When We Were Very Young: An Oldie

The Righteous Brothers had lost that loving feeling, the Beatles needed somebody (not just anybody), and the Rolling Stones could get no satisfaction. Such emotions were still abstract to me, but it was 1965, and we were playing records in the basement of Bobby Flanagan's house, and the boys were funny and sometimes we danced. The world was new.

I am the girl in the lower left with the impossibly lustrous and managed hair, wearing my favorite wool jumper with the brown and black checks. Everyone looks dressed up; I can almost smell the shampoo and shoe polish.

It must have been a Sunday. Rosemary and I often used church as our excuse to get out of our own turbulent homes, not because we were religious, but because we knew we'd see the Lowell Avenue boys there, and afterwards, we would go over to the house on Locust Street to listen to music and goof around.

I’m surprised at how familiar those wood paneled walls look all these decades later, right down to the arrangement of whimsical family portrait plates, and how easily I can imagine the pop and fizz of the cola Dave is opening, and the silly surface banter and laughter beneath which deep rivers of yearning and hormones were beginning to surge.

We inhabited the beautiful exteriors of the young, blissfully unaware that those facades were ephemeral. Our problems, though pressing, were relatively simple, and there seemed to be no limit on the time we'd be granted to figure things out. Not enough loss had yet accrued to shake our faith or hint at our mortality.

I love this photo and the moment it captures.