Best Summer Ever
1978 had so much going for it and I tagged along…
We didn’t move in 1978. I had just finished 8th grade, where I was a new student in Falls Church, Virginia; and due to all the parents who worked for the government (I lived a bus ride away from D.C.) kids were friendly.
That summer I lived at the local pool, and while I didn’t love bikinis, I wore a few. I loved swimming, so a one piece felt easier. Diving, jumping, playing sharks and minnows with girls and guys together made life a lot more interesting. At fourteen I had a thing for cute boys, but my shyness around a boy I really liked made me clam up.
The guys who were in the friend category were the ones I teased and hung out with. I had a best friend, too. Susan. She was opposite of me: dark hair, brown eyes, curvy and cool. As a blue-eyed blonde I rarely tanned, but that perfect summer saw my hair turn white and my skin looked darker than it ever had. We’d rub baby oil or Tropicana SPF 2 onto out skin and baste for an hour.
Then Susan and I popped up to dive into the deliciously cool water. Susan looked elegant flipping her long, wet hair to the side, and I’d usually just swim until my hair lay flat. Then we’d play four-square. It sounds childish, but the teens played, and we all were merciless. Balls barely dropped in my corner had to be returned, or it was back to the end of the line.
Susan and her gorgeous brother, Sam, taught me to smoke cigarettes that year. Sounds awful, I know, but we’d steal out into the woods and light up.
Sam played his guitar beautifully, and while I sang just about any style, I played piano. No choice in the matter. It was what the oldest daughter did, and I followed. I learned how to play and sing at the same time that perfect summer.
On rainy days, which didn’t come often enough to spell us from the languid, drooping air, I’d sit at the piano, praying nobody could hear me. (I realize now they all heard me, but oh well.) Sam came to our door one day, and he stood inside the hall and watched me play, and I think that’s the moment we began noticing each other more and more.
I can tell you if a song is from 1978, because the pool played the radio all day. I walked in at noon and generally stayed until closing. 9:00. Somedays mom wanted to see me at dinnertime, or I had to cook, so I’d race home in bare feet on hot concrete, wolf down food I hardly noticed and walk right back to all my friends.
I learned how to use a tampon, so I could swim, and Susan coached me from the stall next to me. I don’t embarrass easily, but I wished she would just shove the thing in for me. I learned how my body twisted a bit, and it worked! I could wear a white bikini whenever I wanted! Hallelujah!
One night the sun had set, and my 10:00 curfew left me with time to linger outside the closed pool. Pink still painted the western edge of the periwinkle sky, and we stood in the dirt path that lead home, when Sam brushed my arm with his fingertips. No one noticed, which was a small mercy, because Susan had drawn a line saying her best friend (me) could not date her other best friend (Sam, her brother).
Sam ran his fingertips over my tanned, bare arm and said whispered, “Your skin is so soft.” I heard him, but no one else did. I looked up at him in surprise. Didn’t all girls have soft arms? I thought since Sam was a year older he had to more experienced with girls and kissing and such. I hadn’t been kissed yet, but that night I wanted Sam to kiss me.
In front of everyone. I didn’t care. He didn’t, though we talked quietly about when I would sleep over at Susan’s. Sam often hung our with us at their house, and their cool mom let us smoke cigarettes in the basement. We’d play air hockey, and then we’d listen to Carly Simon, Fleetwood Mac, or Bob Seger and talk until midnight. Hopes, dreams, and snippets of the adults we’d become peeked out tentatively at times.
I did kiss a boy late that summer, but only to get it out of the way. We never dated, and I don’t know his name. I wanted Sam, but we still hung out as a group that year. Swimming, diving and four-square. Then off to hang out under the willow trees in my long back yard, where we could talk and laugh without bothering anyone.
That gorgeous summer melted away one August night. High school would separate us into three different schools, and the night before school began I looked out the open windows into the black heart of the night and wished nothing would change. I never slept well the night before the first day of school, and I didn’t. My best summer closed that night.
I moved away the following June. Figures. But I saw Sam several times in the ensuing years, and we spent a lovely night on the beach together in Delaware. Just a lot of kissing, and Susan irritatedly pointed out how sandy I was when Sam at the and I showed up at the beach house together. Guilty, I took a quick shower. Sam later married a friend of mine from the best summer ever.
In 1978 we didn’t move for once. I had friends. I had the absolute closest best friend ever, and my parents gave me so much freedom that year. I read The Exorcist for kicks, sprayed Love’s Baby Soft on before I went out, and I fell in love for the first time. Slipped my way into it. Sam played with my hair sometimes, weaving tiny braids on the sides of my face, and I listened to his music for hours.
When The Boys of Summer by Don Henley plays, I think of it as my September song. It’s reserved for the end of the carefree days of fun. The song is a lament for so much lost back there. I left my wishes on the first star to prick the sky. My songs sung on the swing in the back of the house were caught up in the willows, and I left Susan and Sam. I lost them, too.
All the other summers I either moved or worked. 1978 will always take me back to being a tanned, lithe, young woman learning so much. I wonder what might have changed had I stayed there, but fate moved me to Wisconsin. To the place were my country husband lived in a smallish town, played football, drew and painted, studied, and learned his own way around dating and girls.
As much as I disliked or hated the move, I don’t know how I would have ever found David if I had stayed in the east. Maybe all we get is one good season. One to tuck in our back pocket, knowing it’s safe there. We can pull it out when we want to feel young, careless, carefree and innocent verging on too much knowledge.
I still miss it. But, oh, what a wonderful gift those three months were for me. I’m a lucky lady. I am.
