It’s guaranteed you’ll find me choked up every Tuesday morning in a Yucaipa Silver Sneakers class at 9.30 AM standing somewhere either behind, beside, or on a straight-back metal chair with my dad to my left. (We have our usual spots, as most everyone does.) The emotion usually catches me off guard. I’ll be marching in place, making sure to bring my knees up and not slouch when I’ll catch his reflection in the mirror up front. Actually, multiple reflections because the back-of-the-room mirror catches and repeats endless iterations of him funhouse style. He always seems to be really concentrating even though he’s been coming to this class for about ten years so the moves are pretty baked in. But he complains he can’t really hear the instructor anymore, so maybe that’s why the furrowed brow. Or he’s just focused on getting through the set. Either way, lately I’m taken more and more by how slight he’s become. Frail. Yet still moving and doing and keeping up. He does every exercise put in front of him to the best of his ability. When it’s arms, he picks up the two-pound weight to work only his right side, the left shoulder having been kaput for a few years now. Chair stretches? Hell, yeah, he’s twisting, leaning forward, bending at the waist toward his toes. Working it.

It’s usually somewhere between the behind-the-chair balance moment and the stretchy-chord side bend that I seem to lose it. Watching him in multiples, I think, Remember this moment. His amazing classmates (I mean, they’re mine now too) are all doing their bit around the room. The silver-haired lovely who knitted me a pair of fingerless gloves because there are months when the steering wheel gets very cold and these help that. (She aced my favorite colors in gradating blues.) The woman who makes the best (er, flammabely strong) Bloody Mary’s for the twice-annual class picnics. The man who sings whenever a favorite song comes over the playlist (this week: “I Saw Her Standing There,” which he sang to his wife moving around next to him). A guy who used to be a transit cop in Times Square in the 80s is generally right in front of me (when I met him and said, Boy, you must have tales to tell, he looked away and shook his head in a way that made me a little worried. I don’t bring it up anymore). There are so many stories in that room. The woman who leads the whole shebang is someone I credit with keeping not just my dad, but all of these fabulous folx limber in ways that sexagenarians on up often fall short of (or just fall).

So in between counting along with the reps and smiling at the shenanigans around the room as they multiply in the mirror, I see my pops smack in the middle of the scene. It’s then that a pumice-stone of emotion slips into the base of my throat, often surprising me with its stealth. Then I’ll have to look at the ceiling so the weeping doesn’t become too obvious.

There’s a sidecar riding in on this feeling that has to do with the music, because our lady of motion often favors songs from my high school years. Heart’s “Barracuda” practically dropped me during leg lifts, while Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back” during a chair stretch involving an inflated ball under my foot made me stop doing that and immediately look up at the ceiling tiles. That song in particular kills me (I also strongly suggest clicking on the link for the live Dodger Stadium clip. Holeee Fck. white people dance moves, seventies fashion. I was somewhere in that crowd doing both those things). The reason this particular EJ song throws me into reminiscence is that when the album Caribou was released (1974), I was deep into my love for all things Elton. I took the album over to my dad’s for our weekly dinner. This was something of regular thing: me buying records, the vinyl kind, then playing them for him while we ate while I explained all the little factoids I’d learned from memorizing the lyrics and liner notes. Telling him all about Caribou Ranch in Colorado where part of the album was recorded, How my favorite song was “Pinky” (?!? because….maybe I wanted to be Pinky? probably. Along with the main in “Tiny Dancer“). I was worried that my dad would think the lyrics to “The Bitch Is Back” would be too raunchy and he’d say something about that. But he didn’t. He was always just curious about what I liked, although I’m not sure I brought the Sex Pistols over for a session.

There was just one time he seemed to look sideways at my music and that was when I was working for SPIN and had come to LA for the annual Foundations Forum, a heavy metal convention held at the Sheraton Universal Hotel near the Los Angeles airport where, no lie, the plumbing got wrecked ostensibly because there was a lot of hair that clogged up many drains throughout the hotel. Also the scene of Ted Nugent making a PETA advocate cry in the elevator. Good times. Anyhoo, my dad came to meet me for lunch and asked, “What is it you do again?” At least that’s how I remember it. I mean, he knew what I did, had a subscription to SPIN, and always told me how proud he was I’d made it in New York City. But this particular scene was a bit, er, loud and possibly stupid.

So now, over four decades later, marching next to him in time to “The Bitch Is Back” with the mirrors reflecting forward and back, I try to let myself be moved by the moment and not actively stomp down the emotion. Sure, it may be slightly worrisome to my classmates if I started heaving sobs, but a few discreet tears I can have. If I let the flashback of me sitting at the dining room table, age 13, explaining to my dad, age 48, with so much earnestness I’ve no doubt my voice rose a few octaves how Bernie Taupin’s lyrics are pure poetry, merge with present-me at 61 as to my left my dad does a semi-shuffle, side step at 96 (while holding onto the chair back) and the chorus closes out with “It’s the way that I move, the things that I do, oh-oh-oh,” my head explodes a little. Then melts into the moment, then some stray tears roll down my face as I hold onto gratitude. Right here. Right now. that is all.