Michelle and I recently attended a wedding of a former colleague of mine. It was a beautiful outdoor setting on a lovely summer day, about as perfect as you’d want for a celebration like that.
We don’t have many weddings to go to these days. If we get one invitation in a year, that’s about it. But that just happens to be a phase in our lives we’re part of right now. It got me thinking about those phases, especially when it comes to times in life we want to get together with many people to recognize a new phase in someone else’s life.
When we’re kids, weddings can be really fun and exciting, that is, if we’re allowed to go. Sometimes Mom and Dad would be the only ones invited, so the kids would have to stay with a babysitter. But if we got to go, how cool was it? Oh, not the wedding itself; most young kids get bored by that in a hurry. I’m talking about the party afterwards! All that good food, the chance to drink pop, and crazy dancing! Plus, we got to stay up past our bedtime!
Life really gets busy once you leave home though. Think about your 20s. Not only do many people get married at some point in that decade of their lives, but that means everyone’s friends are getting married too. Weddings are littered throughout the years, and when you plan your own, you have to hope you’re not going to infringe too closely to someone else’s. After all, these big events need lots of time to plan and plenty of time from which to recover.
When Michelle and I got married, we were the third straight October wedding among my group of friends. It got to be kind of a fun tradition, knowing that each tenth month of the calendar year, we’d have a big party. Of course, eventually everyone’s married, and suddenly the weddings trickle and then halt.
What phase is after that? Well, it differs for everyone, depending on the ages of people in your life. Are you the oldest cousin? If so, you then get a batch of family weddings at different points. It can help to mix these in with your friend weddings and can guarantee that you won’t come to a screeching stop when all your friends are married off.
If you’re not among the oldest cousins, you probably are mixing and matching with your friend weddings quite a bit. Or maybe you’re the youngest and these family weddings ate up much of your teenage years. Either way, there is probably a 10-15 year time span where you can remember putting aside plenty of Saturdays for these festivities.
And now we sit and wait for the next phase. What is that, you may ask? That would be the phase where your own children and their friends get married. That’s when your siblings’ and cousins’ kids get married. Based on the ages of my kids and our relatives’ children, we’ve got some time to wait for that. But when it starts, I have a feeling we’ll be back to locking up a lot of time for watching the next generation start their married lives together.
Part of these changes in phases is how you celebrate as well. As a young kid, you were probably just crazy at these shindigs. You got sugared up on mints and soda and went nuts on the dance floor. Likely, someone has a picture of you cutting a rug as a rugrat. But when you crashed, it was probably hard.
During your peak years of weddings, including your own and those of your friends, you felt like you never wanted those evenings to end. When the dance was over, you still had energy to spare and wanted to keep partying. It’s likely that the next day was rough, whether you imbibed or not. Michelle and I still reminisce on how much fun we had at not only our wedding reception, but those of others we attended in our 20s.
And now, as we get older, we find ourselves wondering when it’s okay to excuse ourselves and head home. Whether it’s a family member or a friend, there’s a point in the evening when we’re just tired. It’s fun, though, to sit back and watch the people who are 10-20 years younger than we are enjoy the receptions the same way we used to. And it’s really fun to watch those young kids do the same things we did as youngsters.
We’d better save up that energy. When our own kids get married, we’d best stay until the end of the party! I’m not in any rush to get to that phase of my life, but perhaps it will be a renewal of our own memories of our 20s along with great hope for our future generations.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is paragnosis, which is information that cannot be obtained by normal means, as in, “The paragnosis he gained by just sitting back and observing human nature was irreplaceable.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!