Missing

I have been missing for a long time.  It is that way with me and I have come to accept it.  I drift from time to time, searching, collecting.  I rarely know why or what it was that caused me to be for a while lost but this time the beginning was clear and specific.  I was driving to work a couple of months ago and I heard this:

Well-a hey baby

jump over here

when you do the ooby dooby 

I wanna be near
Ooby dooby

At once it struck me that this was a song akin to The Locomotion and The Hokey Pokey, an anthem or communal celebration of the human condition. 

     I should explain.

     I grew up dancing, not like kids do nowadays, in Miss Whatever's school of dance but in the streets, on summer nights, or in gyms and dark wood wainscoated basements of churches or schools, whose dim, warm refuge made Winter bearable.  It is where we learned to touch each other, gently and with reverence, breathing in the essence of the other, thrilling to the excitement of the expectation of a union in flesh.  It is where we celebrated the mad passions of rock and roll, dancing not with just one but with the sky and the earth, dancing ecstatic in a universe that said yes to our passions that were too fearfully sexual for public touch.  We grew up dancing with each other or watching each other dance.

    We did the stroll together, and the twist, and the shimmy, and the frug and a dozen other dances that came and went.  We were lucky to be so blessed to have rhythm etched on us at so young an age, but much more, to have been together dancing.  To dance together is to make community:  The Ooby Dooby,