the last wedding I'll ever go to. ................. 0 8 / 1 2 / 2 0 0 1

I hadn't been to any weddings since my friend Justin got hitched last year. My friend Cyndy, whom I thought was a bachelorette-for-life, finally gave it up for wedded bliss this weekend in a neat little ceremony at the Beverly Hills Renaissance Hotel. Which got me to thinking: how many more friends do I know who aren't married who are likely to change that? Er, George? Yeah, but he's at least temporarily poor, so no chance of an invite, though we do wish him and his bride well (whenever that happens, which we assume it will). Well... who then? It struck me that all my friends are married. All of them. (Exception made, of course, for work friends who are too young to realistically be married, or gay friends whom the state won't allow to marry.)

It was a staggering realization. You never really think about this kind of thing happening, and yet happen it does, silently. Marriage is like a cat: it sneaks up on you and your friends and, pow, that's it, middle age and kids. Ditto for divorce. I bumped into my first girlfriend, Cathi (who now fancies herself Catherine, apparently), online back in '96 or so; she had been married a few years and divorced already. It was funny -- I typed her name into a search engine recently and came up with this link, which shows you how little things change: she's got some random guy on her arm sporting a vaguely bemused look, as if he's thinking

Whatever. I'm just here to squire her around.
Or maybe, it's
Mmm, ham and cheese wraps!
(You never know when someone's thinking about tasty snacks.)

So back to the marriage-as-cat metaphor: we're all settled in now, all wedded and snug, having been pounced on and our unmarried selves' carcasses lovingly deposited in life's great living room. You think it won't happen to you or your friends, that you're too goofy. We have, as a group, little courage, and little understanding of our own worth. Learning self-promotion is as hard for us as a fish learning how to breathe. So when we were in our twenties, I think we all thought -- never spoke, one doesn't say these things -- it'll never happen, that we'd live our lives out in grumpy (or cheerful, depending on the basic mien) bachelorhood. But we were wrong. And that is a happy thing.


more gruntles rlm@scareduck.com
Last modified: Sun Aug 19 22:45:34 PDT 2001