You see, when my daughter was small, she never wanted to go to sleep. As long as my wife and I were up, she wanted to be in on what was happening and not miss a thing. So I used to carry her to bed, sit beside her, stroke her hair, and sing to her an Irish lullaby that my parents used to sing to me. It was called Toora Loora Looral, and it worked every time.

When she announced that she was getting married, she told me she was choosing that song for the father/bride dance. I was shocked. I didn’t think she even remembered it or that it made that much of an impression on her. Pavarotti, I’m not! The song was often more hummed than sung. It was just one of those little things that occurs between a parent and child that didn’t seem very important. To make matters worse, dancing to the song would be far more difficult than humming it. It was a waltz. Simply put, waltzes “I don’t do.” My daughter’s solution—“We’ll take lessons.”

Sometimes you don’t know why you do things for your children. Maybe it’s because you can see in their eyes how much it means to them. But realizing I would only get one shot at this, I apprehensively agreed. Apprehensively, because besides not being Pavarotti, I also am not Fred Astaire—or Drew Lachey. It’s not that I have two left feet. It’s just that my left foot is attached to my right leg, and vice versa.

At a dance studio near my daughter’s home, we signed up for private, “get-ready-for-a-wedding” lessons—once a week for six weeks. The first night I walked in, I observed some accomplished ballroom dancers gliding across a large dance floor. All I kept thinking was that I would never master something like that in time. Our instructor, John Larson, was one of those people on the floor. He was a very pleasant young man, thin, and graceful even when he walked. He took us into the back studio, listened to our music, and declared it a Viennese waltz. He said we’d be learning hesitations, wisks, and underarm turns.