I’m forty-one. For Sarah and me, the song now sounds like being in love all those years ago, when we were each other’s new partners, and it also sounds like our love now. It’s a bridge between that life and this one. We’re playing “New Partner” for our now nine-year-old son for the first time, and Sarah and I can’t help but smile a little giddily at each other. We start dancing together slowly in the kitchen despite our son’s gagging noises, and we sing along, Sarah on-key and me way off-. At the end of the song, I ask my son if he liked it and he says, “A little.”

That’s okay. He’ll have a different song. You probably have a different one, too. I hope it carries you to places you need to visit without asking you to stay in them.

I give “New Partner” five stars.

THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE

MOST DAYS, I walk past a vertical strip of four photographs featuring Sarah and me. The pictures were taken at a photo booth in Chicago in 2005, just a couple of weeks after we got engaged. It’s standard photo booth fare—smiles, silly faces, and so on—but the light was good, and we were young.

As I get older, the picture keeps changing. In 2005, I thought, This is us. These days, I think, We were just kids. Seeing that picture every day helps remind me that in another fifteen years, I will see pictures of us from 2020 and think, Look at everything those two didn’t know.

There is one other photograph I see almost every day: It’s a print of a picture taken by the photographer August Sander initially titled Young Farmers, 1914, but later known as Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

Sander took many photographs that he called Young Farmers for his massive, never-finished project People of the 20th Century, which sought to photograph all sorts of people in Germany, from aristocrats to circus performers to soldiers. But this picture is probably the best known of them all. I first learned about it from Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which I read in college. Powers later wrote an autobiographical novel in which a young computer programmer becomes obsessed with the picture and abandons his career to write about it. I, too, have become obsessed with the picture. I spent years working to track down the biographies and other extant portraits of the boys depicted in the photograph.*

There’s so much to love about this picture. I love how the young men are looking over their shoulders, as if they barely have time to pause for the camera before going toward the dance and the rest of their lives. Their feet are in the mud, but their heads are in the sky, which is not a bad metaphor for being twenty. And their expressions capture the way you feel when you’re with your best friends in your nicest clothes.