“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 713 (Sunday)– early social

Zills!

Sunday means dance day and this is a good thing. There is the leisurely drive westward down a winding country road with fields and rivers and the adventure of a speed limit that drops from 40 mph to 25 mph when crossing a town line. Sometimes police cruisers are tucked into side streets and parking lots, seemingly waiting for a speeding passerby. At the end of the ride is dance class in a beautiful second-floor space with wood plank floors and natural light. 

We walk with hip lifts in a line while playing zills. We stretch, drill basic technique, and practice choreography with and without zills, and for a bit more than an hour the world beyond the spacious studio doesn’t exist. We interact in beats and steps and zills and combinations, and it is good. After class, it is brief chitchat before we scatter to our separate outside worlds.

After that, the day was blissfully free of obligations. There was the return trip along the winding country road back home to Winston. The little guy seems to sleep more and more, but he is always lively with a greeting when I arrive home. 

Newspapers-dot-com was consulted for additional articles about family members. Old newspapers are terrific for details and stories and were the social media of the time. Wedding announcements included detailed descriptions of the bride and bridesmaid dresses and bouquets. “News” items included who just returned from vacation and where they had been, and who was convalescing in the hospital and who had just gone home from there.

Family two-fer in the news.

My paternal grandmother made numerous appearances in the paper for her roles with various organizations, and the writeup about her funeral in 1965 noted that “Members of the Ladies of St. Anne of St. Joseph’s Church, the Ladies of Fatima, St. Jean-Baptist Society, and St Camillus Guild of this city and the Eagles Auxiliary of Leominster attended the mass.”  

In 1952, there was family double header in the newspaper. The same paternal grandmother was in the paper for receiving a “rose bowl” as the youngest mother at the mother-daughter party held by the auxiliary to Fraternite court, Catholic order of Foresters. In the very next column, Mom’s cousin is in a story titled “2 Youths Hurt in Car Crash,” about their crash into a parked car. The small-town daily newspaper of the 1950s looks a lot the Facebook feed of 2022.