There are stages in your life that can be marked by the types of events you are invited to. First after college, you hit The Wedding Cycle. Travelling around the country to participate in festivities of your friends finding their one and only. Until one day jumping for the bouquet/garter loses its novelty and you leave it for the kids who don’t know what a garter actually does. Then come The Baby Shower Invitations. Your friends and their significant others get knocked up and you must present them with a trousseau for their spawn.
Running parallel in the city, the single and free are on The Club Scene, getting on lists for parties at clubs. With one roommate a promoter and another with a booty for days of the kind favoured by bouncers, I definitely had my fun here. Then one day you feel yourself utter the words you thought would never cross the bright shine of your fashionable lip shade, “too loud.” And you collect Invites to Benefits, and food and wine festivals, you become a VIP on Open Table for the haute cuisine that has become your major sport of leisure.
There’s a huge chasm separating these two groups, it starts gradually, but reaches a near break at the point in which your common daily interests no longer meet anywhere. They are mired in diapers, daycare and schools for their kids, and you still speak with a non diminished vocabulary. You’ve developed interests for yourself, while they grew extra appendages.
And then comes the cycle of divorces. My circle’s divorces started nearly immediately after the weddings finished. Some still need to raise children, co-parenting with exes seems to be the popular order of the day. And then some rejoin you at Free & Single again. I’ve hit that stage.
I got together with an old college friend for the Great Lakes Food & Art Festival at Campus Martius downtown. (A sort of newly established central meeting place in Detroit, like Times Square. Detroit actually has its own actual Times Square; we learned of this with the advent of the People Mover, where there’s a Times Square station, but god knows what’s there). It was light on art, but sitting at a pedestrian zone in the middle of Woodward Avenue on a Saturday night surrounded by smells and sounds just felt like Detroit has arrived. It wasn’t just the domain of the late night adventurers who would stay for a meal after a cultural event, these were the kinds of people coming back to their city. There’s a satisfaction to that feeling. Anyhow, enjoying the atmosphere we caught up, and that’s where she is now. The never been married are probably still a minority, but we stand in the same spot now and it doesn’t matter so much. I get my friends back, and they get their independent spirits back.
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