While we seniors remember much about our past years and reminisce about them, I think we also keep secret some of the events from "back then" or maybe just set them into a corner of our mind and rarely dust them off and remember them.  Some of those unremembered times might be bitter, painful or sad.  Those are the kinds of thoughts we try to put behind us in order to live a reasonably happy life.

 

There is, however, one kind of memory, a poignant one, that I think simply gets set aside, so to speak, but when recalled brings a smile to our faces.  It is a memory of a time when life was good, and those times defined us as much of a teenager as many teenagers today.  It was for us that special season, a season of a summer love, a love that didn't last.  It was when we met someone who didn't go to our school or wasn't from our neighborhood or city.  Often the meeting took place at a summer camp or a church retreat which involved teenagers from many different areas.

 

It was the fleeting meeting of two young people that had all the passion that teenagers have. It was a time of emotional fireworks for us.  It was a falling, a tumbling, a leaping heart first into love that we thought would never end.  We thought we could overcome the obstacles of distance somehow.  It was a time before there was email or Facebook or Twitter.  It was a time of perhaps one expensive phone call a month and many written letters.

 

I mention this because it is a reminder for us in some small way what it is to be a teenager.  As we get older we seem to forget how the passions, that thing we called love, raged in us.  We forget how adults secretly smiled and tolerated what they knew to be foolish ideas.  But it was those times, those years, those feelings and emotions that went into making us who we are, as much as anything else did. 

 

Sadly, in a way our parents were right.  Those summer loves cooled like the warm days and nights of that summer cooled with the coming of fall.  There was no internet, no instant messages to stoke those fires.  Time and distance took their tolls, and the romances ended and faded into memory.  And I suspect even today, when we think back to that summer love, we are a teenager once more.  Then we smile in fond remembrance and wonder what ever happened to him or her. 

 

Maybe a few of us today wonder what would have happened if that romance had been transformed into an engagement and then a marriage.  Personally I think the story would not have ended with a warm memory but a bitter reality.  I think it was our good fortune to have that romance die so that in future years we would have that special memory of what once was but was never meant to be.