Never Sit If You Can Dance by Jo Giese

Author:Jo Giese
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

The beauty of learning a lesson and incorporating it so fully that it becomes part of you, as if it were your original chromosomal material, is that you can casually pass it on without even noticing.

On my first date with Ed, after he rang the bell but before I opened the door, I peeked out the peephole and saw a man wearing the dullest beige plaid flannel shirt. (Flannel in August in Southern California?) Although Ed was a lean, lanky six foot three, that limp sad sack of a shirt accurately reflected how he felt: his wife had died fourteen months earlier, after forty-one years of marriage, and I was his first date. After thirty-eight years of practicing law in Washington, DC, he’d made a fresh break to the West Coast to teach at the law school at Pepperdine. We’d been introduced by a mutual friend, Alice Starr.

Alice hadn’t mentioned that Ed Warren was from Kentucky. I’ve always been a sucker for a super-smart man with a charming Southern drawl, the kind of down-home accent that cleverly camouflages the fact that his impressive office in Washington, DC, overlooked the White House. On our second date, after we’d gone hiking, attended what Ed referred to as a “hippie party” up in the hills, and lain side by side on the double-wide turquoise chaise lounge on my deck, and after he’d responded tremulously to my touch—I’d never felt a man tremble when I touched him—and after we’d talked about marriage and our getting married (yes, this on our second date), he asked if I’d help him shop for some clothes. In no time, he shoved aside his Kirkland & Ellis suits (they were in my closet already—we married nine months after we met) and in their place hung linen shirts in a rainbow of sensual colors—mango, pumpkin, ocean blue, rooster red. With his tanned skin, he looked gorgeous in these vibrant tones. Even his Patagonia hiking shirts were now salmon and turquoise.

Ever since I took Babe’s “don’t be drab” lesson to heart, the experience of radiating color, becoming color, happens often, sometimes in the weirdest of circumstances. One morning, a year or so after we met, Ed was scheduled for a colonoscopy, and, after he’d had a miserable night of preparation, I woke up early to drive him to the endoscopy center. To cheer myself up—because, let’s face it, this is a procedure that none of us looks forward to, right?—I reached for the orange jacket with a mandarin collar that I’d just inherited from Mom. It has the sunniest silk lining of fluorescent marigolds, which burst out when the cuffs are turned up.

At the endoscopy center, Ed had changed into a hospital gown and was in bed, swaddled in layers of warmed blankets. I was sitting on a chair next to him when a woman in scrubs and a shower cap padded in and introduced herself as his anesthesiologist. But, before glancing at Ed’s chart, she turned to me. “I love that color!” she said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.