Playing Records in the Basement

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. It was innocent and appropriate, but my father was suspicious, and my forays into normal teen-age social life were accompanied by anxiety, conflict, and guilt.

This picture re-emerged via Facebook. Bobby Flanagan's brother seems to have inherited a trove of these vintage snapshots of family and friends, and he sent it to me out of the blue. I was surprised at how familiar those wood paneled walls looked all these decades later, right down to the arrangement of whimsical family portrait plates, and how easily I could 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 was contacted recently by another Facebook friend from Central Islip High School, Kathleen. It turns out she lives in San Luis Obispo, practically neighbors, and she and her husband have retired, and we decided to meet for lunch at a halfway point. I remembered her vaguely as a slender girl who was a majorette or cheerleader, one of those school spirit things, and a pleasant person, the kind who might have smiled and said hello to you in the hallway, which wasn't the norm. I worried of course that we'd have nothing at all to say to each other, and that our lives had so diverged we couldn't possibly relate, but as it turned out, these folks were actually...well...nice. Nice is a weak word, I know that, but nice is about the best you dare hope for when setting out to have lunch with someone you haven't seen since 1968 and barely knew even then.

More than nice, there was a certain generational camaraderie. We were shaped by the same forces: Vietnam, for one (and yes, my friend's husband remembered his lottery number) and assassinations and political turmoil and crazy 1960s hopefulness and inevitable disappointments. Somehow it distills into nostalgia, and we're old farts reminiscing. It's that youth thing again. We were so very young then, and we are so very not-young now, and wow...here we are. Naturally, Kathleen and I talked about classmates: memories from school days, marriages and moves, the sad inventory of the ones no longer living.

And it turns out we had each gone on one date with a certain boy, who shall remain unnamed. All I remember about my date with him is going to a carnival, a single tentative and uninspired kiss behind the ferris wheel, and being very bored. Apparently it was mutual, because his former steady girlfriend called me up the next day to report that he'd had a "really shitty" time with me, and they were back together now, and even though I didn't care, that stung a bit. I ate a dish of vanilla ice cream, read a book in my pajamas, and recovered pretty quickly.

"Oh, he was so cute in those days," said Kathleen. "But I saw him years later, at one of the reunions, and he didn't look so good. No, he hadn't aged well at all."

We indulged in a belated (and regressive) giggle at his expense.