Saturday Night's All Right With Me

It's been a long time since I was in my teenage and young adult years and Friday and Saturday nights were the focus of my social calender. Now I look at my calendar as a very different thing. When do I go to the Chiropractor? When is the next national holiday that I can take? What's the lunar phase? What day of the week is it? But the days of Friday night and Saturday night dates or times out with friends to catch dinner and a movie are long behind me. I think that's a shame, at least in same ways.

The days of "How do I look" are long behind me now.

There was something exciting about looking forward to seeing friends for a social event. These were usually people that I knew from school classes or, occasionally co-workers. It could be a small group of two couples or as many as a group of twenty. Rarely it was a "true" date between two people only. We would see movies - midnight showings in the winter and the drive-in during the summer. Sometimes we would gather at the bowling alley or the pinball game parlor. Often we would just get together at one home or another, everyone bring a dish to share for dinner, and we would just talk and listen to music for hours.

There were good friends, good food, good music and good times. But then we grew up and/or graduated. We got jobs in scattered lands and nations and we scattered to the four winds. We stayed in touch, somewhat, and sometimes attended reunions or summer events that would pull some of us back together. But we were never all together again, there were always missing bodies.

There are the hard times when friends get back together.

Then the other type of gatherings started and those weren't as fun. These were for the funerals and wakes of close friends, their spouses, and with even more sadness, their children. Our group splinters more and shrinks more, but we still come together for important occasions, even travelling from far distances.

And we all look at our own children or grandchildren, depending on their ages, and see them getting excited about their Friday and Saturday nights out with their friends or on a date. I wonder...When did the magic leave? When did Friday and Saturday nights just become routine? When did the days that had held such cachet merely transformed into squares on a calendar? Maybe it's time to rediscover the magic again?