An entire genre of music has been created in it's honor. Movies have been made about it. Books have been penned in its name. A boy, a girl and a vacation location (mine is the beach. . .see my book). In one week’s time, during the freedom of the summer, a teen aged girl could live out an entire lifetime of love from Saturday to Saturday. It is the summer love and the beauty of it was, it only really lasted a week until the next year. In our case, there were two very special boys, that Steph and I spent time with every year from the time I was 13 until 17. The years when we were particularly cute, thin and young.
Last year, I had the good fortune to get in contact with one of the boys (Steph’s “love”) and was pleased to find out he was married with children and still lived at the beach. Well, ok. I already knew he still lived at the beach. You see, Stephie and I have stalked him year after year, driving by his house, looking to make sure the name was still on the mailbox, daring one another to go to the door and say hello. We never follow through. And so it was, this year that we hopped in an electric golf cart and traveled back down Memory Lane once again.
It was my intention to show Stephie how successful her Boy had become. He now owns several houses at the beach, many of them back up to a freshwater lake once called The Pits.
We met The Boys in 1972, at the Pits actually, when one of them road his bike down the dirt path and into the lake - stark naked. Had we been any younger we might have needed therapy to get beyond the incident, but hormones had already kicked in and it didn’t take long for us to get to know The Boys. We were young, bikini'd, and barefoot . We squeezed lemon juice into our hair to give it highlights and bathed in baby oil to enhance our tans. And for a whole week, we didn’t wear shoes. The Boys were long haired, deeply tanned and they surfed. We thought they were gorgeous. The parents nicknamed them The Munchkins - which was better than Snort and Grunt (the back-up beach boyfriends).
Our first official date a was homemade dinner. My boy enlisted his Italian father to cook us an authentic Italian lasagna and set us up with a little candle lit table. Stephie was so nervous that she could not eat. I never had that problem. After the dinner, they drove us down to the public beach at the very south end and we caught ghost crabs, walked on the beach and kissed. We kissed a lot.
My father always believed that The Boys had a different set of girlfriends every week. We always believed WE were the only girls they saw and that their summer wasn’t complete until we arrived. Perhaps we were delusional, but we have elevated those hormonal memories to historic proportions, creating epic stories from what amounted to no more than six weeks from our collective lives. Those Boys are icons in our lexicon, archetypes in our stories and legends in our own minds.
So what happens when a drive down Memory Lane brings traffic you weren’t expecting?
To Be Continued. . .
