Wonder Years

This summer has been all cotton candy and smiles for me. Sure, I have a job. But a job is a job is a job and what I do, really, is drive the two kids I watch to and from where they want to go. So yesterday the boy, 12, and I were headed to one destination or the next (actually, his guitar lesson which is housed in the back of a Christian bookstore) and he says to me "Oh, I've been dying to hear this song. I think you have it." Now, said boy is a young Beatles devotee. Just last week he ambled into the salon with an oversized Beatles picture book to show his hairdresser just which Lennon cut he wanted, and every time he puts a song on, I already know what is coming. But when neither Fixing a Hole nor Julia (no Beatles at all for that matter), but 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins began to play, it was a proud moment for me.

Okay, perhaps proud isn't the right word but I have been depressing myself right and left this summer when I ask the kids, 15 & 12, if they remember Snick or Ernest or if they've ever seen the classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off and all they say is "no, no, no". What fuels my childhood memories is now the stuff of the past. Instead, they'll come to hallow PS3 ("God, do you remember that system? How crude."), Miley Cyrus, High School Musical. But the boy's choice of 1979 sent me reeling.

I remember laying on my belly under the piano while watching MTV next to my brother, Reed. Circa 1996 he was a Pumpkins enthusiast; Bullet With Butterfly Wings or Zero penetrating the paper-thin wall that divides our rooms. I could hardly drown it out with my cassette version of Thriller, or ignore the heavy sound when friends and I feigned tea party. It wasn't the ideal background tune for imaginary banter, but it's what stuck and has become an appendage that defines growing up aside my brother.

Somewhere stretching through the decades, there is a sinew that connects morality and deviance and the unmistakable first feeling of butterflies as rights of youth. Return to yesterday; wide-eyed and singing "we were sure we'd never see and end to it all", foot to the pedal, my wistfulness, sunlight like a sugary ether slipping through the trees. A moment that was everything, is everything, will be everything. A moment that encapsulates some kind of forever, forever.