For Lord�s sake, it�s just barely Spring and I�m already staring ahead at the horizon, looking for summer. It�s not so much the longer days or potential for vacation�those things lessen in significance with the advent of full-time employment, anyway, and the weather�s largely good here year-round. Today�s longing for summer, if I can call it a �longing,� which seems to be overstating the case, is linked to nostalgia for something I can�t quite name. It�s stupid for me to try to name it�Jonathan Richman describes it exactly in That Summer Feeling, and I�ve long since given up trying to match his economy of phrase.

I�m not generally prone to nostalgia, and in fact have both a horror of it and a disinclination based on a sheer lack of clear memories. Luckily, my best friend Sue is around to help in this department, with a steel trap memory for the most insignificant of humiliating details and a penchant for sharing.

Sue sent me a message yesterday to comment on a job I'm applying for, and unexpectedly referenced a guy I�ll call Skip Hallworthy. Not only was her reference completely gratuitous, it was surprising in that I didn�t realize she knew about Skip Hallworthy. I barely remember him, and I�m the one who made out with him for three hours in the unoccupied house across the street from his, one late night the summer I was 13.

Maybe it wasn�t three hours. I don�t specifically remember, but what I do recall is rolling around on the wall-to-wall Berber carpet in the empty living room of a stranger�s house (on the market, hence the emptiness), with this giant teenage blond football player a couple of years ahead of me. He lived next door to my then-best friend Tina, and we�d sustained ridiculous, proximity-based crushes on him for several weeks when he unexpectedly made a pass at me that I snuck out of my house in the middle of the night to complete.

I guess the house couldn�t have been totally empty, because I recall a radio tuned to a classic rock station, broadcasting Dire Straits �Making Movies� album all the way through, commercial-free. Kick-ass rock and roll! As their promos used to claim.

I should point out at this juncture that I am very specifically not nostalgic for Skip Hallworthy, who was a big, dumb jock and who, in my personal romantic archives, is filed under �Research.� He was the first boy I�d ever made out with, and I found the experience so novel and bizarre that I spent the bulk of the encounter silently analyzing it while tactically maneuvering to make sure Things Didn�t Go Too Far. I could see that this making-out had great possibilities, Skip Hallworthy notwithstanding.

Following our Big Make-Out, I went away to California on vacation, and returned to find that Skip had started dating my so-called best friend, and thereafter never once made eye contact with me, even when he ended up sitting across the aisle from me in French class. What was he doing in my French class, anyway? He was three years older than I was.

Anyway, I was driving up the coast to work this morning, laughing to myself about Sue�s ability to retain and then share information embarrassing to me, and listening to a new Smed CD, a volume titled You Can�t Stop Rock & Roll, Baby! which includes stellar hits like Foghat�s Slow Ride and Stone in Love, by Journey. I found myself kind of absent-mindedly singing along with Steve Perry on that latter one, a song really more suited to impassioned, high-pitched histrionics than distracted humming, when a memory surfaced.

I don�t recall the exact year, but I might have been about fourteen, and it was high summer. A number of girls were gathered at our friend Karla�s house for a sleep-over, and after the requisite ordered-in pizza and maybe a few surreptitious beers, we settled into the den in our pajamas to discuss boys and eat Popsicles. Karla�s older sister Janet commandeered the stereo to play her beloved arena rock � REO Speedwagon, Bon Jovi, Journey. She put on Journey�s �Escape,� and it played as we lounged around, laughing and gossiping about the boys we knew.

I was slightly intimidated by Janet, who was older and pretty and whom I hardly knew, and I was flattered when she slumped down next to me on the floor where I was sitting. She had just taken a bite of a lime Popsicle, which I remember because moments after she sat down, she leaned over and slipped the frozen bite into my mouth with her tongue, at the center of a kiss. I don�t remember whether I had time to blink, even, but there I was, with a mouthful of lime-flavored ice and a bewildered expression. She laughed and smiled at me, and I remember feeling that it was very important to appear to take it in stride. I laughed, too, and shrugged it off, but as the ice melted down my throat, I was suddenly aware of an entire new realm of experience�it was like she had offered me a sense as powerful as sight or hearing, but unnameable. You could easily imagine the sensation�it was cold and sweet and wet, and all that�the parts of the equation are obvious and mundane, but in combination that day, they took on a potent significance. I instantly understood that at the buffet table of sex, Skip Hallworthy, for all his earnestness, was burnt toast. Or maybe a crouton. Only taller. And possibly stupider.

Janet herself, although initially instrumental, was proven ultimately incidental, for the simple reason that once shown the door to open, I did not care how I'd gotten the key.

Anyway, that's all I'm nostalgic for: the sense that something new and mysterious is on the horizon.

Star of the day. . .24.143.161 ;-)