Ma, That is What My Twenties are For
By: Mindi Boston
Tags: Nostalgia, Memories, Life, Motherhood, Youth

Ma, That is What My Twenties are For

A simple text reminded me of that magical second decade of life.

Photo by Tyler Farmer on Unsplash

It is 9:45 on a Saturday night. I’m nodding off in my recliner like a senior citizen. My iPhone screen lights up. I scroll up and the video message begins to play. A tuxedoed crooner serenades a group of dancers, backlit by the San Francisco skyline. He rattles off a Sinatra classic and then segues into an Italian tune made famous by Dean Martin.

In the far corner, I see a familiar face swaying and dipping in time with the music. Her smile is mostly hidden by her mask, but it reaches all the way to her eyes. They glisten in the neon glow of a silvery moon and a foggy streetlight. Ah, to be young and beautiful again — the magic of your twenties.

We found this park in San Francisco, reads the message. You’d love it, Ma, classic crooners like you enjoy. We toasted our adventure and danced with total strangers! <Insert heart eyes emoji here.>

I start to text my daughter back to be more careful when another dialogue bubble pops up.

Don’t worry, I wore my mask and had hand sanitizer in my purse. Ma, don’t worry — that is what my twenties are for!

My daughter’s early twenties have thus far been about nursing school and work. Within months of her graduation, she was dealing with a global pandemic, unlike anything she’d ever seen. She decided to go where she was needed and ending up in COVID-heavy California. Her entire twenties have been about work and the tragedy unfolding all over the world. Tonight, she’d managed to finally find some adventure, even if it required a mask and extra hand sanitizer.

I’m happy for her, but also sad. I wish her every ounce of magic that she can manage to squeeze out of this confusing world, but I also wish her so much more than what it offers. At her age, the world was my oyster and I was only limited by my imagination. Her world now is so different and I’m not sure I understand it.

In 1995, I stood at the back of the Trammel Crow building in Dallas, Texas. Four jazz musicians played a soft George Gershwin tune, one of my favorites. The handsome carriage driver took a knee, his fare watching from behind Magic, a Belgium draft, and the surrey to which he was attached. The driver proposed right there before the bronze statue of the leaping horse, the neon-lit fountain, and the glitter-eyed spectators. All eyes were on him… and her. She hesitated a moment too long but finally said yes. The crowd, which had gathered and tripled in size, gave a collective sigh. I was sorry the minute I agreed to marry him, but that magical moment was all part of my enchanted twenties.

The carriage driver met me on a blind date, which had not been going so well. My date had offered to walk me to my car but I’d declined and high-tailed it out of the restaurant. A man stepped out from behind a beautiful draft horse and asked if he could drive me home. He had kind eyes and a mischievous smile, so I said yes. He walked to the carriage and offered his hand to help me up. I rode in style back to my 1984 Ford in the far parking lot.

“Only Disney princesses ride in such style,” I said, laughing, thinking the world was such a crazy and wonderful place.

“Aren’t you?” he asked and followed by telling me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. He dropped me at my car and wrote his number on a matchbook. I took it, lit a cigarette with it, but never called.

There were a handful of other dates, most just as terrible as the one before. I wanted an older man who was cool enough to introduce to my friends but mature enough to maybe settle down. I thought I was ready. They mostly thought I’d be an easy target. To my defense, I was anything but easy, I was complicated as hell. I’d dance with a stranger easily but only went home with romanticized storybook characters.

I returned a few weeks later to the same spot with my girlfriends. There was a live band in the center of the large West End complex. Though we weren’t old enough to get into the bars, it never stopped us from getting free drinks. At 20 years old, we had the world at our fingertips — too naïve to be afraid of the dangers that lurked in the dark corners, too brazen to wait for a stranger to ask us to dance, too hungry to stay home and watch TV. I danced with a handful of strangers until I saw him again. He bought me a drink, and this time I gave him my number.

He called the next day. I agreed to ride with him on his tours the next weekend. And then the weekend after. I showed up Friday nights, sometimes with my friends, sometimes alone. We had lunch in the city. We went horseback riding. He taught me to shoot my first gun. He was responsible, chivalrous, and adored me, even with all my peccadilloes. Most of our dates started with me accompanying him on his rounds. We’d pick up tourists and carry them through the sparkling city at night. I learned the route and its points of interest so well that I could give the tours myself, and sometimes he let me.

In my best carnival barker voice, naturally sweetened with a soft native Texan drawl, I’d give my spiel.

“Here is the Sixth Floor of Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald took his shot as President Kennedy made his way down Elm Street in the back of a 1961 Lincoln Continental. Or maybe the shot came from there,” I’d add dramatically, pointing at the rickety wood fence above the grassy knoll. “Rumor is Woody Harrelson’s dad supposedly shot JFK as a mob hitman from behind that small knot-hole right there.”

I loved these nights, the ones that made me feel as if I lived some semi-charmed kind of life.

“As we round the corner, you’ll see the memorial erected by Aristotle Onassis to his wife’s first husband. Here is the Methodist church where Reverend Walker Railey served when he tried to murder his wife in 1987… the Founders’ Cabin… the courthouse we affectionately call Old Red.”

Then, we always ended with the Trammel Crow building.

Fares often stopped there on any given night to dance beneath the summer stars or maybe spring a sudden proposal. Musicians stood, jazz saxophones in hand, ready to serenade that special couple for a few crumpled dollars. One night, a man visiting our city with his mother asked me to dance and held me close, confiding he’d lost his bride of 35 years just the summer before. He told me with wet eyes that she would never forgive him if he didn’t take the opportunity to ask a pretty girl to dance as he had forty years before. By the time they arrived back where we began, they left as friends. My twenties were just magical like that. There would be a lot of dancing with strangers throughout those years.

This was a time before social media or pocket-sized cell phones. People had to meet face-to-face. Strangers quickly became friends, sometimes more. You let go of old relationships more easily without those invisible digital tethers keeping us all connected, which left you open for new and exciting possibilities. Most cameras worked on 35 mm film and they weren’t something we carried around in our pockets. To capture memories, we lived them, then stored them away in our minds for one day in the far future.

There are no pictures of the carriage driver on one knee, my bra-less sundress and long black hair, the tiny diamond in its velvet box. I don’t have photos of my best friends and I dancing barefoot on the city streets with people of all ages and nationalities, from places near and far, of those distant summer nights that keep us warm well into our forties. I barely remembered it at all until I saw the video message from my daughter.

We danced with strangers, I read again and again, smiling to myself.

Long before she left for California or was even a twinkle in my eye, I laughed and let strangers twirl me around a downtown street without a thought about if I was safe or they were sick with something we didn’t yet understand. The street musicians knew my name and we often stopped to perform an impromptu number with them for drunk tourists. The flower vendors knew my face and often handed me a rose for free at the end of a slow night. The bouncers looked the other way because while underage drinking was bad, pretty young girls brought business. And we all looked out for each other because that was just the way the world was back then.

I’m reminded of the stories of my mother’s youth — the scandal she caused in her Midwest town when was the first of her friends to date a black man, the heartbreak she felt for the friends she lost in Vietnam, the new friends she gained in the age of Woodstock and free love. And yet, my world in 1995 was as foreign to her as my daughter’s is to me today.

I remember one night her chastising me for not coming in until 4 a.m. The world isn’t like it was when I young, she told me. My response?

“Ma, that’s what my twenties are for!”

I don’t understand the world where my daughter lives now. Her magic is fleeting and tinged with fatal germs and episodes of Unsolved Mysteries. Pretty young girls can’t walk the city alone and have to hide their faces behind a surgical mask. Dancing with strangers is the exception, not the norm, which I find to be a damn shame. Maybe the world has changed, or maybe I’ve just gotten old.

The earth turns quickly, more quickly with each passing birthday. Looking back, I think we each find the magic of our youth in that fleeting moment where a stranger asks us to dance in a strange city or hold hands on the midway when society frowns, or take a long carriage ride through the sparkling city at night. There is something so sacred about those moments after childhood but before the world teaches us a few things about the unfairness of life.

I watch the video again and see a stranger spin her out and back into his arms. This is her moment of magic and I hope she remembers it forever. Have fun, I finally text back, but be careful. This IS what your twenties are for.