Another week has rolled by

When you reach my age, 77, the weeks began to seem like two days. My wife Annie and I have certin routines through each week. We do one of them and then, suddenly, it is time to do them again. It is a little frightening to have one's life go by so fast.

One of our weekly activities is, each Saturday night, we drive to Rapid City to the Canyon Lake Senior Citizen Center and attend their weekly dance. Last evening the band which was playing was Alan Sacks and his wife Coleen ( I may have mispelled her name). For a two piece band, my wife and I think they are wonderful. She has a voice very much like Patsy Kline, but in some ways hers is much better. She plays the guiter and sings many of Patsy Kline's songs but her voice is much purer and sweeter. Alan mostly plays the keyboard and sings. He has a very good voice and their arrangements of old time favorites and older country and western music is really great.

We usually sit with the same group of people around a fairly large, round table. Last evening there were five couples at our table. They, and the other three couples who usually sit with us, are the some of the best friends Annie and I have every had. Each week we look forward to seeing them again. When Annie and I are at these dances we dance the two step, the fox trot, jitterbug, walz and polkda. We also ocasionally do the one step. We danced the cha cha for years but have gotten out of the habit of dancing that type of step.

There are five bands who usually rotate from week to week but there is no particular pattern as to which band will be playing on a certain Saturday. Alan Sacks and his wife, and Easy Sounds with Tom and Diane Kennedy are favorites of many of our dancers and so they are booked more often than the others. Both play a very wide variety of dance music of the type most older dancers love to dance to. That does not mean all the dancers who come to these dances are senior citizens. There are quite a few younger couples, some in their early twenties who are regulars. They seem to enjoy the dances and the music as much as we older dancers.