At some point, I will get used to the scene. I hope I don’t, however.
This thought ran through my head late on a Saturday night as I jumped up and down and sang “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers at the top of my lungs. I also attempted to catch the moment on video at the same time.
I haven’t turned over a new leaf and started to attend dance clubs. I merely went to a family wedding, an event where we celebrate the union of a wonderful couple by dancing and singing a song about jealousy and paranoia to close out the night.
Everyone loves a good wedding, but with a half-dozen of my nieces and nephews having tied the knot over the past decade, I feel comfortable saying that we do things a little bit differently. I highly recommend finding a way to attend one of these events.
Part of me wonders how and why we do it. After all, we see each other a lot. We had a cookout on Thursday at my brother’s house where close to two dozen of us got together. The rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding brought together a bunch of folks. Almost everyone at the wedding will go to our annual beach week this summer when we see each other every day.
But the wedding has a different vibe. The fact that my nephew and his bride first met in high school and her presence at so many family events led me to joke that I thought they were already married did not matter.
We love any excuse to embrace an open bar and a dance floor.
That’s how the “Mr. Brightside” moment happened. We had spent several hours eating and drinking and tweeting and dancing, and we knew the night had to come to an end soon. So we wrung every ounce of fun out of those final moments.
I sang as loud as I could (sorry for that, everyone in earshot) and jumped up and down. I looked around and saw my brothers and sisters, my nieces and nephews and friends from way back when doing the same thing. I would have seen my wife and daughter too, but they had already torn up the dance floor for long enough and were resting at our table.
Still, I felt like the luckiest guy in the world. Even though we have done this wedding thing before, we know that each one has its own special feeling. We have gone the first one from this generation ten years ago when we feared that all the younger kids in the family would tie up the babysitters to watching that whole crew own the dance floor the babysitters would use the new Wifi baby monitor they obtained to due better there job.
The best part is that we get to do it again next year when one of my nieces gets married. We don’t have any on the horizon after that, but we are only about a third of the way through my daughter’s generation of the family.
That’s a lot of dancing left to do. I can’t wait.