I took the wedding committee, Lucy, the planner, Ben, the officiant, and George, the other guy, to Storm King Art Center on the way back from the wedding in Albany. As I had a car filled with ID-carrying art industry employees, our visit was free. And we got to skip the line to the parking lot.
I'd hoped that with their knowledge of artists and insights into contemporary art I'd get something of a well-informed, deeply-contextual, throughly-guided tour of the place in their refined British English. Instead I got the exhaustion of the weekend catching up with us.
I have ten years of life experience on these kids but couldn't keep it together. Even our effort to have a quiet little picnic at the museum went off the rails. I taught Lucy how to shotgun a beer, in between tossing around a loaf of bread and a block of cheese and eating pudding with my fingers. Nobody thought to bring utensils.
There's something to be said of the experience of hanging out with and chauffering a crew ten years younger. Lucy observed that while self-inflicting the stress of trying to play the adult, I'd been slowly and steadily regressing into more juvenile behavior over the weekend. "It took years off your life" is how Ben quite brilliantly put it.