The Knights of Columbus Club is just beginning to buzz as we pull up at 7:45, 15 minutes fashionably late. Our cars hold two families of three people each; the two small boys—cousins, one in each car, for sanity’s sake—love each other madly and can’t bear the five-minute drive from our dinner at Bonanza. My husband’s aunt and uncle have been married for 48 years, and their children are throwing them a party.

The club manager directs us into the room. To the left as we enter is the guest book, presided over by my husband’s cousin’s wife and their infant son. To the right is a long table with old and new family pictures. Wearing a corsage and boutonniere, Milly and Joe greet their guests.

My husband and I, and his sister and her husband, sit next to my mother-in-law at a table full of family. The little boys and their three younger cousins whiz off, playing tag as far from us as possible. They use the punchbowl as home base, and I worry. (I worry about it all, actually, and if I had my way our seven-year-old son would sit politely next to me and converse intelligently with his elders.) My husband tells me to relax: This is all de rigueur at dances, has been since Adam. I did it, too, in different ways, when I was a child, but wanting my son to be better than I am, I remain unconvinced. “Look how well I turned out,” my husband adds. I force a smile. My sister-in-law grows soft-eyed reminiscing about going to dances as a little girl and then the long car ride home, sleepy in the backseat. “I could still hear the music as if it was in the car with us,” she says. Eyeing the accordions on the stage, I fear it might be true.

About 8:30 the band comes in: Reiny and Burt on guitar and accordion, their names embroidered on their caps, and a third man on the drums. One of the children of the honored couple gets on the mike and says that the party is for them because they’ve been such wonderful parents. They’re going to cut the cake now, he adds, and would everyone please stand up for a moment and gather around it? We hear him, but no one wants to be the first to walk across the empty dance floor, and after a second request they cut the cake attended only by five boys under eight years old, all in their Sunday best, greed in their eyes.

The first dance belongs to Milly and Joe, and now I know how they looked at each other at their wedding. Then there’s a two-step, three waltzes, another two-step, then a couple of polkas and a schottische to which we polka. The only real deviation in rhythm during the evening is “Blue Spanish Eyes,” performed without conviction. There’s something comforting about participating in a dance whose beginnings lie past all remembering. I look around and guess that the percentage of divorces in this room must be nearly as low as in a pondful of Canada geese. These ranch and small-town couples of all shapes and sizes dance together as if they were breathing or pulling a calf or rolling over together in their sleep. I’d like to dance like that some day. “One flesh” takes on new meaning when one watches plain long-married folks doing a plain immemorial dance (which can, hours later, cramp up the legs of the immoderate).

The five small cousins, in groups of two and three according to age, discover Paradise. They sit on the dance-waxed floor and spin around. They swing each other by the hands as hard as they can and then let go, fall, and slide; drink waitresses dodge them deftly, used to it. My son is wearing a pair of white pants his grandmother gave him, and our table decides I’ll need a whole bottle of Shout to get them clean. I tell my mother-in-law no, I’m just going to send them to her.

There are three extraordinarily pretty girls, cousins and friends, all quivering on the brink of teendom. They have asked the band to play what in my youth was called a bunny hop, and the band obliges gallantly. The girls form a line, each with her hands lightly, self-consciously on the hips of the girl before her, and they start their sedate, charming circle of little kicks and hops. A hitch: They have the floor to themselves. They tough it out, smiling bravely and trying to make nonchalant small talk among themselves as they move under the lights, although it’s obvious they’d like the earth to swallow them up. The adults are not the only ones watching: I see my young son and his six-year-old cousin lying at the dark end of the dance floor, heads propped up on elbows, mouths wide open but motionless for once, entranced at the pretty sight. I grow firmer in my resolve to lock him in the basement during his teens.

At 9:30 the food is brought in, much of it prepared by Milly herself anniversary cake, nuts, mints, dips and crackers and cold cuts, hot meatballs and chicken wings and french fried cauliflower in chafing dishes, relish trays, tropical fruit punch, and coffee. The boys are dancing on their toes now, too wound up to eat. My husband makes our son drink a Sprite, suspicious that the boys are innocently commandeering whatever beverage is handy when they get thirsty. I start to ask him if he did that, too, when he was a kid, but someone we haven’t seen for a while bends over us and the thought gets lost. I know the answer, anyway.

There are more than a hundred people in the room, more family than I’ll ever be able to meet or remember. Some are not family but friends, which amounts to almost the same thing. By 10:00—11:00 in the time zone we came from, just 90 miles east—we’ve all danced with each other if we’re so inclined, caught up on the gossip, our son is rubbing his eyes as he hops up and down to the music, and I’m beginning to feel that way myself. My husband drives us to his sister’s house, where we’ll spend the night. I look at him and out at the clear sky, listen to the boys chattering tiredly, and it comes into my mind that a family is like a galaxy, whirling its giant arms and growing larger all the time, so large that where it stops nobody knows—and a marriage, thank God, is more than the sum of its partners. Time and patience effect a grace that mere intent never could. I close my eyes and can still hear the music.