Silent Disco

Saturday evening. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. I’m sixty-five years old and have been single for nearly twenty years. I’ve learned how to live alone, how to shape a life around my home, my friends, my dog, my work. I no longer feel the need for a partner—those days are done—but sometimes an idle Saturday night can still bring on an itchy loneliness.

It’s mid-September, and the sun is setting earlier each day, so I get out my dog’s harness and leash and coax Barnaby off the couch, where he’s already settled in for the night. He looks up at me warily—we don’t usually take a walk at this time—but he grudgingly slides off the couch and hops into the car with me. We head down to Zuanich Point Park, just a few minutes from my house. It’s our favorite place, with its expansive view of Bellingham Bay, the San Juan Islands humped in the distance, and beyond them the faint outlines of the Olympic Mountains. To the east, if it’s clear, you can see Mount Baker’s crown, rising above the foothills.

We arrive about an hour before sunset. I know it will be a good one; the light is already polished, with wisps of rosy clouds to the west. I’m wearing just the right clothes for early fall: light jeans, a T-shirt, a cotton hoodie. We walk our usual loop, past the boats at rest in the harbor, their bare masts stabbing into the sky, hulls creaking in their berths. We pass the Squalicum Boathouse, where I’ve seen so many weddings and parties and reunions. Today it’s quiet. We walk around the park’s broad green field, where a lone kite flyer has put up a rainbow kite, though the breeze is too soft to keep it aloft for long.

It’s been a tough week. Both my parents’ birthdays fell in the last few days. My dad died eight years ago, just months after he and my mom moved to Bellingham. I hadn’t anticipated his demise happening so quickly, or the way he ended up in a nursing home, every organ straining to survive. His last words, after I told him his kidneys were failing, were That’s a little scary. My mom died two years ago, and I’m still struggling—not only with her absence, but with persistent afterimages of her own abrupt and traumatic decline. I want a do-over; I want to make her passing easier, with less pain and more patience.

I’m also missing them intensely right now because, in a couple of months, I’ll be called to the bimah at my synagogue to become a bat mitzvah. At twelve or thirteen a Jewish girl can undergo this ceremony to officially become an adult woman, but in my day girls weren’t normally offered this opportunity—or, if they were, they came from families more affluent than mine. I watched my brothers prepare for their bar mitzvahs, studying with the rabbi for hours and chanting Hebrew passages in their cracking voices, and I told myself I was lucky to be spared from such hard work, until I saw the lavish parties afterward, the showering of cash gifts.

Now, all these decades later, I feel a strong urge to participate in this ritual. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the Jewish rites of mourning after my mother died sparked a longing to connect with my community and ancestors. I’ve had to learn Hebrew again from scratch, starting with the alphabet, then memorize long prayers and their melodies. I’ve been studying for over a year, analyzing my parsha (the Torah portion I will chant); it’s the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel on the eve of reconciling with his twin brother, Esau, from whom he stole his birthright. That night Jacob is beside himself with guilt, fear, and grief. It’s a well-known passage, depicted in many classical paintings as a violent struggle between Jacob and an angel with huge, sharp wings. I’d always understood it as the angel ambushing Jacob and forcing him to reckon with a life marked by deceit and misdeeds.

Barnaby and I walk slowly to the end of the seawall, where the commercial fishing boats dock, their steel hulls and bristling masts all business, nothing like the pleasure boats bobbing on the other side of the harbor. This is where we always turn to head back to the car, but I’m not quite ready to go home, so we sit on a bench adorned with a memorial plaque. Barnaby jumps up and crawls into my lap, his thirty-pound body holding me in place. He’s a mutt, what I call a Heinz 57 dog: mostly Chihuahua and dachshund, which gives him his long, squat profile, but also border collie, German shepherd, pit bull, and a dozen other breeds. He acts most like a border collie, herding me around and making sure everyone’s in their proper place.

“He sure looks happy,” a woman comments as she walks by.

“Yes,” I agree, “he’s a happy guy.”

I notice a woman setting something up in the little roundabout by the fisherman statue, a monument to working people lost at sea. She puts out two sandwich-board signs. I squint to read them: Silent Disco, Join Us! I’ve heard about this: Groups of people gather to dance, wearing headphones that play the same music, but to an outsider, it looks as though they are dancing in silence.

My dog and I get up and walk closer. A girl who’s about twelve is helping the woman set up dozens of flat, wireless headphones on racks, turning them on so they glow blue. She grins at us and yells, “Hi, I’m Elmira!” A few more people arrive, including another lone woman with her dog. We mill around until the woman setting up—she tells us her name is Dana—gathers us into a loose circle.

“We’re here to have fun,” she says. “Be the full expression of yourselves! You can go anywhere or stay right here—wherever the music moves you.”

The sun dips toward the horizon, its light changing to a deeper gold, a hint of red blushing the clouds. We each grab a headset and put it on. Music immediately fills my ears—too loud. I search for the volume knob, and a simple lyric moves through my skull: Breathe in, breathe out, everything that makes you worry, just forget about. . . .

We begin to dance. It’s impossible not to. The other woman with the dog begins prancing along the path, her head tilted toward the sky, and I turn in an awkward little circle. Passersby look at us curiously as we begin to form a dance floor on this lush grass, in this golden hour. Breathe in, breathe out . . . We glance at one another as we move, smiling shyly at first, then widely, connected by the music. It’s somehow different than being in a club or at a concert with speakers blaring at us; the songs enter each person’s body, both private and communal at once.

I go twirling across the grass toward the western horizon, Barnaby following, puzzled. Then I turn to the east to see an almost full moon rising through remnants of charcoal-colored, pink-tinged storm clouds. I tap another dancer on the shoulder and mouth, Look! and soon we’re all looking, pointing to the moon as it inches above us. A new singer in our ears croons, It feels so good to be alive, and we grin and pump our arms in the air, glowing.

More people have joined, and my little dog and I sway with them on this planet that’s constantly turning to its own rhythm, its own song of praise. It reminds me of when I was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and traveled across the country to attend Grateful Dead shows, hooked on that feeling of connection, of transcendence. Back then my body moved easily, swirling through the crowd, dancing with one stranger after another, feeling my individual self dissolve. Now I spend most nights alone with my dog, watching TV or scrolling through Instagram. My body protests this unexpected workout—my knees, my ankles, and some small tendon in my hip squeak and twinge—but I keep wiggling my shoulders, high-stepping along the water.

We’re dancing this strange and beautiful dance in the month of Elul, the last month of the Hebrew year before we turn the page to the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

It’s a month of teshuvah, a time to reflect on the year past and set intentions for the year ahead. Teshuvah literally translates as “return” and often connotes forgiveness: We become a clean slate, we begin again.

I think about Jacob wrestling with his angel, as I frequently do these days, since I need to write my drash, a speech that articulates my personal interpretation of the Torah portion. I’ve been stuck on the first line, which seems so simple yet brings up so many questions: “Jacob was left alone.” There really is no reason for Jacob to be alone on the far side of the Jabbok River. He accompanied his family across the water, and he could have stayed there, safe among them. Instead he waded back to the other side to spend his night on the riverbank. The word for “alone” in Hebrew also means “apart” or “a part.” A state of aloneness requires the existence of something from which you are separated, so when we are most alone, we are also still connected. The Torah is full of such paradoxes.

In an earlier chapter of Genesis, Jacob dreams of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven. But this night is different. Jacob spends this lonely night grappling with a “figure”: maybe an angel, maybe God, maybe simply himself, or—and I think this is most likely—all three at once. He won’t surrender until he is blessed. Jacob must be wounded for the struggle to end, his thighbone wrenched out of its socket. Before the figure leaves him, it gives Jacob the blessing he seeks. Jacob limps out of this terrible night, and when he meets Esau, they fall into each other’s arms, everything between them forgiven. It’s a sacred alchemy: the transformation of damage into grace.

In Marc Chagall’s stained-glass interpretation of this story, a small angel cradles Jacob to her breast while they float peacefully above the shell of another Jacob below. Perhaps that’s what we need most in the dark night, after we’ve exhausted all our reserves: gentleness toward ourselves, along with the knowledge that the dark night always ends. Artist Jan Richardson paints not Jacob and the angel but instead the “tracks and traces left by their feet, the imprint of their bodies on the earth, the map made by their wrestling.” We’re doing the same here this evening, on the grass at Zuanich Point: using our bodies to leave traces of ourselves, our individual movements morphing into connected gestures of beauty. As I turn to the west, where the sun has vanished but left vibrant colors in its absence, and then to the east, where the pure-white moon is breaching the clouds, I know the absolution we seek during the High Holidays must surely begin with forgiving ourselves.

Which seems somehow possible in these fleeting moments in September. The word Elul forms an acronym of a Hebrew phrase in the Song of Songs, which translates to: “I am to my beloved as my beloved is to me.” It’s meant to articulate the deep connection between self and God, but my dad gave my mom a necklace with this phrase inscribed in gold for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. She wore it every day. I almost buried her in it, but at the last minute I snatched it back. I’m going to wear the charm at my bat mitzvah, feel the cool, precious metal against my breastbone as I sing the holy words.

Afterward I hope we’ll push back the tables, and speakers will blare out the “Hava Nagila.” We’ll join hands and do the hora circle dance, laughing and grapevining our feet in perfect rhythm, and someone will pull out a chair, and the crowd will lift me high in it, and I will not fall; I’ll stay aloft, bouncing to the drumbeat, faces raised toward me. This will be the simcha, the joy, that comes from pushing the boundaries of what’s possible even as we grow older and more fragile. They’ll let the chair down carefully, and I’ll step back to the earth, like one of Jacob’s angels descending the ladder from heaven. I’ll be among my people, flushed and out of breath, and we’ll all applaud—not just for me, but for the world we’ve created with our love and attention, a world that’s tender, yes, but also hardwired to survive.

The evening grows cooler, and I zip my jacket to my chin and keep dancing. I feel like a kid, awkward yet unabashed, and I think again of my mother, how she would cup my cheeks in her palms and croon, My daughter, my daughter, in her exaggerated Brooklynese. If she and my dad were alive, they’d be up on the bimah with me; they’d hand me the Torah from the ark, reenacting the passing of the Torah down through countless generations. I would feel the touch of their hands as they placed the heavy scroll in my arms before I danced with it among the congregation.

It’s getting dark now, and my body is tired. I don’t know how long I’ve been dancing, but I can tell Barnaby is over it; he’s frozen mid-stride, with too many people to track, his mom behaving unpredictably. I can’t drive well at night anymore, so I take off the headphones, and the everyday world returns. I hear the sharp cries of gulls and terns who have been singing with us all along; they flock across the water as colors fade to black. I hang my headphones on the rack and turn to watch the others, still moving to a music I cannot hear, dancing easily at the edge of the world.