Our daughter was almost two years old when we moved from North Dakota to Idaho where our home was on a residential street called Kipling Road. We could walk down the street to where it ended at Latah Street, across from Morris Hill Cemetery. There on the corner was a strip mall and in the strip mall was a ballet school in a storefront with large windows through which you could look to see the dancers doing their exercises on the hardwood floor. At that time, the American Festival Ballet company had dual headquarters in Moscow and Boise, Idaho. Over the next few years, with generous support of the Simplot family, the ballet company made the move to a downtown building in Boise as its headquarters. Having the ballet company headquartered in Boise meant that the city had several small dance schools with professional dancers as teachers.

I was mildly interested in the ballet school just a little over a block from our home, and we walked by on occasion that first year. When our son began kindergarten, one of us walked by the school twice each day taking him to and from school. Often our daughter accompanied us on the walks. She was fascinated with the school and asked us if she could go there. At first she was too young for classes at the ballet school, but it wasn't long enough before she was able to sign up for kinder ballet beginning classes and was dancing around our house in her pinks (pink tights and leotard with pink ballet slippers). I had taken a single class in ballet as a college student and could remember the first five positions of the feet and arms. We would go through the positions together with her laughing at how I looked.

From those early days until she graduated from high school, I became a ballet dad. I drove her to and from lessons week after week. I attended all of the recitals and programs. I wrote checks for lessons and costumes and countless sets of ballet slippers and shoes. And I enjoyed it all. I used to stand at the door of the door of the ballet school watching her skip eagerly to class with the words of the Elton John song in my head:

You must’ve seen her
Dancing in the sand
And now she’s in me
Always with me
Tiny dancer in my hand

When we moved from Boise to Rapid City, before the van picked up our furniture, we made a trip to shop for a new home. On that trip we visited two ballet schools and obtained Rachel’s approval for the transfer from her dance school in Boise to the Dance Arts Academy. The row of ballet costumes began to take over her closet.

Yesterday we took our granddaughters, ages 5 and 8, to their first day of a summer dance and arts camp. Just walking into the dance studio brought waves of nostalgia for me. The tiny packages of pink tights for sale by the front desk, the wall of mirrors in the largest rehearsal room, and mostly the eager young girls, some shy, some confident, leaving their parents and grandparents and heading off to their places - everything about the place was familiar to me.

If one of our granddaughters were to say to me, “Grandpa, I want to take dance lessons,” I would eagerly agree to pay for the lessons and drive them to and from class. Whether or not they take any more lessons, however, I have the rest of this week to drop off the two girls on my way to work and pick them up at noon to give them a ride home. I’m going to savor the experience. You can count on me to be there with my camera for their performance on Thursday and I’ll be sending pictures of them to their Aunt Rachel.

Our daughter had to work harder than some of the other children at learning math in school. I volunteered in her elementary classes to help her teachers during math class just to learn how they were teaching because we had to help her with numbers and math facts at home. But that same girl could count her way through twenty measures with four counts per measure with each step in perfect rhythm and memorized. If elementary school would have let her dance her math facts she would have been the top student in her class. When she had to learn her multiplication tables in fourth grade, we sang them to each other. She had a natural talent for music and dance and rhythm. We sang together a lot. Her mother and brother like to sleep in mornings and rise slowly when the schedule allows. She and I liked to get right out of bed. On Saturdays we’d get on our bikes and go out for breakfast while the others slept. Some days we’d take a canoe and head to the lake early in the morning with her favorite CD in the car stereo and both of us singing along at the top of our lungs.

It is impossible for me to walk into a dance studio without thinking of her and remembering what it was like to be her dad when she was a child. They are very happy memories for me.

As we picked up the girls after their first day of dance camp, there was a rush of children and parents and a bit of confusion in the parking lot as the dancers said good bye to one another and were loaded into their car seats and buckled in. The parents had competed for a small number of parking places close to the entrance to the school. I wanted to be very, very careful backing out the car to make sure I didn’t come close to one of the children. The girls were eager to tell us about their morning and they were hungry for lunch and wanted to get home. I was in no rush. I wanted to take it all in. I want to remember every detail.

With luck, I’ll remember, and they’ll always be in me, always with me, tiny dancers in my hand.