What's the best summer you ever had?
Another Memorial Day has passed. When I was a kid growing up in Indiana Memorial Day was what we would think of as the beginning of summer. School was out and now a whole new world would be opening up to us. Oh, those summer teenage years.
My wife and I spent the past month of February in Florida. Something we have been doing now for the past few years. She loves Florida and especially the ocean. I think some of this goes back to when she was growing up. As a teenager she often spent the summers with a cousin in Florida. I say the words "Linger Lodge" to her and she gets a smile. A big smile. There are even some names that come to her mind when mention of that place or the hearing of a certain oldies song. "Boy, he was a good dancer. She has some special memories of certain ones and certain times spent there at this teenage hangout of the late 1950s'.
The wise philosopher from Georgia, Lewis Gizzard once wrote of a summer of his.
"We were all sixteen. Just finished our junior year in high school."He said his mother experienced a momentary lapse in thinking and allowed he and a three of friends to have her 1958 blue and white Pontiac to drive from Moreland, Georgia to Daytona Beach, Florida. What do teenagers do in the late 50's at the beach,they look for girls and rock-n'-roll bands.
When one is eight years old and taken to the beach they go in the ocean, build sand castles and try to knock a golf ball in the clown's mouth. But when you are sixteen or seventeen in keepin' with the scriptures you "Put away childish things."
Lewis says he met Kippy when the song was playing "Do You Love Me." He said they danced a fast dance and then thanks be to the heavens, they played a Johnny Mathis song and they danced---really slow." He kissed her. A real kiss he said.
He went on to say that he and Kippy saw each other every night. "We were free, we were young and it was the most fun I think I ever had." His description of the events.
What he was describing happened nearly forty years ago but he still remembered. He said now he was too old for such beach trips and the music is much too loud. But the memory of Kippy and that time they are not gone. Never.
Kippy well---"We promised to write but you know about summer love---today Kippy could be a grandmother."
"Time moves like molasses when you are young but
it rages like a river when you're grown."
I once sat in the audience at the Polynesian Hotel in Hawaii and listened as Don Ho's last line--"I'll remember you---long after summer." Do you have a favorite summer? A doowop group from the late 50s' once sang a song, "One Summer Night."
I suppose most everyone of us has had a "Kippy" in our past. You?
I hope the thought of a past summer----- at least brings a smile.
Keep on,
Larry Adamson