Word of the Week - 139

Word of the Week:  CHOREOGRAPHY

First, credit to Jerome Robbins for conception and choreography of WEST SIDE STORY.  The opening sequence has never lost its appeal, likely never will.

This week's word came to me while watching the Golden State Warriors play the New Orleans Pelicans the other night.  Having seen the Warriors throughout last season, including the playoffs and championship, I had a picture of what the court looked like during a game.  With the addition of Kevin Durant to the equation, it appeared to me that a new configuration was being eased into, one with which those concerned had not yet become fully fluent.  Where there had once been two principles, now there were three.  As one of the color commentators seemed ready to declare a team misfire part-way into the second game of the season, I saw the working out of new choreography.  When you go here, then you go there and you'll be ready for this.   Places, everyone.  Rehearsals have just begun.

I find that flux influences my days, flexibility and improvisation are required if one is to keep on one's feet, even figuratively.  It is still choreography, whether or not one is actively mobile.  Colliding with other dancers, with fixed objects, with change, happens.  Would that it happened less rather than more.  We have our routines, our expectations, the pieces of the production on which we depend - our own strength, our wits, our capabilities, all of them mutable.  Aging may bring these variations, this need to regroup regularly, into sharper focus, yet I know they've always been there for me.  A more youthful elasticity may have masked their constancy, whereas they now step boldly from the wings and demand a place on the stage.  The other dancers rearrange themselves with as much grace as they can muster.  They are learning not to grumble.

It seems my actions are all variations on working to make peace with uncertainty.  The phrase, "What fresh hell is this?" is one I utter often.  Not hell, exactly, but still surprising, unexpected.  I think of walls, the bricks hold their integrity while the mortar crumbles.  How to keep it all from falling down.

As words escape me, awareness seems easier to access.  It may be the product of greater stillness or the brain teaching itself new tricks.  A definition of evolution refers to, "the gradual development of something, especially from a simple to a more complex form."  I don't believe it was ever truly easy, we just let ourselves be fooled into thinking it so.  My wish:  the ability to evolve as the situation requires.  There will be new steps to learn tomorrow.

Under the morning sun in Billington's Cove

As The Reading Man awoke on that summer Wednesday, he remembered dreaming of conversations with goldfish.  He must have been under water, for they, plural, swam right up to his face, their mouths opened and closed and they spoke, in English, to him in clear tones unmuffled by water or any assumed lack of familiarity with talking.  What they discussed he could not recall.

With their glowing hues still bright in his interior vision, he opened his eyes to the unaccustomed brightness of a Billington's Cove morning.  As it had some weeks earlier, sun somehow managed to overcome the tradition of fog and damp that made The Cove such a destination for those fleeing the valley heat.  In a shade he knew intimately, stripes and pools of egg yolk yellow inched across his bed, the floor, the walls.  My favorite color, he thought before he took in the significance of this meteorological transformation.  The first warm spell introduced him to communal outdoor movies.  If the tales were true, this one might signal - did he dare to hope? - a town-wide dance.  A dance.

Original art and glowing eggy goodness by Jennifer Bellinger.  Thank you.

He said "thank you" out loud to a universe whose nearest-to-Earth star had altered his vision of the day.  Never one to dawdle when there were places to be, he reached Gloria's as though he was two men, twins perhaps, one who was quicker and more eager than the second, one who believed this was a race he had to win.  He left his imagined, slower self in the dust.

Taking the path to the kitchen door, Mr. Apotienne, at the same time, kept watch on the light-capped sea, coaxing, encouraging it, silently pleading his case for clear skies and off-shore winds.  These were wizardly doings he thought, knowing fully that areas of high pressure and low pressure altered the weather patterns.  It only seemed like magic.

As he stepped onto the small porch, Gloria opened the door.  "What does this signify?" he asked, hands indicating everything within view which had begun to grow toasty as the temperature rose.  "And whatever it brings, will you go with me?"  Gloria, laughing, said she was just about to extend the same invitation to him.  Knowing he'd understand the West Side Story reference, she told him, "There'll be a dance tonight at the gym."  Not a gym, probably a field or cordoned-off street, but a dance all the same.  He was twins again, this time one a sweaty-palmed teen, the other a slightly-less-sweaty palmed man of advanced years but one who was pretty sure he could dance to anything they played.