Dancing with the Past

The strains of ” Can’t Stop til you get Enough” could be heard, nay were imprinted onto my DNA as I made my way across the party room to the parents of the Bat Mitzvah girl to say my goodbyes.  It was only 9:45, but Monkey had developed a bad headache and wanted some quiet. While I had enjoyed screaming myself hoarse to be heard over the cacophony – we were seated right next to the dance floor and the massive speakers – my feet hurt and I was secretly glad to be given an excuse to leave the party. 

This was not to say that I hadn’t been having fun.  Perhaps ‘fun’ was stretching it, but I was having an interesting time interacting with people I had been part of a big gang of teenagers with, with whom I’d ventured into the realms of fooling around with good friends, partied with and then, attended each other’s weddings.  Some I had spoken to regularly, including the parents of the Bat Mitzvah, others I was close enough only to exchange birthday wishes and holiday cards and still others I hadn’t seen since my own wedding nearly 15 years before.  Seated at our table were couples in the latter two groups and I while I was saddened to find confirmed my suspicion of nothing in common with a few people (not surprisingly, those who’d never had kids, had further education, or had ever left Montreal), Bob and I were delighted to find a lot of commonality with our immediate seat mates, Tom and Ali from Western Canada. Tom, also an identical twin, had been the lone gentile in our large rambling group of Jewish kids in the public (nominally Protestant) school system’s local high school (where my graduating class was 99% Jewish). Both medical professionals, we found plenty to talk about and were sad to leave them amidst rich conversation. 

The party itself – after a lovely service where the Bat Mitzvah girl was entirely prepared and not even a little nervous – was aside from overly noisy (ok, I’m OLD), was MCed by a gentleman who never let his microphone go.  He led a group of professional dancers who engaged and hyped up the kids in the audience, handed out prizes, and broke out into random ring dances called horahs.  An open bar kept most very inclined to dance and mug for the ever-present camera, and on the spot printing allowed those photographed people to go home with framed copies of the shot featuring them.  As I sat with Bob and Tom and Ali, we looked upon the small horde of our collective kids and thought back to when we attended one another’s Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, how we all dressed in satin under black lights, had big hair and mostly rocked out to “Don’t stop Till you get Enough” and “Rock the Casbah” among other things.

The circle of life, the endless succession of the young goggling at and/or ignoring the older until the young BECOME the other ones and tonight was another opportunity to notice one of these stops along that continuum.  Saying our goodbyes, we laughed and hugged.  Goodby then, until the next pary or funeral.  And on it goes.

Tomorrow, first thing we’ll drop by our friend’s home for breakfast and see when THEY went to bed after their big party, and then we’ll check wait times at the US border so we don’t end up getting stuck for hours. Fortunately, we have a few options on border crossings, so we should be ok.  It’s a theory, at the very least!