More things my cats have taught me about ballet

I wrote my first post on this in 2013, mere months after I’d started my blog. I didn’t have a lot of posts or readers back then. I’d feel lucky to get twenty views a day, and I’d savor that number, cheering when it rose to thirty and feeling teary when it dropped to ten views. One day the number hadn’t even hit double digits and I contacted my sister, begging her to visit the site and read a post or two, just so I’d feel like I wasn’t just shouting out into a void. That little blip of an extra eight views that day warmed my heart.

Now it’s 2024 and The Classical Girl gets between 150 and 200 views each day, distributed among my 285 posts. I am both the same person and a very different one. I’ve learned more about life, taken a few hits, like we all have. You can’t emerge from a decade of living as a responsible adult (or even an irresponsible one) without it having altered you, physically and emotionally.

So here is my original Ten Things list and below it, updated for 2024, more things my aging cats have taught me about ballet. You can read the original post in its entirety HERE.

1. Focus before you leap. Don’t just stupidly fling yourself out there. Know where you plan to go and how you plan to land. Engage 100%, in body, in mind.
2. Stretch. Stretch a lot. Stretch extra big every time you yawn.
3. Make your landings sure-footed and soft, your joints loose enough to cushion the landing.
4. Graze throughout the day. Drink lots of water.
5. Be in the moment. Don’t go doing one movement and be thinking about another.
6. Routinely take rests so that you’re refreshed when you decide to move around again.
7. Sudden bursts of maniacal energy as you sprint across the room can be fun.
8. Observe all that goes on around you. Remain perfectly still as you do so. Sometimes it’s more about the stillness, the focus, than the movement.
9. When you get hurt, be it physical or emotional, go find a quiet corner and lick your wounds. Let yourself heal before you throw yourself back Out There. Then, when you are healed, don’t linger. Go throw yourself back Out There.
10. Move for the joy of it. Pour your all into it.

Here we are, now, in 2024, and here’s my latest cat-and-ballet insight:

Everything has a season

Our first cat, Tartufo, lived to a ripe old age of eighteen before passing away in 2016. We’d prepared ourself for the inevitable loss by adopting little Reese a year earlier (see photo above). Natasha, our fifteen-year-old cat, has been the mainstay through all my blogging years, and is still a delight. Tragically Reese, diagnosed with not just kidney disease but cardiac disease (feline hypertropic cardiomyopathy) by age four, only lived seven years. We hadn’t seen that coming. We did our best, taking special care of him, particularly through the two final years (which coincided with the dreaded 2020 COVID era and my father’s passing). It hurt like hell to lose Reese (weirdly, even more than it felt to lose my 94-year-old dad). I grieved for months. I couldn’t bear to consider adopting another cat until six months later.

Insight from 2020: sometimes life hurts. Like, on-fire-inside hurts. Period.

But now we have Thor, and after two years he still tears through the house like a kitten, careening around corners, frequently smashing into the back wall because he underestimated his speed and sliding power (or, more likely, he did it on purpose because he loves being chaotic). He’s fluffy and adorable. Life takes, and it gives. (Another new insight for the list.)

 

A ten-week-old Thor …

And six months later …   

Natasha tolerates Thor. At fifteen, she now knows what she can and can’t do, and it does not include smashing into the back wall after a full-speed gallop. She knows her physical limits. I can tell she wants to jump on the counter, just like she always has, when I enter the laundry room to do the wash. It’s her perch to watch me, and she knows that if she purrs adorably, I’ll give her some kibble. She still comes into the laundry room if I’m there, and recently she shocked me by leaping right up to the counter again. But most days, I’ll see her assess the risks, the counter’s height against her muscle strength, and opt to stay put on the floor, or use a counter with easier access.

My body is sending me the same messages, these days. After ceasing ballet classes during COVID days, I haven’t gone back, much as I long to do that leaping, spinning and extending. I’m thrilled that my body is as healthy as it is — I’m the kind of fanatic who likes to exercise minimum five days a week (even, shhh, sometimes twice a day), but minor issues in the hips, ankles, knees, back, etc, flare up and take much longer to subside than when I was in my twenties and thirties. I yearn to do all the movements, have the same extensions, that I’d embraced in my performing years and beyond, each decade delivering a little less flexibility. Now, in my 60s, I’m like Natasha, assessing the counter’s height, know I have to carefully consider those more flamboyant moves and maybe say “no,” if the body warns me it might not cooperate.

So that’s more for my “more for 2024″ list. Acknowledge your age and recognize your limits. Make peace with how things are and drop the obsession with having something “the way it’s always been.” I’d always thought dancing would be there for me forever. That ballet alone would be how I danced. Now I dance in yoga, dance (at least in my mind) through my hikes in the forest, dance down empty corridors (truth here is that if no one is around, sometimes I do still do that tombé, pas de bourrée, glissade, grand jeté leap) and occasionally I have been known to dance full-out in a rainstorm. (Rare footage from my hilarious-if-I-don’t-say-so-myself blog, “Ten Ways to Spot a Bunhead”)

What’s a bunhead, you ask? Thank you for asking!

Bunhead (noun): an extremely dedicated female ballet student or professional. Derives from “bun” (a tight roll of hair in the shape of a cinnamon bun, on the back of the head) and “head” (that thing humans tend to have on top of the rest of their body).

I’m laughing over the above, both the video and the definition of a bunhead. It brought back lighthearted feeling of earlier years, writing for the joy of it, having less of an agenda as I worked. Less strictly guided by my other muse, the must-craft-a-compelling-yet-marketable-novel-out-of-this muse. I like this glimpse of that younger writerly me, crashing into walls with words and laughing about it. Definitely more Thor than Natasha. And yet occasionally even senior Natasha will frolic about, making these cute little playful-cat sounds as she darts across the living room and evades my grasp.

It makes me realize I might not yet be done with ballet. Nor, I sense, are the cats done teaching me.

      

 

Below are a few fun pics from my “ballet years” photo album, me in my early 20s and dancing with the Kaw Valley Dance Theater in Lawrence, KS. Gratitude and appreciation to photographer Mike Manley, who owns the copyright to these lovely photos.