The End of the Road, or, Beginners' Luck
"The majority of men are bundles of beginnings" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
The following trifle was inspired most directly by the recent marriage of my two friends Eric and Sara, but could just as well have been kindled by the simultaneous wedding of my cousins-in-law Jimmy and Amy, or my own two-year wedding anniversary, or any of the other approximately 217,000 couples that will get married this month (Source: CDC) NOTE: This was not a delivered toast; let’s think of it as a slice of something, toasted at home and eaten over the sink.
My high school public speaking teacher, Ms-no-period Hamm, has always said never to begin a speech with a joke, because you can't win: in the best-case scenario, you get a tsunami of laughter and the rest of your remarks can do nothing but disappoint thereafter. In the worst-case scenario, your joke runs aground and your audience abandons ship.
So perhaps the best way to begin is by jumping all the way to the end. This is convenient because weddings are designed to celebrate both beginning and ending - the end of two journeys and the beginning of another.
Marriage has always served as a bright line demarcating one chapter of life from another. In really ancient times, a teenaged girl might one day wake up to discover that she had been traded to her new husband for a goat. More recently - say, 70 years ago - a boy might graduate from high school one day and get married the next, move in together the day after, go away to defeat some Nazis and return, somehow, to a family of five.
And of course, this notion persists still, in a Game-of-Life sort of way. Perhaps too often we see ourselves as undistinguished blue or pink totems, crammed into a car that's not-quite-nice-enough, sputtering through life looking for specific exits and mile markers. On the game board, beginnings and endings are orderly and linear: school-work-marriage-children-retirement-death.
But the modern era has, if not removed those signposts, at least made the miles between them more complicated and interesting. Every day we make and travel new paths, invent new ways to get from X to Y to Z. So it is for all things, such as education, careers and love.
As new avenues arise, our options multiply and that simple, linear path starts to look like an interstate highway system. As we minimize the time and distance between points - the space between beginnings and endings - the world shrinks. And as the world shrinks, we frequently have nowhere to turn but our own heads.
What we lose in endurance, we are compensated with diversity. Limitless introspection begets limitless taxonomy, such that mere "courtship" now entails "smitten," "crushing," "hanging out," "pre-dating," "will-they-or-won't-they," "hooking up," "casually dating," "formally dating," "serious dating," "committed relationship," "co-habitation," "talking about marriage," "pre-engagement," "engagement," "wedding planning," "furious arguments about centerpieces" and "marriage." And not necessarily in that order.
Even and especially with all of these discrete subcategories, determining where one phase ends and another begins can be a challenge. And that’s just for one person; two individuals - even two individuals in love - move at their own speed and rythym. (Some with more rhythm than others.)
And so we have Sara and Eric, as with any two people, spinning around at different velocities, forwards, backwards and both at once, each with innumerable paths before them, through an infinite number of stages and sub-stages and all the usual unforeseen obstacles. The fact that anyone gets married to anyone, ever, is kind of a miracle. We have witnessed a miracle.
How did we get here?
We could go through the public record and find a few obvious landmarks. And surely Sara and Eric had their own private moments that pulled them in one direction or another. Their relationship progressed through its share of labels, but labels only describe the what, not the how. The process of falling in love is both gradual and sudden, and difficult to dissect.
Ernest Hemingway once described how people go bankrupt: “Slowly, then all at once.” (Bankruptcy, too, is a beginning and an end.)
The way I like to imagine it is to think about Eric’s many late nights driving back from concerts over the past few years, from Northampton to Hartford or Hartford to Northampton or to-and-from all the halls and clubs in between. I think about the freeways and side streets that he must be able to navigate in his sleep - that is to say instinctively, the product of muscle memory and momentum, as effortless as the indie rock soundtrack playing on the stereo.
It’s like a left turn, right turn, right turn, left turn, 40 miles of bad road, busted traffic light, left turn, right turn, and before you even know it: you're home.
Eventually, he just knew his way home. Call it gravity, divine intervention, The Force, whatever. Without even really thinking, he was transported over hills and valleys, knowing the way without having to read the signs, past all those mile markers, until he arrived to find that his journey was over and he had ended at the beginning. I’m sure Sara made a similar trip, following her own song of true love. And when Antonio Banderas wasn’t home, she settled for Eric.
And, with that joke, we are back where we started. Here’s to the beginning, and all the beginnings to come.
/clink
The following trifle was inspired most directly by the recent marriage of my two friends Eric and Sara, but could just as well have been kindled by the simultaneous wedding of my cousins-in-law Jimmy and Amy, or my own two-year wedding anniversary, or any of the other approximately 217,000 couples that will get married this month (Source: CDC) NOTE: This was not a delivered toast; let’s think of it as a slice of something, toasted at home and eaten over the sink.
My high school public speaking teacher, Ms-no-period Hamm, has always said never to begin a speech with a joke, because you can't win: in the best-case scenario, you get a tsunami of laughter and the rest of your remarks can do nothing but disappoint thereafter. In the worst-case scenario, your joke runs aground and your audience abandons ship.
So perhaps the best way to begin is by jumping all the way to the end. This is convenient because weddings are designed to celebrate both beginning and ending - the end of two journeys and the beginning of another.
Marriage has always served as a bright line demarcating one chapter of life from another. In really ancient times, a teenaged girl might one day wake up to discover that she had been traded to her new husband for a goat. More recently - say, 70 years ago - a boy might graduate from high school one day and get married the next, move in together the day after, go away to defeat some Nazis and return, somehow, to a family of five.
And of course, this notion persists still, in a Game-of-Life sort of way. Perhaps too often we see ourselves as undistinguished blue or pink totems, crammed into a car that's not-quite-nice-enough, sputtering through life looking for specific exits and mile markers. On the game board, beginnings and endings are orderly and linear: school-work-marriage-children-retirement-death.
But the modern era has, if not removed those signposts, at least made the miles between them more complicated and interesting. Every day we make and travel new paths, invent new ways to get from X to Y to Z. So it is for all things, such as education, careers and love.
As new avenues arise, our options multiply and that simple, linear path starts to look like an interstate highway system. As we minimize the time and distance between points - the space between beginnings and endings - the world shrinks. And as the world shrinks, we frequently have nowhere to turn but our own heads.
What we lose in endurance, we are compensated with diversity. Limitless introspection begets limitless taxonomy, such that mere "courtship" now entails "smitten," "crushing," "hanging out," "pre-dating," "will-they-or-won't-they," "hooking up," "casually dating," "formally dating," "serious dating," "committed relationship," "co-habitation," "talking about marriage," "pre-engagement," "engagement," "wedding planning," "furious arguments about centerpieces" and "marriage." And not necessarily in that order.
Even and especially with all of these discrete subcategories, determining where one phase ends and another begins can be a challenge. And that’s just for one person; two individuals - even two individuals in love - move at their own speed and rythym. (Some with more rhythm than others.)
And so we have Sara and Eric, as with any two people, spinning around at different velocities, forwards, backwards and both at once, each with innumerable paths before them, through an infinite number of stages and sub-stages and all the usual unforeseen obstacles. The fact that anyone gets married to anyone, ever, is kind of a miracle. We have witnessed a miracle.
How did we get here?
We could go through the public record and find a few obvious landmarks. And surely Sara and Eric had their own private moments that pulled them in one direction or another. Their relationship progressed through its share of labels, but labels only describe the what, not the how. The process of falling in love is both gradual and sudden, and difficult to dissect.
Ernest Hemingway once described how people go bankrupt: “Slowly, then all at once.” (Bankruptcy, too, is a beginning and an end.)
The way I like to imagine it is to think about Eric’s many late nights driving back from concerts over the past few years, from Northampton to Hartford or Hartford to Northampton or to-and-from all the halls and clubs in between. I think about the freeways and side streets that he must be able to navigate in his sleep - that is to say instinctively, the product of muscle memory and momentum, as effortless as the indie rock soundtrack playing on the stereo.
It’s like a left turn, right turn, right turn, left turn, 40 miles of bad road, busted traffic light, left turn, right turn, and before you even know it: you're home.
Eventually, he just knew his way home. Call it gravity, divine intervention, The Force, whatever. Without even really thinking, he was transported over hills and valleys, knowing the way without having to read the signs, past all those mile markers, until he arrived to find that his journey was over and he had ended at the beginning. I’m sure Sara made a similar trip, following her own song of true love. And when Antonio Banderas wasn’t home, she settled for Eric.
And, with that joke, we are back where we started. Here’s to the beginning, and all the beginnings to come.
/clink