Sometimes Dance to the Symphony of Your Own Soul
Everyone knew Roy to be a young, impressionable boy. He always did what he was told and never questioned, because his mother and father told him that is what good boys do. “Obedience is better than sacrifice”, refrained his minister on Sundays. So, he obeyed friends, strangers, and even enemies of whom he was unaware. If people said “do this” or “that” then he did both for safe measure. All of his teachers considered him the most well behaved chap in the school. His friends considered him the easiest to get along with and his parents considered him absolutely darling. Roy Kimball Davidson could have changed his name to “obedience.”
One morning he woke up to the sound of his mother’s cries, “Wake up Roy!” Wake up!” “Go on and get your shower, dear”, she told him. As he hopped out of the shower, “he heard his father sound up the stairs “Hurry with your wardrobe my boy, you’ve got to beat the schoolyard bell!” So he hastily dressed and ran down the stairs and ate his breakfast upon his mother’s instruction to “eat up.” He walked to school by the guidance of his mother and entered the courtyard. His classmates cried “Roy! Come over here with us!” as they gathered in the courtyard to await the schoolyard bell and so he went to join the herd. He spotted a girl across the yard and at the adamant insistence of his peers to “go talk to her Roy” he crossed the courtyard to introduce himself. This sweet, kind, gentle boy began that morning to court young Regina, the most loved girl in the girls division of Eglenton Day School, saying “Hi I’m Roy and I think you’re beautiful.”
And so they went on, friends from that day, chatting in the hallway and sharing lunch in the yard. One day, under the usual influence of his friends, Roy asked Regina to go to the upcoming school promenade. She excitedly consented because he was nice and she liked him. He anticipated this promenade because he had grown very affectionate toward Regina. The promenade would allow him to make consummate his romance with Regina. That night came soon and the hall was beautiful, as was Regina in her elegant dress with her kind, perfected features, and her graceful display. The promenade began and the young ladies and gentlemen converged in customary fashion upon the center of the floor to waltz romantically with their dates. Custom dictated that Roy was to lead Regina out into the floor and lead her in the dance, in royal fashion. But he froze. He felt like he should be dancing like everyone else, but nobody instructed him. He felt that he should move his feet to the orchestra’s “gliding waltz” with the flow of the mass of people in the hall. But He could not lead Regina in the climactic and customarily important dance, because he only knew how to follow.
Regina, felling rejected by his failure to choose her, ran into the corridor to shed tears. Roy decided swiftly and certainly, for the first time, as if with the Wisdom of Solomon, to do something to mend what seemed to be going terribly wrong. Young Roy had a lot of explaining to do as he ran into the corridor after her. Was it that he had no practice at courtly dancing? Or did he have to learn that night to dance with destiny, to frolic with fate, to lead the object of his affection to his love, because he had never before danced to the symphony of his own soul?
