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| A vintage postcard of Lake Switzerland, near the Catskills town of Fleischmanns, N.Y. |
We liked this piece by Joyce Wadler in the New York Times today so we thought we'd share it. Joyce Wadler is the author of “Cured: My Ovarian Cancer Story. Follow Joyce Wadler on Facebook: facebook.com/joyce.wadler and on Twitter: @joyce_wadler. Previous “I Was Misinformed” columns can be found here.
Every Teenager Should Have a Summer of ’65
There are people who make fun of teenage romances, but I never do and that is because of Rob. He strolled up the street in the tiny Catskills town of Pine Hill one day in the summer of 1965 carrying "The Catcher in the Rye," the badge of a kindred spirit, wearing a canary yellow cable knit sweater. You did not see that shade of yellow on an American guy, but, of course, Rob had not yet become an American guy. He was a Hungarian, working as a busboy at a small hotel owned by another Hungarian. The Catskills were like that then. I was 17; Rob was two years older.
“Do you remember a conversation we had one night near the lake about
God,” I was saying to him this weekend on the phone. “I told you I had
been thinking there was nobody out there and I thought that was pretty
bold of me.”
He did not, but he remembered something I had forgotten entirely.
“I was telling somebody the other day you were the person who introduced
me to Bob Dylan,” he said. “It’s kind of funny because 50 years later,
I’m still listening to Bob Dylan.”
Rob lives in Budapest. A few years ago doctors found a nonmalignant
tumor in his head, which the doctors zapped, and now, because of
medication, he no longer drives. A year and a half ago, pre-cancerous
cells were found in the breast where I’d had cancer 22 years ago, and I
had to have surgery, and there were complications healing. Did I tell
Rob about the complications? I can’t remember. We sometimes go for
months without talking, but when we do it is as if we talked yesterday
so I always have the feeling of being caught up.
“What was my father like when you met him?” one of Rob’s two daughters, then in her late teens, asked me once.
“He was funny,” I say, which sounds wrong to both of us the moment it is
out because Rob was never a guy who always had to be on.
He was dry and smart and observant. He spoke at least four languages. He
had history in his bones: His mother and older brother had been rounded
up by the Nazis in Budapest during World War II and escaped by melting
into the crowd, though I do not think I knew that then. He had lived at
the Y when he first came to New York and always seemed calm and
perpetually amused. It would be a long time before I knew that coming to
the United States speaking very little English was so stressful that he
would have stomach trouble for years. The self-absorption of
17-year-olds is staggering.
“You must have been making out like crazy in these woods when you were a
teenager,” a friend I was showing around the Catskills said recently.
“No need,” I said. “We had all these deserted hotels. Sometimes with beds.”
Not very good beds, it’s true. The mattresses were so skinny they could
be rolled up, and they smelled heavily of mold. But the deserted grand
hotels that might or might not be torched at the end of each season were
still an answer to a teenager’s dream. It’s too bad no one wrote songs
about them — we were probably too limited a demographic: Kids in the
Catskills making out in abandoned hotels. And what fine little love
nests they were: Force open a window of the Takanassee Hotel in
Fleischmanns, slip inside, wonder about the detritus left behind — a
cook’s big white apron, a few pots. But you don’t think about it long.
Busboys don’t get a lot of time off.
Most teenage girls have to leave their boyfriends when they go off to
college, but I do not. When I go to N.Y.U., Rob returns home to Queens
to work in his parent’s candy store. At the Weinstein dorm on University
Place in the Village the other girls are impressed: College boys are
scruffy, starting to move from chinos to jeans and longer hair,
unreliable, stoned. Rob, in his narrow-cut jackets and jeans that look
pressed, is a cool European guy out of one those French movies we were
so proud of watching, "Shoot the Piano Player" maybe.
But I don’t want a European guy. I want a funny, fast-talking New York
City boy. I don’t want a guy who has to be back at the candy store by 11
on Saturday night, to put together The New York Times. My values stink.
I break up with Rob for a fast-talking guy in freshman sociology who
has a girlfriend at Boston University and a red TR-3, starting a bad
pattern of lusting after the unattainable, human and automotive.
Rob, fundamentally saner, gets a scholarship to N.Y.U., where he meets a
smart, pretty American girl who grew up in Paris and whose name is
Lucy. It is probably between junior and senior year, when I hear they
have married and spent the summer knocking about Europe, that I feel the
deep, unequivocal, “Oops.” And it is not until I am 32, visiting Rob
and Lucy in Budapest with my boyfriend, Donal, that I really realize how
much I had in common with Rob after all.
But here is the upside of being an adult: It is O.K. You do not have to
be in a romantic relationship to keep the love. I have known since I met
Lucy that she is the better match for Rob, and I like her. If Lucy
comes alone to New York we hang out, which, as you move into your 40s,
means something different than when you were in your teens: me being
treated for one kind of cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering on one floor,
Lucy’s mother dying of cancer a few floors down, Lucy, shuttling from
one floor to another. With the boyfriends who matter you get a new
friend, the wife. And later, when their children grow up and come to New
York and need a place to stay, you get to fuss over them and see how
great they turned out and wonder, just for a moment, how they might have
looked if you hadn’t have gone for the guy with the sports car.
Next thing you know it is another day in summer, the summer of ’98. My
friend Herb and I have just finished a bike trip in France’s chateau
country and we are waiting for Rob and Lucy. When they drive up, we are
all talking at once. We drive to Provence. Around three in the afternoon
we pull up to a little guesthouse and the owner says it is too late for
lunch but maybe she can scare us up something. Forty minutes later we
are sitting at the table, having the freshest salad I have had in my
life.
“This lettuce was in the ground 20 minutes ago,” Rob says.
Why, with the billions and billions of sentences I have heard, do I
remember a sentence about lettuce? But I do. It is great lettuce and my
first boyfriend and his wife and my best friend and I are all together. I
have pictures. We four in the house in Provence, grinning.
Somewhere out there a 17-year-old girl is sitting outside on a muggy day and a teenage boy is about to walk up to her.
Don’t knock it.
