Dancing through life

Sunday, Feb. 23, is my sister's birthday. We celebrated her birthday Saturday at lunch with old friends, Richard and Linda.

My sister, Gay, has found the fountain of youth and it is ---DANCING!

Look at her here, looking so young. I have not seen her as happy in many, many years. She is in better health, physically, has more strength and endurance. She has inspired me to move more.

Gay has loved to dance as long as I can remember. She was always the best dancer in our group when she was a teen. In college, she majored in dance and was a member of the University Modern Dance Club. She even took a class with the famous dancer Martha Graham when she spent a summer in Connecticut at a dance camp. She taught dance at one time and was a part of the Albany Ballet before she moved out to California. Few people realize how much she loved to dance. But she gave it up and only the past year did she decide to go back to dancing again.

She was always a better dancer than the men she dated and never quite found one who was as good as she was. So now she dances with professional dancers two or three times each week and is on cloud nine. The people at Alpharetta Arthur Murray love her because she makes every new person who comes in feel welcome and comfortable. The owners have thanked her for this effort. I tell her they should be paying her to come instead of her paying for classes there.

The best thing is her husband encourages her to have fun and enjoy this wonderful life she has discovered in her third act. He has gone to a few classes and parties with her.

She recently asked me, "Glenda, when did I start to dance and how did I learn to dance?" I can't answer that. It seems she was always dancing.

Happy Birthday, Gay! Dance, dance, dance!

With her two beloved pups, Smokie and Sunny. They make her happy, too.

I Can't Find Anything Good Enough

Saturday we will celebrate a birthday for my sister, Gay. She doesn't look any older than she did last year at this time, but with the sadness we have shared, she has aged inside, as I have. I wish everyone had a sister like Gay. I am afraid I have taken her love and her caring for granted many times, and I am sorry. She has been my closest confidante throughout my life. She has been a nurturer and a cheer leader for all of us who are close to her, my nieces Lyn and Lee, and their mother, June.

From the time we were young, I admired my little sister. In school, although a shy person, she played clarinet in the band and made majorette, one of the cutest ever seen at Albany High.

Majorette for Albany High School Band

She always had my back. We were so close that sometimes my brothers thought of us as one person. If I gave an opinion in a discussion, they assumed Gay held the same position, and vice versa. But we are two separate people with different lives and different ideas about many subjects. I often ask her advice.

Gay is an artist with talent in several areas of the arts. I have her pet portraits hanging on my walls. I have one of her sculptures on a table in my living room. I have published one of her stories on my blog. Gay loved to dance and earned a special degree with emphasis on Modern Dance. She sings in the choir at church and one of my brothers once said she had the best voice of any of the seven of us. That was a large compliment as my brothers sang professionally at one time.

Gay is the one in the middle as they dance on the campus at UGA

As I think about her birthday coming up, I think how bereft of joy our lives would have been if she had not survived pneumonia that threatened her life when she was an infant. She was the last baby, but was not spoiled. June, who was old enough to be Gay's mother, said she wouldn't take a million dollars for this baby.

Gay Council 

I was never lonely growing up because I had Gay. We shared a bedroom, double-dated, and I changed colleges to go to her school. We even shared a room at the university. Together we could accomplish anything, and we have some family stories about our working together. 

The tall one is me, and Gay is the small one .

When doctors gave up on Mother after her stroke and recommended we find a place for her in a nursing home, Gay and I would not. My sweet sister left her husband in Cincinnati to come and be a round-the-clock caregiver. She stayed a month. I lived close by and continued my part time job, but came every afternoon to help Gay. Because we brought her home and worked with her, Mother regained memory she had lost and enjoyed the last ten years of her life surrounded by family. She and my father were together for their 60th anniversary. That would not have happened without Gay.

Mother and Gay 

After Barry died, Gay was there for me at all times. I don't know how I would have managed if she had not supported me and helped me both emotionally and physically with all I faced.

I watched Gay's same loving spirit as she nurtured June in her last years. She wanted to bring her sister into her home and care for her, but it was not possible, so she spent hours each day trying to improve the quality of June's life. I know June appreciated it. She told me.

How can anyone find a birthday gift good enough for such a selfless, generous, kind and loving person? I don't know. If anyone has any ideas, please tell me.