y tendency is to mock the psuedo-emotion of sentimentality as a rule, especially when it is used as just another decorative centerpiece during the weddings of people I see only on those rare eclipses of the sun. So, I don’t especially relish buying another crystal cut salad bowl from a distant department store registry, which costs more than the svelte leather jacket I had my eye on, just for someone I hardly know. But, when I attend an occasion where the bride or groom is a childhood acquaintance, I am forced to pull back on the reins of my habitually impulsive judgment.

I’ll admit, that a part of my mind began to open like the jewel-spilling cave of Ali Baba, during the recent Walima of a childhood companion. When I saw him perched on a Mughal style sofa up on the platform of the hotel ballroom with his beautiful wife, I felt, for the first time, the calm understanding of how blocks of time are interconnected. My mind was trying to make sense of the phase of my life I exited and the stage in which I now existed. Everyone’s overlapping pasts seemed to sweep past each other like rippling pieces of multi-colored strips on the handlebars of a kid’s bike.

I noticed the many people present, with the banquet hall resembling a microcosm of the UN. Waiters and caterers dressed in black bowties and waistcoats, who, even when pretending to concentrate on scraping a china plate or filling a crystal glass, looked up, their stoic expressions melting when they began marveling with their partners in crime at the presence of such a wide array of costumes, cultures, and melanin. There was something certainly unique about the small community I’d grown up in, I noticed, and that was the calm acceptance of what tied us together this evening. This Walima was also the eventual symbol of what the parents of our generation wanted to see before they died—their satisfaction being a stamped mark of approval on a package brimming with happiness. This was the way it was supposed to be, according to them, but it didn’t happen everyday or to just any passing Tom, Dick, or Habib.

As I stared between the flickering candles poised on the ebony, metal gothic stands, I remembered when I was an ugly duckling in embroidered satin and when I had met the family for the first time. Our parents were chummy and I usually would tag along when there were dinners at his home, so I could receive the full benefit of cultural exposure in a state where samosas and saris were few and far between. His parents were very warm, and keeping up with his family tradition, I suppose, he and his brothers offered to highlight my middle school life with a crash course on the rules of basketball. However, we all parted ways after an unfortunate incident when he accidentally aimed the ball at my face, mistaking my nose for the hoop, bending my gold-rimmed glasses in the process. After that, even though we shared the same Latin language class during high school, I found  little reason to talk to him unless it involved an extra credit grade hike discussion on the toga wearing habits of the Romans. He took Latin probably because it would help him in pre-med and I took it because I was going to be an English major and I thought mosaics were pretty.

As I sat watching his college friends grill him and his bride in front of the wedding guests, I reached for my water glass absent mindedly, just in order to have something to do while laughing at the anecdotes. An uncle from Texas joked about the groom’s inability to concoct poetry at the age of fifteen. Another uncle from India read Urdu poems in his honor, and I translated them in mumblings to my Egyptian friends who were sitting at my table, sometimes writing down the translation on curling packets of Lipton tea, so I wouldn’t disturb the ambience. People sat back satisfactorily, seeming to eavesdrop under the low lights of the ballroom and the candlelight, their salwar kameezes and saris twinkling; women’s arms jingling with bangles as they clapped, smooth and wrinkled arms all included. Each guest probably knew distinct pieces of information about the groom and his family over the years, but the overpowering collection of all those memories, could undoubtedly never belong to one person.

As the night waned I wanted to put all that I’d seen into a bottle and protect it, but I was aware my mind was creating newer memories. I didn’t have the luxury of time, however. Acquiring the luxury of endless time required a mindset of blissful ignorance, usually reserved for children, and the resulting euphoria of that ignorance would be the same for youngsters playing on the slum fringes of Calcutta or the palace gardens of Moscow—a complete indifference of the best kind. You’ll find children, even if they are of vastly different backgrounds, seeing time as being of little importance, as the pink sun weighs heavy behind the hills and their mothers’ voices become hoarse repeatedly calling them to dinner.

When you’re a kid, time is simply an impediment. And what’s especially strange about those we grow up with is whenever we see them again, it’s as if no time passed whatsoever. It doesn’t matter if they’ve become, in the meantime, one of the supreme court justices, the main thing you’ll remember, during a get-together, is the time you pushed him in the pool or she broke your ceiling light during an enthralling pillow fight. As children, we handle time as infinite and unimportant, finding ways to even surpass its limits with a certain air of cockiness, as if we’re performing the long jump in the sand box and the yard is our Olympic stadium. And whether we want it or not, remnants of those feelings will always become a part of us; maybe a week after we receive a pen at our retirement party, and we’re watching Peter Jennings on the evening news, still wondering what’s for dinner.