The Best Way To Raise Kids Is to Watch Yourself Recede

It’s what has to happen.

I love going to weddings. I never understand why people complain about having to go to weddings. You get to dress up nice. Everybody’s in a good mood. You visit a place you don’t ordinarily get to go. You see old friends, or maybe make some new ones. There’s free booze. I’ve reached the age where I don’t go to many weddings anymore — I’ve gone from my “high school friend marriage” period to “college friend marriage” to “grownup friends marriage” to “everybody’s second marriage,” and I’m now in a holding pattern until the “all my friends’ kids marriage” wave hits — and I’m a little bummed about it. Know that if you invite me to your wedding, I will always go.

For me, the best part of any wedding, as a guest, is that brief interaction I get to have with the two people getting married. There are basically three or four different times as a grown-up when you get to be the center of everyone’s attention, where everyone is there solely to see and celebrate you: High school graduation, college graduation, retirement party, funeral (which you don’t even get to be there to enjoy). But the biggest of them all is a wedding. It is as close as we, as normal people, ever get to being a celebrity. At that specific event, for one evening, you are Charles and Diana, Jennifer and Ben, Beyonce and Jay-Z, Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm. I met dozens upon dozens of people at my wedding and talked to nearly everyone there, and I don’t remember a single…