Old People Stuff

Originally written Saturday, November 19, 2005

Spent all day teaching Patrick. Or actually, he’s at the stage now where I can just let him sit in meditation while I go about my business. I got some midterm exams graded while he was over. Just over a year in practice and he’s already sitting for eight hours on request. I don’t know how single-pointed the meditation is, or if he’s focusing on something else, but the great thing about most Grey Orchid teachings is that the student is really his or her own disciplinarian. He’s (since my only student is Patrick, I’ll just use the masculine) in it because he wants to be, and he’ll be the only one suffering if his self-discipline fails. I’m there to teach the techniques and to coach him into proper body/mind alignment, but he really needs to do most of the work. The martial arts side is, of course, more active. But it also takes considerably less time out of the training day.

In the evening, I went out contra dancing. I invited Patrick to go, but he declined. “I’m not really into all your old people stuff,” he said.

“Two things, kiddo,” I replied: “First, you could easily dismiss everything I do as old people stuff, so really, that excuse just doesn’t hold water anymore. And Second, you’re not really one to talk. If you stick with this curriculum, you’re going to be old for a lot longer than you’ve been young. You’d better get used to the old people stuff.”

“It’s not you,” he protested. “You can be young when you want to. It’s the real old people.” By which he means appearance, of course. I’ll just have to be patient and let him learn to see age and appearance differently on his own.

And anyway, it’s not all old people there. The age range does skew toward the empty-nest crowd, but the standard deviation encompasses a much wider spread. He came with me to a contra dance when we first moved to the area, and he wasn’t really thrilled. For me, however, it’s like a direct line to the past. I’ve been dancing for years, and it’s really fascinating to see how it’s evolved. There’s English country dancing, which is much like what we did long ago and (not necessarily so) far away, aside from the influences it’s picked up from contra, and then there’s contra, which is more casual, more upbeat, more… American, really. I do them both; they each hold their own appeal.

But tonight I was reminded why I wanted Patrick to come back again, even if he doesn’t dance. Thing is, I’m not the only one who enjoys the nostalgia of these dances. They serve as kind of a point of convergence for immortals and amortals of various sorts. A year ago, Patrick was too new to the teachings for a lesson in recognition, and it’s not like it’s part of the traditional curriculum, anyway, but I think he’d be interested now. I mean, when he met Trudy, he had no idea she wasn’t mortal. When he introduced us, I picked up on it right away. She vibes pretty strongly. So I’d really like the kid to come and hone his skills. Not because it’s that critical to his overall studies but because I have the feeling it could save him some embarrassment somewhere down the line when he starts to vibe himself (which he could, even if he doesn’t turn out to be gifted). If people pick up on his old-soulness and he doesn’t pick up on theirs, he could be at a disadvantage.

So the surprise of the evening was that my old friend Richard turned up. It’s only been a couple of years since I last ran into him in New York, but it’s always good to see him again. He’s a wonderful dancer, even if he really belongs in the English country set: he can do contra just fine, but you can tell by dancing with him that he’s trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, as it were. I find myself changing my own dance style quite a bit to coordinate with him. So he’s actually in town for good. He’s taken a job at the American history museum downtown. I’ll probably be seeing much more of him. We exchanged numbers and email addresses, etc. We hope to get together for lunch or something next week.

The other curiosity at the dance was this very unusual man whom I danced with late in the evening. I didn’t see him for most of the time I was there, and then he appeared some time after the break. I saw him watching me from the seats at the side of the room. A couple of songs later, he asked me to dance. He was dressed formally, in a jacket and tie, and had pasty skin, and he seemed to avoid taking my hand when it wasn’t necessary. When the dance did call for contact, he felt cold and clammy. There was no question that he was an immortal, and I was certain he’d picked up on me right away. Only thing was, all the signs were indicating that he was a vampire, but then he said his name was Moshe. That threw me. I never realized until that moment that I’d never met a Jewish vampire before. And then I realized how silly it was even to wonder about that. Why wouldn’t there be Jewish vampires? I was raised Jewish, and I had met other old-souled Jews. Nonetheless, the thought of it—and the novelty of the thought of it—consumed me throughout our dance together (the particular dance had relatively simple steps, and I didn’t have much else to think about, so you know how your mind wanders and you go through the motions and you get a little distracted). I completely forgot to size him up to figure out his risk factor. And goshdarnit, if Patrick had been there I could have assigned him that task. The only other thing I ended up remembering about him was that he couldn’t dance.