A Brief Trip to America

Yes, this is actually a photo of the town I grew up in.

Saturday found me on a train to upstate Connecticut to attend a wedding of a childhood contact of mine. I'm of two minds about weddings. They're either triumphant, beautiful occasions that lift your spirits (read: awash with free-flowing alcohol), or they make you feel like shit.

This wedding was the latter. I arrived to the chapel seconds before post-time, thanks to traffic. Yes, I actually had to drive, which means that I could not drink. Seeing as how complimentary booze is one of the primary reasons people attend weddings of acquaintances, I was already in a sour mood.

I was put in an even more ill disposition when I noticed a few familiar faces from my high school days. Not only did they look stunning and oh-so blonde in their bridesmaid's dresses, but they all had rocks on their fingers. The ones in attendance sans ring were definitely coupled up and well on their way to the altar.

It was then it hit me. I am the only single person here.

I surmise that this is what life is like in The Rest Of America. Twentysomethings marry other twentysomethings. They graduate high school, get a solid education (both bachelor's and masters) from the top local university, get the best job they can in the local city, fall in love with local people, move to the suburbs (if they aren't living there already), and breed. They get jobs -- and good ones at that -- at one of a handful of large corporations with their headquarters nearby. They buy matching golden retrievers and Ford Expeditions, take annual vacations to the same hotel in the same cliched holiday spot every year, and join the P.T.A.

While, at first blush, it seems like a rather colorless existence, I couldn't seem to shake the fact that these girls I knew in high school - whom I had my first beers with, attended my first rock concerts with (on the lawn!), discussed my first clandestine hook-ups with - are nearly all married off, while I'm languishing in singleton limbo in arguably the greatest city on earth.

I began to wonder...if I had chosen to go to the local state school instead of a fancy private university on the other side of the continent, and chosen to stay within a 200-mile radius of where I spent my formative years (like most Americans do), would I have found love at 20 and be married by 25, birthing children at 29 and attending parent-teacher conferences at 35?

Tolkien may have said that not all those who wander are lost. However, it seems like us wanderers - those who uprooted ourselves from our respective Shires to experience culture shocks and personal glory (both in our careers and otherwise), and engage in all sorts of envelope-pushing adventure - may have found that Love has passed them by.

Or, it may be simply that there's just nothing for those people to do except get married. In Manhattan, when bored, we go to the Frick Collection. We join the Junior League or Zog Sports. We train for the marathon. We create fashion lines, write screenplays, stalk celebrities, take our guitars to Union Square and play Wish You Were Here or the Buckley Hallelujah to gain some under-the-table income. We dream up ways to crash the Tribeca Film Festival and the Heisman Awards Ceremony, and search for the perfect pitcher of sangria. We drink ourselves silly on cheap pinot grigio at Soho Stroll and end up purchasing $1,800 ball gowns at Ralph Lauren, only to return them two weeks later.

But we don't get married. Maybe that's our mistake, who knows.