On October 2, my grandmother would have been 97 years old. She passed away around 3 years ago but sometimes it feels like the wound is fresh from her death. Sometimes it feels like I was just standing in front of my family, desperately trying to get through one sentence at a time as I spoke at her wake.
She was more than a grandmother to me. She lived in our house my entire life. Her kitchen was above my bedroom. Every scrape of the chair, every shuffle of the feet, and every phone call to her sister about a Judge Judy episode, I heard.
And when I went away to college and ended up staying after graduation in Washington, DC, we wrote letters to each other. One week she wrote, the next I did. Sometimes it was a few weeks between our letters due to my self-absorbed self, but always, we kept writing. We did this for 10 years.
And one thing we wrote about in almost all those letters towards the end of our correspondence was Dancing With The Stars. She loved that show with the same passion she once felt for dance.
Those were HER dances. The jitterbug, the waltz, the jive. Those were the dances she loved, the ones she did the night she met my grandfather at a dance hall. The same dances she tried to teach me down the aisles of a Macy’s women’s dress section.
So we would write about the ins and outs of the show. She would tell me her favorite dancers, and I would tell herwho Kim Kardashian was and why she was famous. (which was a hilarious letter to write, let me tell you).
I loved those letters. It perked up any day to have one waiting for me in my mailbox. And although to anyone else, the letters would seem mundane, to me – they were like being back at the kitchen table, with a cup of tea and an Entenmann’s donut and my mom, grandmother and I talking and laughing about life. Those letters were my happy place.
Dancing With The Stars has lived on after her death. And although I could care less about the celebrities, dancers, or scores, I still watch. But instead of writing about it with my grandmother, I live it with my daughter. Her eyes shine bright when she sees the glitzy costumes (though my face is usually a look of horror) and she always asks if she can stay up to watch “just one more” dance.
And every time I let her.
Because in those moments, in the silly world of a reality television dancing show, I feel as if my grandmother is there. And that makes it the most special show ever to me…
