blue room dreamer. . .

Had to brush away a few tears this morning . . . I hadn't expected that.

It was early in the ballet--a schoolday morning, 350+ seventh-graders and their chaperones. Dark, thankfully, since I'm not sure what the students on either side of me would have thought or that I could have explained. . . Tears.

I've always had a soft spot for Ebenezer Scrooge--in black and white, recast as the Grinch, Ebenezer the boy, and Ebenezer the old man shivering in his miser-y. But I did not cry today for Ebenezer, the boy on stage. A piece of me envied his experience--his to live on this stage at this moment in time. Mine only to dream all those long years ago in that blue, blue room . . .

I chart the best memories of my adolescent and teen years--and all the years since--by their music. "Greenfields" was my first love, "Chestnuts roasting . . .," my second (though I would not, until years later, see or taste my first chestnut). But the discovery that was to last a lifetime, the discovery of this thing called "classical music" (I now know I'm a lover of all things adagio), shaped a space in which dreams, however improbable, were infinitely possible.

The first record--long-playing, vinyl?--was a sampler of classics, a TV promotion. I've always thought my mother was the one who ordered it but, of late, I'm discovering Daddy bought things too then, like the aluminum Christmas tree . . . ? The record--just enough to make me so very hungry for more.

More came in the guise of the Nutcracker Suite. Overnight, the clutzy swan of uncertain equilibrium (my mother reminded me of that chronic flaw this Thanksgiving) became a ballerina. I savored those rare moments when the house was all mine--when in the privacy, first of the Candlewood kitchen and, at long last, senior year, the Hardee Road blue room, I danced my heart out. Twirling, twirling, one leg raised to clear a chair back. In my most sacred of dreams I danced the "Pas de Deux" with a faceless partner, someone much like this morning's young Ebenezer.

Tears, but with a smile, for the blue room dreamer . . . for the stuff of which rainbows are made. I still dream improbable--yet infinitely possible, somehow, some way, some day--dreams.