A friend told me she had purchased a tap dancing board for her home. She had danced as a kid, and now that she was reducing her work hours to part time as a transition to retirement, she was looking to make a little noise.

This gesture seemed so delightfully whimsical that I looked up “home dance boards” online to see if such transcendent items were indeed available to anybody with a patent-shoe past and a current passion. I thought about her home studio for days, wondering if she might get a mirror, too, and a wooden barre. Recalling my own tap dance days, when I was five, I thought of Perry — the boy who knelt in front of me during the dance school’s year-end recital. His dark, slick hair smelled of Brylcreem; I knew this because my chin was perched over his shoulder during one of the dance poses. I sniffed his head hungrily during rehearsals until the teacher told me to stop. Shortly thereafter, my mother withdrew me from tap; apparently my toes were too square. You can imagine how I envied my friend her home board, and the world it opened for her.