Imperfect

Friday, January 4, 2008


I am beginning to think that I've taken ballroom dancing on so that I might walk around in the rest of my life in awe of talents that will never be mine. Sure, it takes nothing to settle a hip when the cha-cha music plays slow, but pick up the tempo and I look (I fear) like a wind-up doll. And I can go 60 seconds inside the dream of a bolero before I lose my angles and scrape my heel. I dance with a rising star champion who is half my age and infinitely wiser about all things motion and song. I waltz a waltz with a mid-westerner and feel the impoverishment of my east-coast ways. I slouch sometimes. My chin pushes forward. You are paper, my teacher tells me. And with this dance we need rock.

I want to be good at dancing, shamefully I want this, just as I want to write the one perfect book, the one perfect line, and I'm never in the end satisfied. Equilibrium eludes me most days. Urgency brands me.

5 comments:

grete said...

Dear Beth -

Regarding this urge to write the one perfect book (what is perfection anyway?....): I don’t know if this is a comfort (or indeed you need/want comforting) - but this was my day: rushing around all day to do errands for a son who’s holiday is over, then driving him to the train station, knowing he will not be back till the summer. Sitting in the car on the way home, listening to REM, chest heavy with grief, tears wetting my cheeks. This feeling of loss. My son so close. And now so far far away......

Then. A thought enters my mind. A book parcel has arrived - Amazon being my secret (or not so secret....) passion. Coming home, the house all empty, I rip tape, paper, cardboard, plastic - as a child on Christmas morning (or in Norway - Christmas eve....). A river of books land on my floor. Among them - Beth Kephart - Ghosts in the Garden. I leaf through pages of mysterious pictures, chapters with beautiful names.

The perfect book? I have no idea, the reading is in front of me. But if not the content, the object itself made my day that much brighter......

Beth Kephart said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Beth Kephart said...

Grete —

Oh, I can only feel for you, feel for your son traveling on, the wait for summer.

When we love as much as we ache as much as we do. But aren't we, in the end, more complete people?

There will be letters and calls between now and summer. Stories to be saved up and told over dinner in the not so distant future.

b

lib said...

Beth, Yours - the quest for writing the perfect book, dancing the perfect dance. Mine - the quest for writing the perfect piece of music, singing/playing perfectly pieces already written. HMMM, could it be we're related!! Love you dear cousin!

Beth Kephart said...

We Kepharts stick together—through the perfect and the imperfect.

It is so cool that you visit this blog from time to time, Libby. Thank you!!

  © Blogger templates Newspaper II by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP