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June 22, 2004
the first summer of the rest of my life.
I tend to talk a lot about being fifteen. At least once a month, I'll pull some crazy item of thrift store clothing out of the recesses of the closet and model it for Patrick, saying "I wore this to school when I was fifteen. How cool was I?" Or I'll open up my journal from tenth grade Creative Writing class, and read through an entry about That Summer.
I was fifteen in the summer of 1994, ten years ago. And while it's true that fifteen for me marked many standard teenage milestones (first kiss, first boyfriend, first time staying out past curfew), that's not really what I think about when I think about why that age, and that summer, shaped me so strongly, and why they still have so much resonance ten years later. What follows is a beginning of the explanation.
That was the summer when I began to understand gravity. I don’t mean the fall of steps, the way a toy, when dropped, will crash to the floor and break. I’d understood that since I was three. I’m talking about the pull of the earth in its orbit, the way the moon shapes tides, spreading them over the surface of the planet like a housewife spreading thick, sweet frosting over a layer cake.
It was all about lying on my back and looking up. Up at the branches of trees, their leaves fluttering in the wind. A northwest wind, my mom would say. In Maine, when you’re on the coast, you can tell which way the wind’s blowing just by looking outside – if the sky is blue and the clouds are puffs of perfect white, and it’s sunny but not hot – it’s a northwest wind day.
Erin and I were lying on our backs on the worn, gray pavement of Juniper road. Pavement so old it almost looked soft, pavement the color of a black teeshirt that’s been through the wash a hundred times. It was warm against my shoulderblades and my butt and the backs of my calves. Gravel was digging slightly into my right arm, cocked under my head. The shadows of maple leaves dappled our faces. We talked about reincarnation, whether we believed in it or not.
I thought about how her dad was dead. My uncle. I thought about how, years ago, when we were only seven or eight, in the entryway to the Jones cottage – the linoleum-floored room off the kitchen, near the back screen door – the one that faces the gravel driveway, not the ocean – I had said the thing I most regretted before... well, for a long time. I can’t think of another thing I regretted saying more. And the level of regret was childish in its melodrama, perhaps, but it was deep-rooted in me, a sadness that words from me had caused pain. I hadn’t meant it to sound the way it did.
There, by the screen door, she had said matter-of-factly, a little sadly, "My dad is dead. I don’t have a dad anymore." And I wanted to say I was sorry, to let her know that I sympathized with her pain. But what I said was, "I know. And I don’t have an uncle anymore." And I wanted to mean: it was a loss for everyone, he touched all of our lives, I share your sadness. But I knew, with my next breath, that that is not how it had sounded. It had sounded like I was trying to equate my pain with hers, and thereby somehow negate hers. An uncle is nothing like a father, and losing one can’t be compared with losing the other. When I think of that moment now, it still fills me with a feeling like crying. And I have to take a deep breath to equalize the pressure that has formed in throat and eyes.
But on that day, that blue-sky northwest wind day, we weren’t talking about her dead father. We were talking now about our crushes of the moment. I had a boyfriend. She had an obsessive crush on an older boy.
Later that summer, I would feel the earth moving. It would be night, and clear. Stars would be in the sky, and the brightest one would be Venus. We would lie on the field above Reid’s beach, listening to the wash and rush of ocean, and we would stare up again, at the sky, the stars, the planets.
That summer, Erin and I decided that life was moments. And that if we wanted to go swimming in the ocean in jeans and overalls, weighed down by the sogged denim, then slog back up the hill, pine needles and sand clinging to wet ankles, we would. And that if we wanted to sit under a picnic table on the public wharf and sing Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall all the way through, we would. Tourists could stare if they wanted. And that if we wanted to start a mosh pit and headbang to cheesy pop at the Yacht Club’s Teen Night dance, we would. And when they asked us to leave, we just laughed.
I think of that summer as the beginning of my current life. It was a summer of teenage rebellion, but most of all, it was the time when I decided, firmly and clearly, that I wanted to define myself in the world on my own terms, and make the world change to accept me, rather than the other way around. Now, I try to hang onto a little bit of that sense of righteous, iconoclastic idealism. I try to live a life that fifteen-year-old me would be down with.
Posted by sarah at June 22, 2004 09:00 PM
