Cover

The Sixth Wedding

Elin Hilderbrand

Little, Brown and Company

New York     Boston     London

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Introduction

What are we talking about in 2023? Home robots, life on planet B20, the resurgence of “appointment television,” an NFL team in Paris, a phone battery that holds a charge for one year, the Hamptons submarine, Elon Musk’s “moon colony,” an eight-billion-sensor economy and…the end of the pandemic. Social distancing, quarantining, PCR and antigen tests, masks and PPE are in our collective rearview mirror. We can gather once again. Twenty thousand people pack into Madison Square Garden to hear Billy Joel segue from “My Life” into a cover of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” Super Bowl LVII is held in Glendale, Arizona, and those who don’t have tickets crowd around the bar at Kimmyz on the Greenway. Movie theaters are packed, people do the Electric Slide at weddings, and Viking River Cruises has a three-year wait list. Every treadmill at Orangetheory Fitness in Boca Raton is spoken for; all Peloton classes in both New York and L.A. are sold out. The late-night Jimmys perform their monologues in front of a live studio audience. The Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs is at 95 percent occupancy and there’s no hope for getting a ticket to a Boston Pops Christmas performance unless you want to pay five thousand dollars on StubHub. Bingo night at Chai Point Senior Living in Milwaukee is back on, every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m.! We all go to have our teeth cleaned, our eyes checked. The theme of the Met Ball is Fashion Returns (people get dressed up, wear heels). The impossible-to-get item is no longer toilet paper, it’s a seat on Alitalia’s Friday night flight from JFK to Rome. The online dating scene rebounds with a fervor—people are meeting IRL!—with newcomer Firepink leading the way for Gen X and Boomers. The Dow soars over forty thousand—and we thought the 1920s were roaring!

Although we are relieved that life is “getting back to normal”—we have returned to our offices and in-person meetings; we’re throwing away our ring lights, if we never Zoom again it will be too soon—we have all learned some valuable lessons, and not just how to make sourdough bread. We have learned to save and budget for the unexpected. We have learned to cherish all the things we temporarily lost: baseball games, author tours, Disney World, family reunions, charity benefits, college visits (college, period), our sense of taste and smell, acoustic night at Frayed Edge Coffee, sitting next to a stranger on a bus or at a bar, seeing one another smile, and most especially the opportunity to hug our loved ones wherever we want, whenever we want.

We honor the ones we have lost.

What are we talking about in 2023? We are talking about our shared grief. We are talking about our collective gratitude.

Cooper