A September moment.
Fragile, just a piece, part of an unremembered, unrecoverable whole from innocent times. Broken away from that whole. And seems, on this Sunday Labor Day Weekend night, like some piece from something like a vase you recall on a mantel, long lost now in some basement or attic.
It’s from a party, this moment. A teenage party. The party was dissolving. It had been a quiet party. I recall no dancing. Just teenagers –I being one of them –together in small rooms in somebody’s home which was just a second floor apartment in one of those humble woodframe homes off a dog-leg street off Morrissey Boulevard as you approached Neponset Circle in Boston’s Dorchester section. I was happy to be invited; didn’t always feel like I fit particularly well with everybody, kind of a broken piece. But I was accepted. Teenagers liked to be accepted. How strange I cannot even recall whose home it might be. Some girl whose parents had given her permission for a party.
It’s crazy simple, nostalgic thing that I’d recall just this moment –which did not involve me. A happy, innocent moment for other people, two teenagers like me.
It features two souls of my long-ago acquaintance sitting happily together on a couch. I have not seen either of them in probably sixty years. — I have the name of one, the boy; not the other, the girl. But I can see them both. The room was small, the light dim, nearly dark. There is music, a record playing, possibly from a stack of 45 rpm records. There were parlor windows facing out on the night, maybe a breeze against some curtains. The party was pretty much over, but the boy, Dickie Thompson, was holding the girl –no, no name for her. I will probably never have a name for her. She was happy at that moment to be held by Dickie on that couch, the street and maybe streetlights quietly at their back out a window. Not kissing, not “making out,” as the saying goes. Just sitting together, Dicks arm around the girl, the girl nestled against him. And the girl, a tremor of happiness in her young voice, nearly a laugh, as she shouted to a female companion who was leaving the party out a door in a hallway. She was not especially pretty, this girl. She was so obviously happy at this attention from Dickie. And Dickie was tall and thin, plain, hair swept back. A nice kid — always seemed a little older than his years, as if he’d already crossed a threshold into adulthood. I don’t recall him ever having a girlfriend.
Then the song on the record machine played that tune by the Tempos –“I’ll see you in September.” And I recalling how out of joint it seemed, for summer was over. In fact, I believe September was already here. It was probably Labor Day Weekend — a good time for a party, even though we teenagers had barely entered the job market. I was bagging at the super market up the Boulevard.
I don’t know what’s happened to Dickie — don’t know if perhaps he walked that girl home that night and that was it. Maybe they dated, maybe not.
Wherever he is tonight, if still alive, I’ll bet he doesn’t recall that moment. But – maybe he does. Maybe they married. Maybe they’ve both forgotten it. Maybe both gone.
I guess that moment seemed so tender — low light, window and streetlight quietly at their back, happy in what was probably Labor Day Weekend or thereabouts in 1963. Happy, newly together, feeling, maybe, something like love while the moment lasted.
I’d like to think someday I’ll get to ask them about it. But I just hope they’re happy, wherever they are.
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