If I had any question about where the children go while the parents dance, it was answered for me when I set out to leave my house about six this morning, curious to see what the people looked like then, after a whole night of wedding dancing without sleep.
I opened my door to see three little shadows sitting in a line on our front rocks. They turned their faces up to me and whispered happy hellos. I wondered how long they’d been sitting there waiting for me—perhaps summoned by my reading light at 4:30—and how many other mornings they’d sat there anxiously, to no avail.
It was probably a letdown that I told them I was going up to the ringing bell (the central sound ringing from every wedding celebration… quite nonstop… for at least two days) to see the people dancing.
It wasn’t so exciting—to us it normally isn’t—just a bunch of drunk people, scarcely dressed yet elaborately adorned with beads and any other bit of nonsense from outside, covered in white ash and gyrating awkwardly around or inside a circle.
But I’ve always wondered how they would be in the morning. We’ve been there at night, at the beginning of the all-night bashes. But never have I ventured out in the morning, though I wake up often to hear the bells and drums still going full-bore.
Well, my wondering has ceased. They’d just a bit more drunk, a bit more off-beat and a lot more likely to spontaneously break out in quarreling or fighting. But I tell you, these people would be all-stars at pulling all-nighters at college.
My curiosity quenched and my patience running thin with all the fighting, I headed back home. I felt a bit like a pied piper, collecting more and more children as I walked home, all asking if they could come to my house and play. I haven’t been doing that as much lately, and I miss it—a sentiment, it seems, shared by the kids.
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