5 Months on the Road
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.
I have been on the road for over 5 months. I’ve visited 14 cities in that time and will be revisiting a few more in the next month.
There is a lot to traveling and when it began I didn’t really know where it was going or where I was going. Not just in an uncertain sense of what city I would visit next but where I was going in my life. I wanted to lose myself.
I was just starting to deal with the loss of my best friend / girl friend from almost a year prior, I had a lot of emotional baggage tying me down to bad habits in life; with people, with money, with myself and my health.
In these five months I have built a blog on Lifestyle Design and started working on networking and writing for it seriously. I have taken control of my finances and paid down a good chunk of credit card debt that I accumulated last year. I have helped spread the love of dance and the passion for life that it has given me. I have undertaken a serious learning project to create an online business within three months. I have spent many great nights with friends, many days alone in cafes, many hours on planes, buses and trains.
Most importantly I remember going to bed one night after teaching in Cleveland, OH with Joanna and feeling supremely at peace. It was definitely not like that not so long ago.
I woke up at some point about a year ago and I was exceptionally unhappy. I was working long hours and making decent money, traveling to dance a lot on weekends, and neglecting the most important person who I shared my life with. I was drinking too often. I was running from my life. I knew I needed to change things.
It’s almost been a year and change has come.
I have changed and my world has changed. I have found myself.
I am willing to take risks and dive into my days to make them meaningful to me. I am finding a new joy in working, in teaching, in writing. I want to share my passion for life as art, to create my life deliberately and reflectively.
I want to spread the art of living. Through dance. Through words. Through friends. Through sharing time. Through sharing space.
Today I am alive. Tomorrow I will be somewhere else but I’ll have a passion, a purpose, dreams and values that I hold to, that guide my decisions.
Frankie Manning – The Passing of a Great Ambassador
This morning one of my heroes died. He was 94 years old.
Many of my readers know him and for those who don’t his name is Frankie Manning. He was born May 26, 1914 and passed away today, April 27th, 2009.
For many of us in the Lindy Hop community it has been a day of sadness for the loss of one of our elders. Too many of our old timers are gone from us and today we lost one of our most famous, we lost our Ambassador.
In the hours following his death thousands of lindy hoppers around the globe poured onto social networking sites, texted, and left numerous messages of love and thanks for Frankie. There were many postings of clips of Frankie, photos of Frankie and memories of Frankie.
The first time I met Frankie was at Beantown 2002. I had been dancing less than a year and I remember the vibrancy with which he greeted the room and every dancer there. Most of it though is blurry in my memories.
My next encounter with Frankie is almost comical to me. I was sitting on the sidelines at ALHC two years ago (2007) next to Dawn Hampton and him. They were eating chicken wings from what I can remember and as they finished their food I offered to take their empty boxes to the trash as I was throwing away my own garbage. Frankie would have none of it. He waved me off and made his own to the trash can. He was a strong man even in his 90s with so much character. Dawn smiled and let me take her boxes.
Most recently I saw Frankie in Berkeley, CA in February. He was glorious, shooting of jokes and going back and forth with Manu while he recounted stories and talked about various video clips. During his Q&A I asked him what he would like to see in the community now and his answer was basically this, “to carry on, to keep on dancing cause that is what keeps him going.”
Now that has passed away I see the community pulling together to carry on, to keep on dancing. In less than a month we celebrate Frankie 95, the celebration of his 95th birthday. While I don’t know how the event will change in light of his passing it will still be a great celebration of the life of one our great Lindy Hop heroes.
With that I leave you with these short words and footage of Frankie singing along to “You Make Me Feel So Young.”
He lived to 94 years 11 months and 1 day young.
Let us hope that each of us can take that youth into every day of our lives whether we are 18 or 25 or 40 or 94.
Live each day like it is your last.
If you don’t wake up smiling that famous Frankie smile maybe it’s time for a change.
San Mateo, CA – Dead Laptop & Sunny California (4/8)
So my laptop’s hard drive died at approximately 4am the morning of the 2nd of April and for that reason, on top of teaching this past weekend and exhausting myself the prior weekend at Boston Tea Party, I’ve not been capable of getting more Vagabond Cafe posts up.
So, I’ll attempt to start anew from here and then tackle the backlog.
I flew in to San Francisco yesterday from Cleveland, OH with a layover in Charlotte, NC. Now why exactly I flew south a few hundred miles to then cross the country I can’t explain but that’s the way airlines work.
The upside, Charlotte’s airport is now one of my favorites. The majority of the terminals are open and airy with moving walkways lined with plants and windows. The shops are unobtrusive, coffee readily available, and WiFi for free (a disappointment when you don’t have a working laptop).
Most of my flights these days have been a couple hours at most since I’ve basically hopped across the country but North Carolina to California is a coast-to-coast long haul. Five hours in air plus taxi time and I wanted to stretch out down the aisle after about an hour or two.
Another hour in and the parents of the two year old behind me were readily becoming my least favorite people. The child was fine. He was quiet, occasionally whacked the back of the seat but more often than not just had a little wander up or down the aisle. The parents… well I’ll say they were a bit more wearing.
Upside to my flight: extra seat to myself. Downside: only one meal on a five hour flight when I usually eat every two or three hours.
I touched down in San Francisco about twenty minutes late, snagged my suitcase (which is in dire need of replacing), and caught the Bart. As an annoyance to get to the Caltrain from SFO you need to go north on the Bart then back one stop on a different line to Milbrae. If you miss the Caltrain I hope you enjoy waiting.
Lucky for once, I managed to walk off the Bart an directly onto the Caltrain. I pulled out my phone to update my ride that I made the train and low-and-behold: battery dead. Last thing Rye knew, I was at Milbrae waiting for the train.
So while I traveled south on the train, Rye drove north to pick me up at Milbrae. Passing each other in the night, I disembarked at Redwood and not seeing his car walked to the dance venue – luggage in tow. It’s only about an eight minute walk, so I didn’t mind. Thankfully we got a hold of Rye before he camped out for me somewhere I wasn’t going to be. Problem? Not so much.
I hung out at the dance until it closed down then headed back to Carla & Rye’s to crash. I settled in on their incredibly comfy guest bed (memory foam is my friend) with David Sedaris’s memoir Naked and promptly passed out.
