Come Dance With Me

35 Elias Newman

30 January 2003. Soon I’d be in Honolulu where I’d get a flight to Maui. Now that I knew about Django’s death I was very uneasy about this ‘rememberance day’ that Christabel had said was the purpose of her trip. Such a strange woman — so full of life and so preoccupied with death.

I can never get used to the passage of the self through time and space and the passage of time and space through the self. The years in me surged up like acid reflux to mingle with the travel hours I was trying to digest while the miles lay like a lump in my stomach and half-forgotten songs spun in my head: ‘The stars shine above you,/ Yet linger awhile;/ They whisper “I love you,”/ So linger awhile …’ Along with ‘The Spanish Cavalier’, ‘Juanita’, ‘Herr Oluf’ and other greatest hits.

So what was all this about, this late-blooming love? Why not slide gently and smoothly into old age without all this aggravation? ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said to myself. ‘It happened and you don’t have a choice. And this kind of aggravation is what makes you not dead. Be thankful for it.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’m thankful.’ I leant forward in my seat and cursed the slowness of the plane.