Today, kind of a chilly day...my foot still in a boot and keeping me home bound...I skipped through the channels. I landed on Stand By Me. This movie was huge when I was a kid. I have always loved it. I own it on DVD. I have sat my kids down to watch it. It is still a movie that moves me.
When I watch this movie I am always brought back to being a teenager. I think of how simple it was in my life. How the biggest thing in my life was swimming meets and softball. It meant living for summer vacation. It meant swimming outside and playing water tag all day at the pool. It meant hanging out with friends everyday...listening to music as loud as I could and going to White Sox games in the middle of the afternoon. It meant playing catch until the sun went down and wishing everyday would never end.
It can recreate complete days in my head...waking up and walking across the lawn with summer dew on my barefeet, cartoons on tv in the morning, riding my bike to the pool and spending the entire day in the water. I remember songs of the summer on the radio. I remember summer salad on the table with a fresh cucumber salad dressing that my Grandmother would make. I loved the smell of fresh cut grass...I can remember laughing each day and sleeping better than I can recall ever sleeping in my life.
Summer days were spent hanging out with my boyfriend at the park...who whenever I see this movie always reminds me of him...he looked just like River Phoenix. He always hated that reference as a kid and would tell me so each time I would say it.
We reconnected recently and this came into the topic of discussion one night... I learned he loved every time I said it to him. Funny, I think I always new that deep down.
I think back to all my friends, I can still hear their laughter. I can still smell the pool, I can still see the exact color of the sky. These years, they were the best time in my life. I would relive them every day of them if I could.
At the end of the movie Stand By Me, there was a line that was being typed in...at the time, I did not fully understand nor could I have grasped how much truth that line would have later in life...it was "Gordie Lachance's" character typing the final line of his book, it read: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"
Really, does anyone? I can honestly say, not me.
