Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, David Margolick described the pleasures of being 74 with a mother who’s almost 102. This week, Susie Kaufman, who writes the Substack seventysomething, offers this bit of ancient wisdom: Start dancing!
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One Tuesday morning about six months ago, I went to a dance fitness class for older people at a community center in Minnetonka, a Minneapolis suburb near where I live. I thought I was signing up for Zumba and gave myself a figurative pat on the back. “This is hot stuff,” I thought. “Everyone will be impressed that at my age I’m doing Zumba.”
Half a year later, I still have no clue what Zumba is, but it’s certainly not what I do on Tuesday mornings. What I do on Tuesday mornings is Cuban cha-cha and Dominican bachata, with an occasional Brazilian samba thrown in for good measure. I’ve never been to any of these exotic places, but I grew up in New York so I know how the music sounds. I know it’s brassy, thumping, percussive, and irresistible. It was a loud and persistent presence on the Upper West Side of New York in the 1950s. Back then, in a soundscape mixed with sirens and car horns, Puerto Ricans of all ages partied out in the street late into the night.
Middle-class people were fortressed in apartment buildings like mausoleums with vast faux marble lobbies and uniformed doormen. But Latinos were always out in force, sitting on their stoops eating cuchifritos, playing dominoes and doing the merengue up and down those side streets between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue and between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue before all those blocks became the gentrified streets littered with chain coffee shops that they are today.
Latin culture was a huge feature of my life growing up. The women were magnificent in tight-fitting clothes, their eyelashes curled, their lips painted bright red. The men looked at me in a way I didn’t know about. I was small and pale, walking on 83rd Street when I had to go to the post office for stamps, or south on Amsterdam to the local branch of the public library. I was a little scared, but being a little scared was part of the energy of uptown. The year I turned 12, in 1957, my parents sprung for tickets to the Broadway production of West Side Story and there she was, Chita Rivera, flouncing her skirt and singing those songs.
