Every Step You Take

Every Step You Take Read Free Page A

Book: Every Step You Take Read Free
Author: Jock Soto
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of wiry horsehair; my velvet loincloth and matching fringed vest with sparkling sequins are a pretty purple. We are carrying smooth circles that never start and never end, beautiful wooden hoops (mine are small and just my size, and my mother’s are bigger, just right for her) made by my grandfather.
    As we begin to move through our dance steps, holding our hoops, my mother and I become another set of hoops. We roll, separate but connected, inside the heat and the light and inside the irresistible beat of my grandfather’s drum and the sound of his voice as he chants a long, special song. We gather momentum and unity as we move; the surrounding light and colors and all of the familiar smells—horsehair, leather, dust, hot clay—become one with our movement and the drumbeat and my grandfather’s voice. I notice from the corner of my eye that even the sunlight is dancing with us now, its shadow feet rushing to match the movement of every step we take, meeting us toe-to-toe with perfect timing.
    I am dancing with my mother and I am only three, but already I can feel the thrill and the power of surrendering to the sum of our partnership with each other and with everything in this moment in time. I am her son, she is my sun, I am a small moon in her happy orbit. Every time we dance it is like this—we spin ourselves a brand-new universe.
    Whenever I dive into the murk of my childhood years, the earliest artifact I can bring back to the surface is this memory of my mother teaching me the traditional Navajo hoop dance. As memories go, my childhood pas de deux with Mom is always easy to find—in fact, over the years it has revisited me often, bringing with it sensations so vivid and visceral they register more like a current than a recollected experience. On March 28, 2008, as I sit in an uncomfortable wooden pew in a small chapel in Colorado Springs and try to listen to the rent-a-priest who is speaking at my mother’s memorial service, the memory comes to me once more—this time in an act of emotional rescue.
    My beautiful mother—Josephine Towne Soto—has died. But as the gray minutes roll past and the priest at the front of the chapel drones on, my beautiful mother is still dancing with me in a world of bright light and vivid colors. We are moving across the hard-packed earth in front of my grandpa Bud and grandma Rachel’s hogan on the Navajo Reservation in Chinle, Arizona, on a day four decades ago, but we are also dancing through the fluid dimension of time, on a platform that is both of and above the world we usually inhabit. This is what the two of us always have done together; this is what we always will do. My mother was my very first dance partner, and as I close my eyes and ears to the grim little gathering that surrounds me, it is a great relief to know that I will be dancing with her forever.
    Only two weeks have passed since the moment when my brother, Kiko, called me, as I was headed to teach my partnering class at the School of American Ballet in New York, to say I’d better come back to Colorado Springs, where Mom had been admitted to hospice care several weeks earlier. We have been through many tough times since our mother was diagnosed with cancer five years ago—but nothing could have prepared me for these final weeks, when every twenty-four hours seemed to bring brutal new diminishments of her autonomy. For me the visual and emotional horrors of watching my mother suffer a slow and painful death have been compounded by the strange and unpredictable dynamics of our large and unruly family. My mother has always been the powerful and beloved center of that family, both the immediate and the extended branches. Not one of us wanted to let her go. As we all have tried to face the pain of our profound loss, spoken and unspoken feelings have ricocheted like stray bullets among the scattered members of this communication-challenged family. My father has been

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