When I hear that the kallah is 21, I’m surprised. Since when do 21-year-olds look so young?

IT hasn’t been so long since our wedding. We’re still a young couple. Practically newlyweds. We look exactly the same as we looked in our wedding pictures (well, almost exactly). We’re still using plenty of the things we purchased or received as gifts when we got married.

We’re inexperienced in so many ways, still discovering the world of adults. Yes, we’ve figured out quite a bit — we’ve learned about getting into school, and we’ve nailed taxes. We’ve picked up the basics of babyhood and we’ve vanquished leaky sinks.

But there’s still so much we don’t know. We really are at the beginning of our journey in adulthood.

So when a wedding invitation arrives in the mail, I admire it. It’s much fancier than mine was. It doesn’t occur to me that it’s been a while since I’ve seen a wedding invitation. Instead, I think, Hmm, must be a trendy kallah! It doesn’t cross my mind that invitation styles have changed since my friends and I were getting married. It was just recently, after all.

I don’t recognize the name of the hall either. It wasn’t around when we got married. But there are some new halls that have sprung up in the wake of Covid, and I assume this is one of them.

When I get to the hall, the first thing that strikes me (other than the music vibrating in my eardrums) is how this must be an especially young kallah. Her friends all look like schoolgirls, and the styles! I don’t recognize the styles.

When I hear that the kallah is 21, I’m surprised. Since when do 21-year-olds look so young? Twenty-one is about my age.