Dancing Danny — By Tommy Purser

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my childhood friend Danny. Danny was a year older than I was. Maybe two years older. He was one year ahead of me in school but, since Danny didn’t appear to me to be all that interested in school, or grades, or learning — at least not learning the things teachers were teaching us in school — he could have been a year or two behind in school which would have made him more than a year ahead of me in age.
Whatever his age and despite his relatively cavalier approach to learning, I looked up to Danny. There was something about Danny that made me want him to like me, or perhaps that made me want to be like him. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I idolized him but, in my mind, there seemed to be no down size to being like him. Yeah, I admired Danny.
He was small as a youngster, not as small as I was but not as big as most of his classmates. And he was a bit bowlegged. But he was a good looking kid with a winsome smile, a bounce in his step and a boatload of confidence. He was always happy. Happy not only with life but happy with himself as well. Not conceited but, rather, self-assured. Satisfied with who he was, and where he was in life.
And, in some ways above all, he could dance. That may not mean much to most of those reading this column today but, I came up in a different time and place than did most of the readers of this newspaper in general and this column in particular.
In the time when and the place where I grew up, the ability to dance was sort of a status symbol. The young girls I grew up with liked to dance and they loved to dance with boys who could dance and dance well. Dancing was, in a way, a better “babe-magnet” than was good looks, or athleticism, or smooth talking, or whatever girls from other times and eras were/are interested in.
Danny was a smooth dancer, confident on the dance floor, and girls watched him with approving eyes. He was good enough at it that he attracted a blonde-headed lass that soon enough became his lifelong partner.
Yeah, I admired Danny and, if nothing else, I became a good enough dancer to attract a strawberry-blonde lass that soon enough became my lifelong partner as well.
A few weeks ago, Danny, my childhood friend, danced his last dance. His blonde-headed lifelong partner misses him. And so do I.