Summer night long ago

Dear H

It was forty-one years ago, in 1964 on a balmy, late-summer evening not unlike this one. Above was a mellifluous August canopy – a Milky Way of stars studding an ebony sky now rare in this light polluted world. I ventured down a freshly-oiled & graveled macadam back road, piloting a shiny-new sky-blue-metallic Pontiac Tempest. It was replete with a throaty sounding, way-too-big, five plus liter V-8, air conditioning and bucket front seats. My brother and I had somehow cajoled and/or conned my parents into buying this road rocket as the family sedan. From Grandview Avenue to Spook Rock Road in Ramapo at sundown, to Tallman in the gathering twilight, I manically motored. Through the verdant and cool and katydid-populated woods of Upper Saddle River to a destination in Ridgewood, I deftly drove. As if on a mission.

For there, ensconced in a well-tended split ranch with a lush and luxuriant hunter-green front lawn that felt like soft cool moist shag carpet underfoot, was a girl. With whom I had passed notes to and fro during a French class taught by Madame Polgar the preceding spring. Who spelled reflection with an “x”. Who introduced me to the somehow secret and sonorous sounding word “miasma”. Whose name rolled off my tongue in glamorous and alluring alliteration. And who I found rather fascinatingly, exotically, bright.

She was nineteen and about to go off to George Washington University in the District of Columbia. She looked to my recollection like a brunette Elizabeth Montgomery (Bewitched) with a dash of Helen Mirren (PBS). I was but a callow seventeen and impetuously and often petulantly young even at that.

The time that we spent then seems now to have passed in an instant. But what crystallized out of that moment was a euphoric memory of that starlit night with her that I would carry in my mind to Cambridge, Mass., where I called her a few days later. From a little-used rotary dial phone that had resided since 1941 on a little shelf in the upper hall of my Aunt and Uncle’s turn-of-century house just off Harvard Square. And then to the deep and rocky woods of mid-Maine where my parents, my brother and I journeyed for a brief stay at a dude camp on the shores of Kidney Pond just outside Mount Katadin State Park. Where the staff would light the fire in our cabin each frosty morning and cook gourmet breakfasts. And then back south to the sunny still-summery ball fields of high school where in September the varsity soccer team convened early for practice.

What was playing in my mind as a sound track all this time was the Beatles singing, Things We Said Today. I could not escape it. Murray the K, who called himself the fifth Beatle, played it regularly on New York’s 1010 WINS. As did Cousin Brucie and Big Dan Ingram on WABC. “Then I will remember, things we said today”. And each day in that late summer seemed like an act in a play.

Every once in a while about this time of year something seemingly small and insignificant and evanescent, like a scent of fresh asphalt or a glint of starlight or just a balmy feeling floating in from the August aether, seems to trigger this rediscovery, this crystalline panorama of memory. Which seems to me now like a novella lived by someone else long ago and far away, save for the thin thread that persists between me and that girl. For me, this cascade of thought is like a quasar. A beacon that stands at the far distant edge, the deep and misty fringe, of what I can still recollect as a then-just-emerging relatively sentient being.

It is the textured fabric of faint echoes like these that I suppose we all carry around with us. Like heirlooms in a threadbare and overstuffed but precious receptacle called our Past, and that make us who we are today. And that may somehow, somewhere, even persist out in the aether even after we have, centuries ago, turned to dust.

Perhaps this letter will make it so.

-- Aug. 23, 2005