No Country for Old Women

William Butler Yeats had it right: there are places and times not for--in his case--old men, but also for old women as well. One of these is a wedding. I'm just back from attending a wedding in Washington state. It was held outdoors in a beautiful setting, the weather was perfect, the bride right out of the pages of a magazine, and everything well organized and happy.

Why then, one might ask, do I say I didn't feel I belonged? Let me answer that by stating my (new) philosophy of weddings. Weddings, I have concluded, are for the young.

Note that I talk of weddings, not of marriages. Marriages are the union of two people. Weddings are the elaborate, expensive celebrations written about in bridal magazines, planned to the last degree often by a new profession called wedding consultant.

Marriages can be held in a judge's offices with at most a corsage for the bride and maybe a carnation for the groom. Weddings are held in romantic locales, require $2000and up dresses plus formals for the groom and his attendants, flower arrangements that carry out a color scheme repeated by the cake, and several thousand dollars' worth of elaborate photography that inevitably includes a picture of a champagne bottle nestled among an invitation and the bride's shoes.

Marriages may be celebrated by a retreat to a local restaurant or someone's back yard. In the UK, it may be a retreat to the local pub. Weddings, on the other hand, require catering and an orchestra.

Finally, marriages cross every age barrier. Weddings, on the other hand, and as I said before are for the young by their very nature. The hours before the ceremony are taken up with false eyelashes, zippers, nylons, and frantic straightening of bows and curls. This is when relatively normal young women turn into bridezillas fully convinced that the least flaw will ruin whatever future life awaits them. I speak in generalities here because, happily, the bride did not make this transformation. She was, indeed, the wonderful young woman she has always been.

But even given the fact I wasn't needed much in the way of curls and nylons and was free to take long walks on the beach, I still felt out of place. The reason was the nature of the exuberance of youth. I had little in common with the young friends of the bride and groom, nor they with me. It didn't help that I beat a hasty retreat when, overtired and overstimulated, the children of the guests expressed their frustrations in the normal way: crying inconsolably at the disruption in their lives.

I now know I am old because I remember my own child doing the same--only way back then I was young myself. I admit it--I have become a Yeatsian old person, and a screaming child makes my ears ring and my heart rate rise. Any illusion I may have had before this wedding, any self-congratulatory estimate of my bearing my age well, dissipated as I made a hasty retreat rather than bend down to console the little one. I have never felt my age quite so much before, nor in some respects my own redundancy.

Yeats talked about the generations teeming and the young in one another's arms as a sort of scary reality. We who are older must recognize they are the future, and we who have had our day must bend before them. I made my contribution to the world--hopefully, I did some good. But it is theirs now, and I yield it gratefully to them.

I hope the world will understand if next time I just send a check.