Booty Shake

There’s some truly bad music in Zumba. This is my favorite example. The music doesn’t begin til 43 seconds in…don’t ask me what the intro is all about. 

There’s a moment at the beginning of Zumba class where I often get a catch in my throat and tears fill my eyes for a second.

I know Zumba is silly. Part of the reason that I get verklempt is that it is so silly, and yet we humans get together a few times a week to do it. We all put on our little colorful outfits, leave our homes, and come to the same spot to do…what? Shake our butts and move our feet in complicated patterns? It’s ridiculous.

I find it touching, this nuttiness.

I’m also so thankful that I can do it. There was a time in my life where I couldn’t move at all without excruciating pain. There was a time I weighed 224 pounds and couldn’t dance for five minutes, much less 55. And there were years of my sister Laura’s life where she couldn’t move her body at all.

So I go out there, colorfully clad and silly, and grin, hugely, as I shake my butt as hard as I possibly can, even though I can never keep up with Jorge, our instructor who seems to have WD40 in his hips. I do it for me. I do it for being relatively pain-free, today. I do it because my sister couldn’t.

I grin because I’m having fun. I grin because I am here now, doing this. And that’s enough.