and supermarkets, a distant time of peace and dizzying motion when the word network became a verb and mindshare became the goal. If we were to experience the roar of the twenties then we had to steal its anthem. Swing was back in style.

I am not really sure how I convinced Amy Chamberlain to take swing dance classes with me. I think it was at a Christmas party when we got into a conversation about whether the animated character, Arthur, was really an Aardvark or a mouse. I was sticking to the mouse concept, but the early work proved that he once had a far less kid friendly proboscis. Somehow after this discussion, six months later we were swing dancing.

We found a small dancehall for classes in a neighborhood that is now called South Beach, but was then the China Basin. (I still don't understand the new name because it is neither south (it is on the east) nor a beach). The place had an appropriate seediness to remind us that swing came out of prohibition, but across the road the new ballpark was being built whose fans would be beautiful yuppies rather than the cold, bitter ones of the Candlestick. It was the last time for us to have edginess and we could dance like we didn't care.

Mercury, the Roman god, is a male, but in my own mythology the goddess for being everywhere at once is Amy. She had the ability to be both flakey and sincere. When you spent time with her you felt like you were in the center of the world, but you were never really sure when she would show up. I like to think that she believed that she could help everyone and almost had enough energy to pull it off.

And she did have such enthusiasm. I had no idea that this petite curly blond was an athletic dynamo. I was about a year from getting into any kind of shape having spent what it seemed like the decade eating at Taco Bell, and did my best just to try to keep up.

We twirled, cherry dipped and pretzel'd. But mostly we laughed.

Shakespeare wrote a sonnet comparing a woman to a summer's day, and if I had to pick a handful of days to be compared to (rather than the usual foggy ones), those four classes would be right in the mix. I wish I had the common sense then to realize that. There are the large moments like family reunions, weddings, and graduations that everyone knows to bring cameras to, but there are also those smaller ones that you wish you could capture and hold onto by something more reliable than fading memories.

We were wonders at turning and much better at dips than lifts. I never got down an over the back maneuver, but when we got caught halfway through a pose and wound up stuck like the board game twister we would just giggle to the dismay of our colleagues who seriously thought they could audition for the next Gap commercial.

The hard thing is that dances are fleeting and so are summer days.

I saw Amy only occasionally after that. A couple of years later we ran into each other at Portland Marathon. I think she had finished, showered, written a children's story, and come back to transition area, by the time I crossed the line. She could do it all.

And that is why it is so hard to find out that she has past. I mean how does someone like that drown? I got the news abroad and the reality of it still seems so distant.

I want to believe that she is out there way ahead – it could be another marathon, it could be Africa, it could be at a friend's wedding dancing – that she is just over the horizon giggling at the wonder of trying to do it all.