The Dance by Garth Brooks

Garth Brooks - The Dance @ Yahoo! Video

[for those of you who know me well and are trying to figure out who Jennifer is, chill, "Jennifer" is a pseudonym]

Everyone has a moment in their lives in which they lived through "The Dance." These are the relationships have ended, but that we are better for having gone through.
One of the things I’ve realized as I’ve grown older is that as bad as break-ups fell, they don't change the good times that are shared.

My favorite memory with Jennifer was dancing in her dorm room to her favorite Garth Brooks song, "The Dance." As the song got to the second verse I she looked up to me, smiled and sand the words accentuating "king" which is the nickname Jennifer called me and then giggled to herself.

Holding you I held everything
For a moment wasn't I a king
But if I'd only known how the king would fall
Hey who's to say you know I might have changed it all

At that time, the first part of this verse is what spoke to me. I didn't think about the fact that this King "would fall." All that I was focusing on was the moment, the feeling of companionship and sharing a moment with a girl who at the time was my world.

There are other moments in my memory of being with Jennifer that make me smile. Singing with her, exchanging long rambling e-mails and just hanging out with her and being silly. She helped me break out of my “take myself way to seriously shell.” But we broke up and that wasn't fun. In retrospect it wasn't like a horrendous event, nobody did anything wrong, it just wasn't working out, but at the time it was painful.

As time has passed the breakup has become less consequential and what is more meaningful is the good times we shared and how Jennifer effected my life.

Jennifer introduced me to many things. Her infectious love of Bon Jovi gave me an appreciation of the power of rock anthems (check out this past post on “Livin’ On A Prayer.”) She was a fan professional wrestling which brought me into that world which even though I do not actively watch any more, I used watched religiously for a couple years and still enjoy this get a kick out of watching every so often.

The most powerful world she brought into my life was country music. People often talk about Jazz as being the true American music and I have to disagree, for me it’s country music. This music derives from Gospel, folk and religious music, while providing the foundation rock music and almost every other style of pop music.

Jennifer's favorite country artist when we were together was Garth Brooks. Now I was aware of this guy. It was impossible to not know who he was. This guy has sold more than 220 million copies of his albums and singles worldwide. But growing up in grunge-centric Seattle there was nothing worse in my high school as enjoying country music so I created a distaste for a genre of music that I didn't even know.

When I started going out with Jennifer, I was interested in getting to know her and part of that was learning to appreciate these things that I had irrationally disliked. This was a two-way street as there were kinds of music that I enjoyed that she didn't like that she made an effort to get to know.

Jennifer gave me a couple Garth Brooks CDs to check out and what initially bugged me was the country fiddle and slide-guitar twang (which I totally love now). Most of all what I thought I hated about country music was the way they sang. Garth Brooks is the perfect ambassador of country music for people who thought I used to. He sang in a country style but he didn't overdo it. He looked like a guy who would live next door to you and sounded like it too.

What really got to me were the words. In the 1990s, lyrics were romantic drivel that didn’t make much sense like “I Want It That Way” or depressing and dark contemplations on life like Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy.” The words in the “The Dance” are completely different and they blew me away. Almost like a sermon, “The Dance” passes on wisdom about life in a direct and meaningful way. The lesson is something I may have heard before but never thought about.

Jennifer really hasn’t been a part of my life for a couple years. We both went our separate ways but every so often I check up on her facebook.com page and it warms my heart that she has found happiness in her life and I like to think that she feels the same way.

Looking back, I could have lived without the breakup, the awkwardness and friendship that was lost, but I would have had to miss all the moments we shared and most importantly our dance.