I used to wonder why the elderly people in my life became so sad as the years passed. Now that I am older, I am beginning to understand.
Yesterday I was swimming in the pool, and I had the Yacht Rock station on in the background. The song, “Sad Eyes” came on and suddenly an entire summer from my youth flashed before my eyes.
My first kiss came during a summer romance when I was 16 in Canada on vacation.
When I was a kid, my Daddy used to take us to Canada on vacation every summer, and by the time I was a teenager, he got three weeks off.
We went every summer to a camp with rustic cabins, a crystal blue lake, water skiing, fishing, swimming, and fun family activities where everyone got to know one another.
I was an only child, so my parents used to let me invite a friend to go with us, and I had two girlfriends who went with me on various summers. One my friend Terry, and my friend Debby.
There were several families who came every summer, and it got to the point that our families coordinated dates so we could all be there at the same time. And those families had boys. And my girlfriends I and loved the boys.
One summer, my friend Debbie and I had hot crushes on these two boys, and we hatched an escape plan to sneak out to see them. My parents both snored, so we laid in bed at night pretending to be asleep, and then we listened for both of my parents to start snoring. We popped the screen out of our cabin window, climbed out, and went down to the campfire where the boys were.
The boys had snuck their dad’s beers, there was music, laughter, marshmallow roasting, and Meatloaf was singing “You took the words right out of my mouth. Oh, it must have been while you were kissing me.”
The boy I was crushing on roasted a marshmallow and dared me to eat a bite out of his mouth. When I went in for the marshmallow, he kissed me. So, my first kiss tasted sweet like marshmallows, and I knew my crush was crushing on me, too. Heaven!
I had a job at Fotomat, and when I got home, I blew up this photo of him waterskiing and framed it and put it in my room, and sometimes I would just look at it and think, “I kissed that guy!” He was so groovy.
We had a fun three-week summer romance, and then poof. It was over. I thought I would see him the next summer at the cabins, but he was older than me, and he graduated and his family didn’t come back.
We wrote letters back and forth for a while and when the Sad Eyes song came out, he sent it to me on 45. Like bought it, put it in a box and mailed it to me. And I listened to it like 4000 times.
That was 50 years ago. When I listened to that song yesterday, all those memories of Canadian summers, my girlfriends and our summer crushes, all came flooding back to me.
But last year, Terry died. Debbie died. My crush died. And both of my parents are gone. I wanted to call someone up and say, “Guess what song I heard on the radio today?” and reminisce and laugh about my 16-year-old life, but I am the keeper of all the memories of those times now. The only one left that knows those things happened.
And that’s why old people get sad. – Tamilu
Leave a Reply