Perhaps I should have expected it. In retrospect, I might have seen it coming. Its not the first time this has happened, after all. But every prior case is pebbles compared to the mountain of this occurrence. I was truly, utterly taken by surprise. And at the same time there was a little voice at the back of my mind, grinning and shaking its head, saying, "this would happen, wouldn't it. This is just my life."
When I moved to Bellingham from Seattle, I experienced it at the biweekly contra dance the first time I made an appearance. "Hello," she said, "I'm Virginia, an old friend of your father's. The man calling the dance up there is Marlin, my husband. If you ever need anything, anything at all, don't hesitate to ask us. We'd love to help you out."
A year later at the same dance, I got stopped by three separate people asking me about my family. One of them told me I looked JUST like a mix of my mother and my father. I told him that yes, that was generally how it worked, and promised to give his well-wishes to both sides of my family.
It happened again one weekend at Dancing Fool, the bi-annual contra dance camp that I have attended studiously for the last 3 years. A member of the band came up to me during the break, asked me how my father was and told me he was a big fan of his, and that it was great to see me out dancing here in the same scene so many years later. At this point I'd grown rather used to it. My father's influence extends far and wide within certain groups; the fiddling, contra-ing, folksy community being one of them.
But these were all incidences of my father's, and occasionally my mother's, networks finding me. In joining the communities they were once so prolific in, I was understandably caught up in the webs of their influences. What I did not expect was the realization that through blues and acro and fusion, through summer dances with strangers on makeshift docks and skinny dipping at circus communes, I have slowly but surely created my own. I have a web. I have a network. And my network, apparently, stretches as far out as Tokyo, Japan.
About a month ago I sent a public facebook message to a blues group centered in Tokyo, hoping that I might find a way to experience this passion of mine while abroad. There was silence for a long while until just last week, when suddenly three separate people replied at once. One of them started private messaging me, and I learned that she was essentially the teacher for blues in the area whenever they could get a venue going for an event. I also learned that she spent a little while several years ago dancing in Seattle. Seattle Washington. My hometown. I asked her about it, and while she'd never been to Om (the fusion place I frequented, it evidently opened just as she was leaving) and I'd missed the closing of Waid's by a couple years, we'd both been to Blues Underground on Fridays on Capitol Hill. And at this point it came as no surprise that we'd met some of the same people, and even our facebook pages showed several friends in common. It was a bizarre experience to reminisce about old dance partners with a woman I've never met in Tokyo. But also incredibly serendipitous, because now she knows who I am, and if there are any dances in the area while I am visiting (I plan to travel around Tokyo a little during summer break) she promised to let me know. At the very least I'd love to meet up with her, it'd be fantastic even dancing with one other person here in Japan. I mean to try very hard to make that happen. I can't wait to dance again!
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