Giese - Never sit if you can dance: lessons from my mother

PRAISE FOR NEVER SIT IF YOU CAN DANCE

Stories about life, about love, about family. When she was younger, Jo didnt understand her mother. When she was older, Jo realized how smart, how special her mother was. You choose the heroine. I choose both.

ILENE BECKERMAN, author of Love, Loss, and What I Wore

You could read this book on one plane flightand leave with the satisfying feeling you have been traveling with a delightful, memorable companion.

RENA PEDERSON, author of The Burma Spring

Babe is a life-embracing role model for anyone seeking to make their days dance with love and joy.

ELIZABETH FORSYTHE HAILEY, author of A Woman of Independent Means

Babes lessons are simple, but each is a valuable gem. Her lifelong zest for squeezing pleasure from just about everything is heartwarming and entertaining.

CAROL SALINE, author of Mothers & Daughters

From arm-wrestling to thank-you notes, this breezy tribute from a feminist to her old-fashioned mom celebrates both civility and love.

LESLIE LEHR, author of What a Mother Knows

This snappy mother-daughter memoir brings old-fashioned lessons to life with a clever and modern twist.

LINDA GRAY SEXTON, New York Times best-selling author of Searching for Mercy Street

We all need a Babe in our lives! Lucky for Jo Giese having hers, and lucky for us that shes sharing her with us in this uplifting romp through one womans well-lived life. Youll laugh, youll cry, and then youll want to read it all over again just to get a little more Babe.

NANCY SPILLER, author of Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mothers Recipe Box

Copyright 2019 by Jo Giese

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published April 23, 2019
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-533-9
E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-534-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957236

For information, address:
She Writes Press
1563 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707

Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

In memory of my parents. Im so sorry they didnt hang around longer so we could have grown old together.

LESSON 1:
Never Sit If You Can Dance

LESSON 2:
Maybe We All Need Someone Waiting for Us in the Parking Lot

LESSON 3:
Never Show Up Empty-Handed

LESSON 4:
Thank-You Notes Are Never Too Plentiful

LESSON 5:
Make the Best of It

LESSON 6:
Sharing Fun Is the Whole Thing

LESSON 7:
The Happiness of Giving and Receiving Flowers

LESSON 8:
The Good Goodbye

LESSON 9:
People Dont Like to Be Around Depressed People

LESSON 10:
Dont Be Drab

LESSON 11:
Never Leave a Compliment Unsaid

LESSON 12:
Go! While You Can

LESSON 13:
Sometimes Life Begins Again at Ninety-Five

O ne day Babe and I were discussing why some people we knew were so unhappy and cranky. I asked her, Okay, so why do you think I turned out so happy?

Because you take after me, she said.

Thats when the idea of Never Sit If You Can Dance was born. Id been a seventies-bell-bottom-wearing, Ms. magazine-writing daughter who was sorely disappointed with my stay-at-home-housewife mom. She seemed so behind the times. Id look at her and think, Lord, I do not want to turn out like that!

But, half a century later, this baby boomer has lived long enough to realize how seriously I underestimated her. Maybe we werent members of such different generations after all. She might have had stewed rhubarb and tomato aspic salad in her fridge, while I have organic kale and soy milk in mine, but maybe, in more important ways, were much closer in spirit than I thought. And at ninety-five and a half, shed put up with me long enough to hear me start singing her praises publicly in a Houston magazine.

I called Mom Babe because she asked me toshe disliked her given name, Gladys. Besides, Babe was fun to say, and it suited her. She was the youngest in her family, the baby. But even after shed outlived three sisters, her husband, and everybody else, the name still fit. She was some Babe.

Im especially delighted that in this Instagram age, a woman who never touched a computer or owned a cell phone or played solitaire on an iPad had wisdomearned from a lifetime of livingthat has turned out to be timeless.

Probably nobody is more surprised than I am that, stitch by stitch, I embroidered Babes pronouncements into life lessons. And many of these lessons werent necessarily even spoken until we sat down together, and I asked about all that dancing she and Dad had done. Thats when she blurted out, Never sit if you can dance.

If Ive been successful, Ive communicated her grace, her wit, and her playfulness. (Lets goof off today was one of her favorite sayings.) Taken together, these lessons show theres a celebratory life waiting for each of usif we embrace it.

As you come to know Babe, youll see that she was no Goody Two-Shoes. She drank, danced, and stayed up very late. She was so much livelier than most mothers Ive known. And since I frown on manuals telling me which fork or word to use, this is not that. Instead, these lessons, defined by love, rather than by prohibition, are stories about what worked pretty well for Babe. They are about the simplest, most basic things: how to get along with other people, how to make a marriage work, how to make life more agreeable.

I got such a kick out of focusing on Babe that I had no intention of having much of a presence in these pages myself. But as her stories unfolded, they naturally evolved into mother-daughter stories. How could they not? And, again, why should I have been so surprised? Because Babes lessons show not just how she lived, but the impact her attitudes and ideas had on me and the others lucky enough to have known her.