Simply perfect

It is no secret that I am battling depression, and have been doing so for the past couple of years. Mine is the situational variety, however, rather than the clinical, although fighting it is still a very tough battle. The author of a column I read recently expressed my feelings better than I can. "How many of us face long odds and struggle with hardship, sickness and despair?" he wrote. "Who hasn't been tempted to surrender to the thought that the hate and pain and sorrow of this life are too great to endure?" Perhaps every thoughtful person wonders about that from time to time, especially during middle age. (As an aside, although it has nothing to do with the subject of this photo and description, I HIGHLY recommend that you read the article in question, which may be found here. But you should probably have a Kleenex handy when you read it.)

I am fortunate to have several things going on in my life to counterbalance the depression. One is my ballroom dancing, which, considered solely in terms of its therapeutic value, may well be the best thing I have ever done. Another is humor. My dance instructor, Miss Angie, gives me some excellent lessons in the former, all of which are liberally sprinkled with the latter. She nearly always manages to make me laugh, apparently without much effort on her part.

I freely confess to being a bit of a nerd. This manifests itself, in part, through my habit of carrying several pens and assorted papers in my shirt pocket. During one dance lesson about six months ago, Angie removed my employee badge from around my neck and took all of the pens and papers out of my pocket. She then set them on a nearby table for the duration, telling me they had been throwing me off balance, or some such thing. The same thing happened the next time I had a lesson with her, and the time after that as well, and soon it became an established ritual. It reminded me of the opening scene in "Branded," a mid-1960s TV drama starring Chuck Connors. (That revelation might date me, but I don't really care; for what it's worth, I am posting this image and story a week before my 55th birthday. So I am old enough to remember "Branded" quite well.)

Eventually I decided to get back at Angie by disrupting her pen-confiscation ritual. On the morning of a day when I had a lesson scheduled, and with that specifically in mind, I went to work wearing a pocketless pullover shirt. During the lesson, I took some pride in pointing out to the instructor that this one was "Angie-proof." She looked it over and asked what that meant, to which I responded that it had no pocket, ergo, no pens for her to confiscate. I had outsmarted Angie at last, and I said "Nya-nya!" to her, just as the studio's owner and manager happened to be passing by. An incredulous Angie exclaimed to them, "Did you see THAT? He nya-nya'ed me!" She got very little sympathy from them, but I don't think she really expected any.

On another occasion, she decided to wear my employee badge around her own neck during our lesson, and proclaimed that she was now the new version of Garry. I responded that she was certainly much better-looking than the old one. We both nearly forgot about that badge when the lesson ended, and if we had done so, Angie would have been Garry for a bit longer than she had anticipated.

Just this past week, there have been several occurrences related to the pen ritual. Just before one lesson, I removed the pens, badge, and papers myself and left them on the table. Angie discovered this about halfway through our lesson, and warned me that this was HER job, and I was not to do that again. I repeated this story to a co-worker the following day, and she said she had the feeling Angie sort of enjoyed teasing me. In the elevator a day or so earlier, another co-worker familiar with the Angie saga eyeballed my pocketful of pens and joked that she was going to remove them herself. I told her she'd better not DARE think of usurping Angie's power and prerogatives, as there would be hell to pay if she did so and Angie found out about it. We both laughed.

All of that sets the background for this image. I felt pretty down throughout most of last week, and I had a lesson after work on Tuesday. I stood there and went through the pen-confiscation ritual, which the studio manager was present to observe. (I was carrying five of them that day.) She and Angie both talked about how nice my pens were, and which ones each of them would be claiming. Then we had our lesson, after which I gathered up my confiscated property and went home.

The next morning, after I finished getting dressed for work, I grabbed my pens and arranged them in my shirt pocket as usual. Then, as I was reaching for the papers I would be carrying in the same pocket that day, I did a sort of double-take when I saw this. It did not move me to tears, or to any kind of deep emotion; but it did touch me inside, and I stood there and spent several seconds looking at it. I knew immediately that Angie had drawn this little smiley-face, right next to a nearly illegible telephone number I had scribbled down on the fly. She had apparently done this during a moment when I was distracted, probably while I was trying to persuade the studio manager not to expropriate any of my pens for herself.

The next time I saw Angie, I mentioned this to her, and she confirmed what I had suspected -- namely, that she drew this little icon with the intent that I would discover it hours later, long after the day's dance lesson was over.

Little things mean a great deal to me, and it is difficult to imagine a smaller or simpler gesture than this one. It consists of three strokes from a roller-ball pen, and probably took about one full second's worth of effort on Angie's part. And it is small enough that a dime will cover it completely. There is nothing profound, deep, or dramatic about it at all, but that is just my point. She had wanted to brighten my day with this simplest of gestures, and she succeeded, as I'm sure she knew she would. Angie knows this student of hers quite well.

One of the best things that ever happened to me was to have Miss Angie as my dance instructor, and I really mean that. She is good to me, and I never imagined that in my mid-fifties, with the arc of my years descending, I would be learning so much from a young woman half my age. Angie has always been honest with me, and I trust her completely. She has never given me the slightest reason to do otherwise. I have told her that her courage and her professionalism, in that order, are the two qualities I most admire in her. In addition to those, she is understanding and forgiving, and on more than one occasion, I have benefited personally from those particular attributes of hers.

Angie is human, and as we all know, to be human is to be flawed. But I can attest that she is entitled to claim personal glory for at least one thing she has done in her young life, although I am certain there are many others. I recommend that she ponder carefully the way she has treated me throughout the 16 months she and I have known each other, for it is quite possibly the closest Angie will ever come in her lifetime to achieving absolute perfection.

Thank you once again, Angie, for all that you do for me -- for everything from this simple little gesture to the deeper lessons of life that I have learned from you, both by precept and by example. And especially for one thing, which perhaps represents the sum of all the others. You have taught me how to soar on wings that, until I met you and you coached me through those first clumsy and hesitant dance moves, I never even imagined I had.