LASS

LASS   AKA   A crack in my wall

We are dancing. Eight of us. Women. Wearing matching sunglasses and smiles. A huge disco ball spins overhead splashing random shards of silvery light everywhere and the thudding beat of far-to-loud music reverberates right through to our very bones but somehow I am finding this alien (to me) environment as welcome and warming as the first rays of the summer’s sun. There is no way to speak to each other with the DJ’s speakers turned up so high but our gyrating bodies and joyful grins easily communicate our thoughts: we are happy. As one song ends and another starts we re-adjust our positions with respect to each other but none of us even think of leaving the dance floor.

Little connects me to any of them; they all work, present or past tense, in the same building as I do but I seldom see any of them on even a weekly basis, am certainly not friends with them, at all, but rather acquaintances, barely, or even less. Their ages range from early 30’s to late 60’s. I just started work there this past year while some have been retired for ages. All, really, that I have in common is that I chose to come away on this annual mystery-destination weekend getaway together with them.

Belleville. I was disappointed a few hours ago when it was announced that that was where we’d be going; just another small town with a large highway running by and huge box stores and fast food restaurants dominating the generic landscape.

And only eight women had signed up to go. Another disappointment.

Yet after a long drive crammed altogether in a couple of cars, a few drinks crammed altogether in one of the hotel rooms, a shared meal crammed altogether in a restaurant booth, and now, this, a visit to a run-down dive of a night club, the sense of belonging that I am starting to feel is enthralling.

I didn’t want to be uprooted from the community I had been living in before. I didn’t want to have to move/live/work here. I resented so much having to be in a new town that I have stubbornly resisted making any new friends, and, despite being frequently included in staff parties and more intimate private TGIF’s I have succeeded in never spending a whole weekend here, in not becoming a part of any part of the community. My life has been straightforward this past year, filled with work, daily routines, weekends away. It has been easy, relaxing, and without a doubt completely stress-free. (But has it been, an inner voice questions, fulfilling? Have you been living life to the fullest? Have you been making the most of each day? I shush this voice, ignore it, tell myself that I am happy with the unencumbered simplicity of it all.)

You can make me move here, I have been shouting to the universe, but you can’t make me like it.

But as we are predominately over-sharers - I as guilty of this as several of them - and as we have in the past few hours divulged to each other, some virtual strangers, a smattering of the details of our daily lives, we are all fast becoming, if not friends exactly, then allies at least.

And the music shifts again and we dance on.

Most of the club’s clientele are far younger than us. Cardable. Several of the girls are grossly obese but, given the short skimpy outfits they are wearing, apparently not lacking in self-confidence. Their hair is died all manner of shades and they display with pride generous amounts of cleavage and exotic tattoos decorating other large expanses of exposed skin. I have no idea what they, regulars I must assume, think of us, here, invading their bar. Do we look as odd to them as they do to us? We are each dressed in our nicest jeans and what we thought a few hours ago were fancy tops, but, which, here, beside their high heeled knee boots and almost non-existent flashy dresses, must look incredibly sedate, almost dour.

There is some sort of promotion going on. Free drinks are being given out along with t-shirts, sunglasses, and other paraphernalia all adorned with the alcohol’s brand name. I expect one is only supposed to receive a single freebee, but we, giddy as kids at a birthday party, have each collected all of the gifts and are delighting in them with the same fascination once associated with loot bags. That explains our matching sunglasses.

Our matching smiles and the spring to our steps are not quite as easy to explain. How can this simple weekend away have so suddenly shockingly liberated us and how can such liberation have so easily led to such exuberance? It is more than merely the few drinks we have had, or stepping out of our regular habits, or even starting to connect to each other, but, rather, I can only assume, the cumulative effect of all of the above. As I fumble for a word to describe the shared freedom and fun we are experiencing two of our group climb onto the stage and dance together showing off their moves for the crowd below and they, silly sunglasses and all, perfectly express, for me at least, our collective abandon.

And this is still only Friday night.

As the weekend wends on it simply becomes more and more delightful. We are a small enough group to do everything together and so we do; long hikes, coffee shop stops, shopping, winery tours, and more. In between we gather inside in the hotel’s lounge in a cluster of easy chairs around a fake fireplace or outside on deck chairs by the pool chatting and eating and planning what to do next. 

It is, I finally decide, irrelevant where we are. The mystery part of our destination barely matters. We could have decided to stay in a hotel in our home town. What is important is how we have actively chosen to spend this time together. When we go hiking we all go (though one woman gets terrible blisters) and when we go shopping we all do so (though shopping is really not my cup of tea) and in between we chat, altogether or in smaller groups or often just in pairs as we walk from place to place.

And we talk and talk and talk.

One woman tells me of her first grandchild (the details don’t matter) and I reciprocate with telling her about my first son (again the details don’t matter) and we stop and look at each other almost unaware of where we are – though the spot of sidewalk on which we were standing will be etched in my memory forever - and though our stories are almost symmetrical opposites of each other they pull us together, like magnets, and the first successful stitch in the fabric of this next chapter of life is finally tightened. This sharing, this bonding with another woman who I am suddenly certain will become a new friend, is as potent as a first kiss between new lovers.

I am starting to fail at not becoming a member of the community. And it doesn’t feel like failure at all.

I still don’t know by the end of the weekend what LASS stands for; Ladies of Arnprior Secondary School? Liberated And Spontaneous Souls? But it doesn’t matter. I know already that I will sign up again next year because maybe, just maybe, the weekend away has cracked the wall I had erected around myself, a crack just big enough to let the first new root sneak through and start to take hold. Maybe, just maybe, I will find a way to fit in here after all.  

And as a postscript, when I next connect with my youngest son, who is paying his way through university by running mystery-destination drinking tours to engineering students, I learn that the last mystery-destination tour that he ran was to the very same bar that I had visited with the teachers on my mystery-destination trip. ‘There was a promotion going on that night too,’ he reminisces. And the treads in my life are forming a pattern that is undeniable.