I’m not a dancer. Never have been one. I have six weeks to learn so I can dance with my daughter at her wedding reception.
  Formal dancing went out of style when I reached my teens.
  I learned the rudiments of square dancing when I was eight or nine but worried too much about which foot went where when to enjoy it as much as I might have.
  My mother signed me up for ballroom dance lessons sometime after that, but I was shy and uncoordinated and the lessons didn’t take.
  My high school administrators, slow to realize that the waltz and fox trot were no longer the dances most young people cared about in the late 1950s when “doing your own thing” began to take the place of cooperation and teamwork, attempted to give us students a taste of formal dancing. In gym class.
  A few dozen pubescent boys of various degrees of gawkiness, ranging from suave and confident at one end of the scale to kids like me at the other, and a similar number of girls, nearly all of whom seemed more mature than any of us boys, poured onto the gym floor and lined up against opposite walls.
  I think we had dance instructors, although it may have been the gym teachers who attempted to teach us the basic steps of dance.
  A few of the boys and girls danced with their steadies, close and slow and with no regard for whatever step we were supposed to be doing. The instructors broke them up.
  I don’t recall what system the instructors used to get us to choose partners and change off now and then, but a standout memory of that time is dancing for a few minutes with a beautiful, graceful, and gracious blonde a year behind me in school. If I mentioned her name, you’d recognize it from TV and movies. 
  I don’t think I stepped on any toes. It’s hard to get close enough to step on your partner’s toes when you are looking at your feet and holding her far enough away that you don’t risk accidentally—well, you know—touching.
  The only kind of dancing I did later in high school and after was very slow, very close, and with my girlfriend. Neither of us needed to know any dance steps.
  Somewhere along the line, I acquired enough experience that I could dance without extreme fear, as long as the music was simple with a definite beat.
  Rock and roll was and is beyond me. Not because I couldn’t master it if I tried, but because—you may find this hard to believe—I still have an adolescent’s fear of looking silly.
  But my daughter asked me to select the music for my dance with her at her wedding. That was easy. I picked a song that reflects on an older generation watching the younger grow to maturity. The lyrics will fit the occasion.
  Now for the hard part.
  I was pretty sure it’s a waltz, though it was hard for me to tell from memory. I bought a CD and listened to it a few times and moved my feet to it the way I was taught in gym class. Yep, it’s a waltz, a relatively easy step, if you can remember left from right and count to three.
  All I’d have to do is take the CD to Sacramento and practice dancing with my daughter a couple of times, I thought.
  My wife thought it would be a good idea if she and I took a dancing lesson or two before the wedding, so she called Kathleen Moore at Pioneer Dance Arts in Sequim and made an appointment.
  There was a lot they didn’t tell us in those gym-class dancing lessons four decades ago.
  In only an hour, Kathleen had refreshed our memories with basic waltz and fox trot steps and had taught us several fine points in mechanics and in how to look good on the dance floor. With practice, we won’t just look like two people trying to avoid stepping on each other’s feet. We’ll look like a couple enjoying themselves, perhaps with a certain amount of style.
  Darned if it isn’t a lot of fun, too. Maybe we’ll take more lessons, maybe learn some faster dances before I’m too old to make the moves.