Already moving on the polished Susquenita High School lobby floor, as soon as the band kicked into the “Wipe Out” drum solo, Jesse shifted from first to second gear with a smooth clockwise rotation that made him look like a Perry County tornado.
We watched in awe, clapping and egging him on although he needed no prodding. Whirling, smiling, building rhythm the way he did as a pulling senior guard looking for somebody to crush on the football field, when sweat broke on Jesse’s forehead out came the white handkerchief as he dabbed drops, wiped bright red cheeks and kicked into third gear with both feet mashing two-step dance steps better than Charlie Downs ever mashed potatoes at the Ranch House restaurant and nobody could mash potatoes better than Charlie Downs. I know this historical fact because Charlie Downs once boasted of his potato prowess while I was paying my bill and buying a cellophane-wrapped $2 trucker music record album to listen to on the plastic record player I kept on top of my underwear drawer in my bedroom.
Jesse’s dancing matched his heart, pulsing pure as the snow-covered back road I walked to school on cold winter mornings. With his soaked dress shirt sticking to his chest he moved like a freight train riding magic rails from Marysville to Duncannon along the glistening steel track that parallels Route 11&15 in front of the one-story red brick house my family rented back in the 60s.
Jesse sometimes gave me a ride home from summer football practice when I was in the 10th grade, dropping me off behind my house near the corner of Schoolhouse Road and Sawmill Road by the trailer park where Sonny Drake lived and I dumped coal ash in a pile by where Sonny and I pounded each other with my dad’s 16 oz. World War II boxing gloves beside the little creek that ran blue-green with shiny ribbons of raw sewage.
Jesse helped me adjust to some of the bad times we all experienced. A few years older, red-haired Jesse carried himself like a Viking sentinel headed home after a successful hunt in the mountains. Our mothers were friends, nurse’s aides working at the Kinkora Knights of Pythias nursing home where they made little money but cared for people who needed attention and love. One cranky old man wouldn’t let anybody but my mom trim his toenails. A shy old woman beamed when Jesse’s mom fixed her hair. And, at the end of the shift, these two dear friends knew they had done their best with what they had.
We all did.
That was the secret then and still is now.
Do the best with what you’ve got.
Some weekends Jesse would pick me up and we’d drive to drink beer with our buddies in the woods (near Montebello, I think) finishing off a quarter keg in the frigid night before heading home late to the sometimes hard lessons we learned like when we found out Mike Wright died in Vietnam.
Jesse drove that sleek white three-speed-on-the-column machine he loved and handled like a stock car champion. One rainy Sunday afternoon he taught me how to work a clutch and let me practice with his car in the bowling alley parking lot. Then we finished off the beer left over from Saturday night when we cruised big city Second and Front streets in Harrisburg, drinking cans of Bud, staring at the city that breathed hot neon all around us before heading back to our rural darkness where we belonged.
Those teenage days are long gone, of course.
So is Jesse who left us in 2021..
Among the stars in the photograph that’s Jesse dancing with his granddaughter Sophia who he drove to ballet classes for years.
Our beautiful memories remain, sometimes even picking up steam as we grow older and remember that great gentle dancing man moving, breathing, sweating and riding the music forever and ever, amen.
No doubt about it, Jesse Boyer sure could dance.
