“May the roof above us never fall in, and may we friends gathered below never fall out.”
Being fourteen years old was one of the most exciting times of my life. Not quite old enough to fully step into adulthood, but old enough to experience many of its enchantments and brush up against the young man I was going to be, it contained the best of both worlds. Part of me also understood in a way that none of my peers seemed to understand, how lucky we were to be just fourteen, and still clinging to the innocence and hope and happiness that childhood, at its best, affords to the fortunate.
When my niece and nephew turned fourteen, I advised that they make the most of it, embrace each day, and savor this time in their lives. They’ve already been touched by loss in ways that I hadn’t at that age, so perhaps it’s too late. That’s still sound advice for any age, and I should probably take more of it myself. With the tenderness of that time in my mind, I threw them their first grown-up dinner party, and invited their respective boyfriend and girlfriend, whom I had not met. Every dinner party should have elements of excitement, awkwardness, sparkle, and uncertainty. (And meeting me for the first time usually has all of that and more.)
Originally I had planned on just having dinner and sending them on their merry way, but friends of mine who have children kept asking what we were going to do, at which point I realized that teenagers might need to be entertained, especially as I didn’t want everyone just lamely resorting to their phone. And so I put a little more organizational effort into the evening (in addition to making Patti LaBelle’s Over the Rainbow Mac and cheese, appetizer meatballs, and a batch of collard greens).
We began the evening with a custom that the twins and I have had for a while: the Circle of Trust. Banishing all responsible adults from the vicinity (in this case that was just Andy), it’s an opportunity to share whatever is on anyone’s mind. The twins are comfortable enough with me simply to talk – I figured that two new people would not be as forthcoming, so I printed out a bunch of questions and sprinkled them into a bowl, where we would each randomly select one and answer it.
I thought we would do one round and call it a day but they wanted to go through the whole bowl of questions, so we did. At the end of that it was time for dinner, and I passed around the Goblet of Toasts, which had several toasts printed that we each read – some silly and saucy, some sweet and sentimental.
Since the twins haven’t been too keen on dessert of late, I had some Christmas sweet treats from Andy that Ryan assembled on the platter in the feature photo. They then suggested we play pool and chess in the cellar, so I went down with them and promptly lost a chess game to Ryan – which is my first loss in decades – perhaps a sign of passing the torch on to the next generation. It feels like time. There were several pool matches after that, and none of us were very good at it, which made for a relatively level playing field. Planting a hopeful seed in the wintry ground, Emi and I discussed a theme for summer and settled on one – she came up with last summer’s coquette theme, and this one seems similarly scintillating.
As the evening wound down, I wondered if any of the teenagers would remember this night years from now; fourteen was the age when I started making the memories that I still have to this day. Even with having written this brief recollection down in a blog post, I’m likely to forget all the details by next week. I asked everyone to write down their favorite moment of the evening in an effort to remember (usually we do a rose and thorn with one good and one bad, but I wanted to end the evening on a purely good note so we omitted the thorns). One person wrote down their positive and insisted on adding a negative as well, which was as follows: “Not enough time here.”
When it was time for us to bring everyone home, we looked outside and saw that a heavy fog had descended during our dinner party, making the ride to Amsterdam something out of a surreal dream – the ideal accompaniment and ending to a dinner party of sparkling enchantment.
“May the best of our past be the worst of our future.”
