Trance

Today, I am grateful for trance music.

Our Christmas voyage currently has us in Clyde’s hometown. It’s the quintessential Southern town, complete with a Main Street lined with Mom and Pop shops. For lunch, we eat at Betty’s — a local institution squeezed into an abandoned gas station. The buffet features chicken breasts the size of headlights, cornbread dressing, and every slow-cooked vegetable you might imagine finding at a place called Betty’s in a town called New Albany.

After eating far too much, we retire to Clyde’s father’s house, where the aggressive air-blown heat has everyone feeling drowsy. I haul out my computer and poke around in iTunes. Peyton, the college-age nehpew, says, “You have any trance music?”

As it turns out, I do. In fact, I have some of the original trance music: Tangerine Dream. Peyton’s never heard of it, but the flailing electronic melodies and digital percussion clearly strike a chord with him. My fingers fly over the keyboard, calling up every dance tune stowed away in my MacBook; soon, the den fills up with pulsing club tracks.

And, to my surprise, Peyton leaps up and starts dancing — something I haven’t seen him do since he was four or five years old. Eric Prydz is singing “Call on Me,” and Peyton is executing these chunky, masculine, Springsteen-on-ecstacy moves. He’s completely unselfconscious about it; he just closes his eyes and becomes the music.

For someone like me — someone permanently dance-challenged by virtue of a fundamentalist upbringing — this simple dance embodies a freedom, a unity with music I always longed for, but never achieved.

I keep playing tunes. He keeps dancing.

Today, I am grateful for trance music.