Overcurious

Today it is starting to hit me:  the effects of seven days of dancing, over a thousand miles on the road, regular alcohol, lack of sleep and living on the nerves produced by unfamiliar environments.  I am good now for little but words yet good dancing is so rejuvenating.  The problem is, it has taken all those miles to find it.

On the theme of personal questions, I have rarely been asked what I do in the milongas.

During the four days I spent at the Sheffield queer tango marathon not once was I asked what I do.  At the beginning of the first evening, another lady was sitting near me. I struck up conversation, asking her, after a while -  partly because I have the subject in mind for writing - what makes you get up in the morning?  Although I did not intend it, she, understandably, took this to be a British version of that forward question: And what do you do?  She laughed nervously to cover her embarrassment on my behalf.  She was not the sort of whom one asks such things.  She was, I was surprised to learn, retired.  But, with exquisite politeness, she took pains to tell me what she used to do.  I, having appeared wanting in manners, did not want to compound the problem by correcting her as to my intentions:  I really had wanted to know what interested her, generally. So I tried, with equally British embarrassment, to clarify what I had meant whilst trying not to imply that she had misunderstood.  Thus, we stumbled on through this very British dance.  It was not an auspicious start.

During the nearly seven years that I have danced tango, I realise that many of us still have no idea what our friends and dance partners do in life.  We don't tend to ask.  Of those whose occupations I know, I could not, in general, say how I learned these facts.  They tend to be absorbed, like the music, like much in the milonga, like water by slow-growing trees.  I suppose other people mention it.  It strikes me how little relevance this knowledge has and how surprising it can be to learn or recall that someone is Really? A professor? A plumber? A musician?  A tree surgeon?   

This question, when it cropped up in wider society, was fine when I was "doing well" by the general judgement: money, career, flat, meals out, international travel.  But in the milongas now, I am pleased this question is so little asked.  

Recently, a much younger mum I had only just met through school was sitting on the sheepskins in the large chair in my kitchen with a cup of tea.  We chatted as I cooked or washed up and our sons played together.  Curious, perhaps, about this mother in a big house who apparently did not work she must have asked what I did because I remember thinking So I suppose I can ask her now, ignoring the flags that said Don't and Wait and Be patient.  

- I clean, she said. 

- Oh, I said, thinking vaguely of another mum in that part of town who had set up her own business in care or cleaning.  You have your own business? 

- No, she said, quietly. I just clean.

- Oh. I said.  

- For people near me.  For some of the mums she said. And I immediately realised she meant:  at the very middle-class school where my kids recently started, whose parent-organised Hallowe'en party isn't a patch on that of the school that we used to go to, notwithstanding that someone at a posh tennis club called it: 'The one in the 'projects?'  

She continued: My husband is a chef.  He was diagnosed very young with Parkinson's.
- Oh. I'm so sorry.
- So I can do the hours that work for us.
- Yes. Of course,  I said.
- Yes, I like cleaning, she said, quiet and possibly unconscious victor in this exchange.