We’re in Santa Rosa for John and Cristie’s wedding. A few years back I would have declined. Now I know life is solely about these moments. Getting together and marking occasions.

After landing in Oakland, we drove through Petaluma. In case you don’t know it, that was the name of a Norman Greenbaum album. Northern California is littered with locations we read about in "Rolling Stone", where some of our favorite musicians lived and made music. It wasn’t about hits, hits were accidental. In Northern California it was about expanding your mind and becoming your fully realized self. Southern California was for posers.

And it still is.

SoCal is where you migrate to make it. You shine up your looks and your personality and try to become a star. And when you fail, you either return home or resign yourself to a day job in the San Fernando Valley. Those with a modicum of success in the industry eventually retire up north. To Sonoma or Napa.

My drinking days are long behind me. Killed by the LAPD and a woman who insisted on biting me during sex. Maybe that’s why I haven’t visited a winery since ’66, when my liquor store owning father used a "connection" to get a private tour of Christian Brothers Winery.

But today we schlepped from winery to winery in a bus. I didn’t partake, but the camaraderie was palpable. When you eclipse fifty it’s no longer about what you own, who you know, but who you are. It’s too late to reinvent yourself, you’ve etched your life into stone, you accept yourself. And therefore interactions are so much more fulfilling. It’s not about impressing people, but connecting with them. And even though I hadn’t met so many of the attendees previously, we fell right in. Friends have like-minded friends.

And tonight we drove twenty minutes from our hotel into the relative hinterlands where we saw goats and cows and a landscape out of a picture book. They say California is the Golden State. I believe that’s supposed to be about the 49ers, but when I looked at those hills this evening, I believed they inspired the name.

And in these early days of August, the light is changing. We’re experiencing the last throes of summer. The vegetation has fully bloomed. From here, it’s all downhill. You think of dark nights and those who are no longer with us. Who we used to tell our stories to, who used to listen to us. There are only so many summers and so many falls and then you reach the end. Usually in some ignominious way you couldn’t foresee. With your body failing or the big bang of an accident.

But before expiration occurs, and if it’s not the only thing you think about after fifty, it’s always present in the back of your mind, you keep on living, looking to savor more exquisite moments of life.

And that’s what this weekend has been. One of those unforeseen perfect epochs that you wish could go on forever. But don’t. Some of these people you’ll never see again. But their memories will live on.

For my wedding, I will dress in black
And never again will I look back

John and I lived through our divorces. When he counseled me through mine, his was unforeseen. He didn’t reel as much as me, but the disconnection takes a toll. When you can finally stand up straight you look for someone to fit the pocket, but your glove feels strange, it’s hard to find a ball that you can snap into that well-oiled appendage. If you’re lucky, you eventually do.

John did. An old friend fixed him up with Cristie. It was an instant romance. I think it’s going to last. Because when you’re older, it’s more about the person than your dreams. Your dreams rarely become realities.

John stood up in Sonoma last night in a black coat from Afghanistan and a white shirt from India.

You could see the teenage Cristie in her gown, the glint in her eyes had not died.

And while the ceremony is taking place, all I can hear in my brain is Don Henley’s "For My Wedding". He didn’t write it. But he made it his own on his 2000 album "Inside Job", released in the same year Napster gained critical mass and rendered all the new material by classic artists irrelevant. No one’s interested in the work of legends, everybody’s hunkering down and trying to survive, trying to find a bit of happiness in their lives.

And what truly makes you happy is a song. Now playing in your ears via Steve Jobs’ magical device. We take our music everywhere, it consoles us.

So what makes us any different from all the others
Who have tried and failed before us

Plenty. We’re baby boomers. We dealt with the world like it and we would survive intact no matter how much abuse we inflicted. But just like the planet is suffering, we’ve suffered too. We’ve done too many drugs, spent too much money. We thought the good times would go on forever. We didn’t truly believe the Mark Zuckerbergs could inherit the world.

But they have. And we’ve been pushed aside, we’re no longer the caretakers of the world. If we’re lucky, we can be caretakers of ourselves.

I think John and Cristie are going to make it. Because they don’t deny the past, it’s embedded in their memories. They’re living in the moment, seeing that fall always comes, and at a point that will seem too soon, you might make it to winter, but you won’t make it until spring.

To want what we have
To take what we’re given with grace
For these things I pray
On my wedding day
On my wedding day