Remembering that first summer tasting the freedom of school as a memory, mine largely the stuff of night sweats. I spent too much time alone, trying to write songs on a guitar I’d never learn to play.

Rock music had gone missing, presumed exiled in France with the Chuck Berry and The Stones. The void was filled with singer songwriters—just much better than me—and southern-rock, and even kids who’d never been south of Jersey adopted a twang and drawl.

You and me, never a thing, just us. We spent that summer riding around till past sunset, in my ‘67 Chevy with the windows wide open bathed in that hot summer air. June and July nights till well past nine, almost ten in the evening after the sun was set. We stole us a few of the last beams of the day and watched them paint the water of the big pond by your house. Some nights the air was fresh and clear and sometimes sticky as syrup. I looked at you that one time, as we were coming down that gravel hill by the still water and it was late, maybe quarter to ten, but the sky was still a light blue and a bit of gold tinged the edge of the darkness and that gold and blue was reflected in the perfectly calm water. And I wondered which half I lived in. You said maybe neither was real, and we were just here for a while—just here, not in either scene, and we were alone.

I wanted to say something romantic or poetic or profound but the words always escaped me so I said if I died here and now, and my last memory was this perfect moment with you I’d die a happy man, or a boy, depending on my behavior in the present.

You laughed, and jumped from behind a big maple tree and pushed me into the weedy end of the pond, down by that cut in the shoreline before the dam, where all the green muck collects. Because it seemed you weren’t much for poetry or romance either.

I sat in the slimy water and a frog jumped out of the weeds and I felt somehow baptized and washed free of the sins laid upon from the crimes and tribulations of our day’s past. The sexual baseball metaphor all boys at the time lived by had me clearly sliding into home just a few days before. We happily found ourselves free of any of the requisite quilt.

I looked at you, muddy and smiling and laughing on the shoreline. I splashed my hands in the muck and said, “I have been in love with you since the first grade…”

And you didn’t say anything, but you smiled your secret smile. You were quiet not because you were mean, but because no one at your house expressed stuff like that and I knew that, just like I knew your daddy hated me for liking you when we was only five and six years old. And I saw your mom sometimes in town and she always looked like she’d been crying. I’d felt the chill of your house sitting in your front room waiting on you. Your daddy was big and mean and he liked beer and cigarettes and quiet. I couldn’t be quiet even sitting still and I knew just my breathing pissed him off.

That was the one soft and sweet summer of my life, the same year we celebrated the bicentennial. And everyone was full of American pride and flags were everywhere and we got drunk of PBRs and Jimmy Carter’s brother’s Billy Beer and Mexican weed. My world was one big party, and everyone was there but you. You left town in July with your mom, as she escaped your father’s factory-drunk-pain.

After ‘76 life happened at full speed. I went and got a job working on trucks full of produce, and become quite skilled at swearing in Spanish, and it took me a lot of years to stop thinking about you, but I did. I knew you leaving with your mom was for the best. I wasn’t much better at being a man than I’d been at being a boy, and truth be told, not a lot better at all than your daddy.

You and me, we were forgotten to the rain and snow of a long line of winters, whose cold makes you forget about things like soft-sweet summers.

I forgot all about you, and even your name for a time, until one day for reasons I’ll never understand I found myself walking down that gravel hill by the big pond and it was late in the evening, and the last golden fingers of day that touched the night sky were reflected perfectly in the glass-still water and for a moment I wondered, in which reality did I live, and I recalled your words, and realized we were just here for a while, and you were right all along.