As a co-founder of Retrospect, I thought I would respond to this month’s prompt by offering a founder’s perspective on what we were trying to accomplish, how it did (and didn’t) fulfill those aims, and what it ended up doing instead.

Retrospect proves that social media sites need not become cesspools of trolling and rancor.

Then I read what Patti and I wrote back in 2018 as we prepared to shut down the site. It turned out that we said most of that then, more eloquently than I would probably have done it now. So I tossed my outline in favor of simply reposting that story below and adding a few thoughts here.

First, we are indebted to Suzy for taking over Retrospect and giving it the tender loving care (and cash) it needed to keep going and growing. Bringing in co-administrators was also a brilliant stroke, and we salute Marian, Laurie, and Barbara for the creativity and effort they added.

Second, it strikes me that Retrospect has remained a safe haven for personal stories even as many social media sites have become cesspools of trolling and rancor. If the way to a mass audience was to emulate Facebook and Twitter by amplifying controversy, partisanship, and outrage, we preferred to remain small.

Besides, the small audience we attracted was passionate about telling their own stories and using comments to find common ground with others. We’re grateful to all of you who came to share that passion, contribute your wonderful stories to Retrospect, and be part of the mutually supportive community that grew here.

We hope Retrospect will continue and, to that end, if able, we encourage you to join Suzy, Marian, Laurie, and Barbara in the noble calling of story wrangling. Because, as we baby boomers grow older, our stories are too important to lose.

One of us spoke the unspoken in mid-November [2018]—the idea that it was time to move on from MyRetrospect.com—and the idea floated in the air like a sagging birthday balloon. This is how we make some of our tough decisions: We pick a tentative course of action and live with it for a week or two, looking at it, weighing it, trying it on. Neither of us spoke about it much, but it hung there, not going away.

We had high hopes when we founded Retrospect Media, Inc. back in 2014. We dreamed of a site where hundreds, then thousands of baby boomers could capture and share their memories and life stories. We dreamed of compiling the first-ever first-person history of a whole generation. We dreamed of becoming a hub for boomers to form a community, to connect, to rediscover our activism, to support each other as we aged. We dreamed of a site that would, through subscriptions, sponsorships, and a boomer marketplace, support itself, and us, and more.

None of those dreams came to pass, but another did. Instead of a mass audience, Retrospect attracted a small but passionate band of storytellers. You bonded, formed a community, and became important in each others’ lives. That was apparently what Retrospect wanted to be, and we embraced the role of facilitating that community.

To inform our decision, we tracked the amount of time we spent on Retrospect (among other tasks) over a week. On one typical day, we had asked a Retrospect author for permission to post a chapter of one of their published books as the featured story for an upcoming prompt. She agreed, and we spent time uploading it from the book, choosing the right featured image, and making it look good on the site. The chapter was a beautiful, self-contained story on its own, and we practically rubbed our hands together like a diabolical Bond villain in anticipation of sharing it with others.

That same day, another Retrospect writer posted a story on the current prompt. There wasn’t anything particularly special about it, but it just had the right combination of suspense, humor, insight, and closure that made us grin when we came to the end. The author is not a professional writer and would probably not have written this (or any) story were it not for Retrospect. We looked at each other and thought, we helped this lovely story come into being. We’re story wranglers.

Story wrangling has been our calling over the last four years. We’ve loved the work: designing the site, testing it, trying new features. We loved crafting prompts and selecting images to evoke the most cogent memories and experiences. We loved creating our weekly newsletter and promoting prompts and stories on social media. We loved learning about search engine optimization and Google Analytics and renting mailing lists to send promotional postcards. And most of all, we loved reading your stories, with their humor, pathos, poignancy, triumphs, and heartbreaks—the deeds and misdeeds of real people trying to make their way in the world, all of us trying to cobble together a life we can enjoy and be proud of even as it overtakes us. We’ve all known since we were little kids that there is magic in storytelling—in learning how others experience the world, what we share and how we differ, and in finding out what happens next. Did we really want to give that up?

A few days later, a friend was diagnosed with a nasty life-threatening cancer. It was just the latest reminder that our time on this planet is limited, and if there are goals we want to accomplish or experiences we want to have, we’d better get to them. In the end, this is what crystallized our decision.

Much as we’ve loved story wrangling, it’s not the only role we want to fulfill in our remaining years. Story telling, for example. (That novel is not going write itself.) Music making. Retrospect was a labor of love, but it was still labor. It’s time to open up space in our lives for new goals and new roles. It’s time to move on to the next phase of our lives.

Our founding team. Photo credit: Robb Most for InMenlo.com © 2017. Used with permission.

There are many people we want to thank before we go. We’re grateful to Susan, our co-founder, who shared this venture with us from the start until just a year ago. We couldn’t have created or maintained the site without the help of Arthur, Gunny, and Angela at Firespike LLC, our web development and marketing partners, who built the site, made changes as requested, fought off intruders, and fixed bugs with unceasing good humor—and even contributed their own stories. We’re indebted to Peter, Janey, and Ashwin from WilmerHale for providing legal help and advice under their innovative QuickStart program. We thank Marc, our advisor, who generously shared his expertise and experience while we all shared champagne and pizza. And mostly we thank you, our readers and storytellers, for sharing more than 900 stories with us and each other, and for making Retrospect a ride we will never forget.

May all your endings be happy. Well, that’s not realistic. Instead, we wish you long life, memorable stories, and friends and family to tell them to. Farewell.

John & Patti Zussman are co-founders of Retrospect Media, Inc.

Originally written in the ‘90s. I’ll leave it to readers to guess whether my sleepy time experience has changed in the intervening years.

The demons barge into my brain at three a.m., check for messages, make coffee.

The demons barge into my brain at three a.m., check for messages, make coffee. They peel back my eyelids to peer at my dreams. “Bor-ring!” says the competitive friend demon as he flips through the infomercials. “When are you going to get high-def satellite?” The travel demon shakes me. “Wake up!” he calls in my ear. “It’s time to decide what to pack for your trip.” “Get lost!” I say. I look at him groggily. He is short and bearded, like a troll. They all look like trolls, even the women.

I turn over. “Yeah, go away,” says the perfectionist boss demon, always helpful. “You had him last night. Remember his presentation tomorrow?” Piss off!” I say. “I’ve prepared it.” “Sure,” coos the boss demon, “but you haven’t worried about it enough.” I turn over again but the doctor demon is on that side, solicitous, asking about the lump on my elbow. “Probably benign,” she says, “but let’s take a biopsy.”

I reach for my book and reading light. Under the covers, I escape to another man’s mid-life crisis. After a chapter I close my eyes. “Hi there,” says the IRS audit demon. Behind her the others are raucous. They sing Hava Nagila and dance in a circle, a pixie hora, except for the disgruntled employee demon who frowns at his desk, writing a four-page email full of ANGRY CAPITALIZED PHRASES. I push back the covers, put on my slippers, walk to the study. “Ignore us if you like,” says the aging parent demon. “We’ll wait.”

I sort through mail, read the newspaper, write a birthday card. The demons drink beer, eat chips, play pinochle. The irate sister-in-law demon wants to rehash the last argument. I put a relaxation tape in the Walkman. “Focus on your breathing,” says the calm, measured voice. “Inhale, exhale. In your mind, you see yourself as relaxed.” Am I relaxed? The demons, playing ping-pong, clatter distantly from the next room.

By five-thirty the sky is gray. The demons aren’t fond of daylight. They overflow the trash with pizza boxes and beer bottles and parade out the door, going bowling. “G’night,” says the stock market demon as I settle back into bed. He knows the alarm is set for seven. “See you tomorrow.” “Maybe not,” I smile as I slip into sleep.” I’m going to write a story about you.”

“Great idea!” exclaims the editor demon. “I’ll bring my red pencil.”

The Grammy Awards poster the year we won.

I have a long history with Carl Orff’s cantata Carmina Burana. Around 1966, my parents returned from my father’s annual tax seminar in New York City with an LP. They had heard it performed and thought I would enjoy it. I had recently become a fan of classical choral music and had joined my first chorus that summer at music camp. But I looked at it skeptically. A piece I’d never heard of by a composer I’d never heard of? Not likely.

Oh, there’s also a swan (a brave tenor) who sings of roasting in agony on a spit.

I put it on the turntable and was blown away.

At camp, I had sung Handel’s Messiah and Kodaly’s Te Deum. Carmina is nothing like those works, except that (like the Kodaly) it’s mostly in Latin. Orff based it on a trove of medieval manuscripts found in a Bavarian monastery in 1803. The poems and stories are not at all religious—in fact, they’re secular bordering on profane. Carmina is about the vagaries of fortune; the coming of spring; drinking and gambling; desire spurned and requited; and the urgency of young carnal love. Well, as a 16-year-old boy, I was certainly interested in that.

Oh, there’s also a swan (a brave tenor) who sings of roasting in agony on a spit.

I listened to it so often I wore out the stylus on my turntable. The song settings are vivid, almost cinematic. (Even if you don’t know the piece, you’d doubtless recognize its opening movement, O Fortuna, employed in so many movies, TV shows, and commercials that it has its own Wikipedia page.) I could practically sing along although I had never seen the score. I wanted desperately to perform it.

Flash forward to 1983. Now settled into our adult working lives, Patti and I thought it might be time to start singing again. We read in the paper that a local chorus, the Schola Cantorum, was sponsoring a series of Summer Sings where singers could read through some of the great choral repertoire. Last in the series: Carmina.

I went and learned three things. One, Carmina was as fun to sing as I imagined. Two, Schola was led by a dynamic, charismatic conductor, Louis Magor, with whom it would be fun to sing anything. Three, Schola was leading off its new season with Carmina. Fate was indeed smiling on us that day.

Singing Carmina with Schola launched Patti’s and my choral odyssey and initiated many lasting friendships. Seven years later, we sang it again—and recorded it—on the stage of Davies Symphony Hall as members of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. That recording won a Grammy as the best choral recording of 1992. A fantasy come true.

In 2019, our friend Greg Wait—the swan in that original performance and our former voice teacher—concluded his 30-year reign as music director of Schola. We rejoined the group for his two valedictory programs: Carmina Burana and Brahms’ German Requiem (worth its own Retrospect tribute).

We thought we had exhausted the depth of Carmina in previous performances, but that turned out not to be true. Every performance is a little different. In this one, for example, the baritone soloist portrayed the abbot of Cockaigne as a staggering, hiccupping, rip-roaring drunk. And, after reviewing the men’s choral catalogue of the multitudes drinking immoderately in the tavern (the mistress, the master, the soldier, the priest…), we had to admit the characterization was apt.

More to the point, we’ve now lived long enough to appreciate how the gods of fate and fortune lift us up only to let us down, and why we must be forever grateful to generous Venus, Venus generosa. Parts of it choke me up every time, though we try to suppress that in performance.

So if the gods of fortune decreed that we had to choose one song—okay, one musical work—to listen to on repeat for the rest of our days, it’s hard to think of a better choice than Carmina Burana.

A less intimidating Marty Doctoroff as judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals.

My local Harvard interviewer was a Detroit lawyer named Marty Doctoroff whom my father knew professionally. I went to his office and he proceeded to grill me about current events and social issues — the Vietnam war, civil rights, campus unrest. The questions were all a little “slanted,” however, and I didn’t have stock answers. So for each one I’d stumble around a bit trying to get my bearing, then settle on a tack and start to cruise — at which point he’d interrupt me and ask about something else! It was so frustrating that finally I asked him why he wasn’t letting me finish. He replied, “Well, I knew what you were going to say.”

What it's like when your college interview is conducted by an FBI agent.

And as I thought about it, it was true. My answers were pretty much what my father would have said — the accepted liberal (but not radical) wisdom of the time. It was sobering, when I had a chance to reflect on it. Later I learned that Marty had previously been an FBI agent, where he learned how to interrogate a suspect. I was no match for him — but he did recommend me.

Marty and I got a chance to laugh about it later on, when he and my dad shared a law office for several years and our families started to socialize. I told him I had never learned as much about myself in an hour as I did from that interview.

Toward the end of 2002, our first full year on Maui, we were approached by Irene, a local vacation rental agent. Would we be interested in renting our house out over the holidays? She had a client, a celebrity musician whom she couldn’t name, who was interested in booking it for a month. He wouldn’t be inviting all his friends or throwing wild parties, she promised. All he wanted to do was relax and kick back out of the public eye. She named a rental amount that, even after her 20% commission, seemed extravagant.

You turned down backstage passes, our friends asked? Are you CRAZY?

We looked at each other. We had been planning to go to California over the holidays anyway. And the amount was at the “offer we can’t refuse” level. Shit yeah. Why the hell not?

View from the lanai

Once we signed a nondisclosure agreement—which still did not name the mystery guest—the rental agent visited with Trevor, the guest’s head of security, in tow. The guest, he said, was especially interested in our piano, a glorious Bechstein grand. He toured the house and approved the setup, on a bluff overlooking the ocean. The only thing that worried him was the pool complex, with a spa stepping down to an infinity dipping pool, and the water cascading from there into the infinity lap pool. It was wide open to a spectacular view of the crashing surf below and the islands of Moloka’i and Lanai beyond, between which the sun set nightly. It’s too open, he said; it could be seen from the road below. Would it be okay if they brought in potted trees from a nursery and positioned them around the pool? They would pay the expense and remove them at the end of the rental. We looked at each other again. Block the view? Is he crazy? But we shrugged and said, sure.

The agent sent us the rental agreement, which again did not reveal the guest’s identity but listed an address in Minneapolis. By then rumors were swirling around the island via the “coconut wireless,” and they all seemed to center on Prince—or, at that time, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. We weren’t really fans—our shelves of CDs were full of classical music, not pop—but of course were aware of him. He was apparently very religious and not known for drugs or partying. We signed the agreement.

The next three weeks were a whirlwind of activity as we made the house habitable for rental. It seemed like we made the 2-hour drive to and from Kahului, where Lowe’s, Costco, and even the previously shunned Walmart were located, once or twice a day. We purchased new sets of bed linens and towels for guest use. We put a lock on one of the master closets to store our own personal belongings. We scoured the island for the last bits of furniture that we hadn’t had a chance to acquire. We even wrote an instruction manual for our sound system and projection TV.

The pool complex

A few days before the guest’s arrival, Trevor visited again with a more critical eye. This time he focused on the master bedroom, which also overlooked the pool and the ocean. Can we get rid of the bed? he asked, indicating our elegant four-poster. He likes to sleep on the floor. Really? Okay, if that’s what he wants. We painstakingly dismantled the bed, dragged the heavy posts and rails down to the garage, and placed the mattress and box spring on the floor like a college student.

Trevor also didn’t like the sheer curtains on the glass door to the bedroom lanai, through which the sun streamed each morning. He needs it dark, he said. We rushed into Kahului and bought darker curtains, but even those didn’t pass inspection. Finally, Trevor went into town and bought rolls of black tarp with which we all papered over the sliding doors. It seemed criminal, blocking not only the view but access to the lanai. But the guest is always right.

As we packed up to leave, we surveyed the house with Irene and Trevor. The artist, still unnamed but now tacitly acknowledged as Prince, would be performing in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve. Would we like to attend, Trevor asked? He could arrange backstage passes. Again, we looked at each other. Did we really want to arrange another set of flights, find suitable accommodations, and brave the New Year’s Eve crowds in a city we disdained, just to see an artist we weren’t really fans of? We thanked him and said no.

That’s the one decision we came to regret, after he died and we realized he wasn’t just a pop star, he was a cultural phenomenon.

We had a lovely holiday back in California and returned to Maui a few days before Prince was scheduled to leave. Irene called and told us Prince loved the house and wanted to extend his stay another week. No problem! We had a condo nearby where we could bunk for the duration. We arranged with Trevor to come over one day when Prince and his entourage were out and pick up some personal items.

But when we got there and opened the garage door to enter, we immediately realized a problem: trash bags of garbage that looked and smelled like they’d been there for weeks. Prince was so protective of his privacy that he refused to let the trash collectors in. We begged Trevor to let them do their jobs, but apparently he would tolerate no intrusions.

Prince ended up spending five weeks in our house. Trevor said he might have stayed longer but the roosters were starting to get to him. We were fully sympathetic.

When we finally moved back into the house, it was pristine and undamaged. He left behind only a few Christian tracts. And, in the garage, a mouse infestation that we resolved over time but turned out to be a problem for our next celebrity renter, Stevie Nicks. But that’s another story.

So that’s our brush with superstardom. We never met Prince, never attended one of his concerts. But we spent a lot of time and effort trying to satisfy his every desire. He ate at our table, swam in our pool, and slept in our bed (or at least on our mattress). And whenever we play our piano, we remember our mystery guest.

The call from my brother came on a Sunday morning. “Mom’s in hospice in Bradenton,” he said. She and her body, after defeating cancer twice over the years, had finally given up fighting Parkinson’s, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, psoriasis, and recurring pneumonia. “It’s time.”

The last person to know me from moment one was reaching the end. What did she want to hear from me? What did I want to say to her?

I booked a red-eye across the country, laying over at ATL, bustling and garish even in the middle of the night. I had a long time to think.

Our relationship hadn’t been easy. The apple of her eye as a child, and she of mine, I had made different choices than she envisioned, than she wanted, and suffered the consequences. Now the last person to know me from moment one was reaching the end. What did she want to hear from me? What did I want to say to her? By the time I landed in Sarasota, I had settled on four things.

In the hospice room, homey and spacious, my mom dozed in a hospital bed, a canula in her nose but otherwise unencumbered. My dad, three siblings, and a few of their spouses and children were already seated around her, making light conversation, bringing each other up to date. Others were due to arrive over the next couple of days.

When she awoke, I approached the bed. “Hi, Mom,” I said. She was pale, her hair wispy. I bent over and kissed her on the cheek. She was woozy but looked back at me. There was still light in her eyes.

“I love you and I’m proud of you.” That was Thing #1.

“Why?” she said, her voice hoarse.

“Because you fought so hard and so long, and then you knew when to stop fighting.”

She looked pleased, but it was hard to tell. She was still a little out of it. “It’s great that you came down,” she croaked out.

“Thank you for being my mom,” I said, “and for everything you did.” Thing #2.

“Thank you for being my son,” she replied.

The other two things were harder and more personal. I wanted to wait until I could be alone with her, if that ever happened. If I could bring myself to speak them.

My chance came that night after we returned from dinner. My sibs and their kids had taken off and my father went for a walk. My mom was dozing again, no longer lucid. I pulled my chair up to the bed.

“I don’t know if you can hear me,” I said in a quiet voice, “but I need to say this. I need to practice it.”

“I’m sorry for all the times I hurt you,” I said. That was Thing #3.

Her breathing was steady but shallow, like a ghost might breathe, over and over.

“And I forgive you for all the times you hurt me,” I said. Thing #4. The most difficult, because she had never apologized, never even acknowledged the hurts.

Her eyes were still closed. Had she heard me? The hospice nurses all said her hearing would be the last sense to go.

I’ll never know. But I said them. That would have to be enough.

*

Later, after I returned to California, after a snowy funeral in Michigan, I related all this to my friend Barr. He had been my therapist 35 years before, so he knew the history.

When I got to Thing #4, he raised an eyebrow. “Did you mean it?” he said.

I thought long and hard before I answered.

“I’m working on it,” I said.

The Redwood Symphony is an ambitious community orchestra, based in Silicon Valley, that never shrank from a challenge. Under the baton of Maestro Eric Kujawsky, its repertoire extends into territory that most community orchestras fear to tread, such as the cycle of symphonies by Gustav Mahler. But the challenge they attempted in spring 1999 would prove daunting even for most professional orchestras: Mahler’s epic Eighth Symphony, nicknamed “Symphony of a Thousand” for the prodigious forces required: an augmented symphony orchestra, seven vocal soloists, a children’s choir, and not one but two four-part adult choruses, which sing almost nonstop over the hour and twenty minutes of the work’s two movements. For that reason it’s rarely performed, so when Patti and I were recruited to sing in the chorus, we (like most of the other singers) were learning it from scratch.

Virtual Seder like it's 1999.

The performance was in early April, and one required rehearsal conflicted with the first night of Passover. No big deal to Patti and me, but it mattered to our friends Peter and Janet, who played oboe and cello in the orchestra, respectively. They would otherwise have been celebrating Seder with their four-year-old son Michael, who instead was home with a sitter.

Michael was a big fan of the Rugrats cartoons, which gave Peter and Janet an idea. So at our rehearsal break, the four of us clustered together in the “band room” and called their sitter at home. (So those of you who celebrated virtual Seders in this year of COVID-19: we had you beat by 21 years.)

Our Haggadah for the evening was Let My Babies Go!, a children’s book in which the Rugrats imagine they are Moses, Miriam, Aaron, the Pharoah, and all the other Passover characters. Based on an episode of the cartoon show, it attempted to retell the Passover story within the attention and comprehension span of a preschooler.

Our break was only 20 minutes, so we had to move fast. The details are a little fuzzy at this point, but I remember we recited the blessings over wine, bread, and our gathering. We drank at least one cup of wine (or was it grape juice?) and ate a “Hillel sandwich” of matzo, haroset (fruit and nut paste), and bitter herbs. Michael asked the Four Questions (their daughter, with whom Janet was pregnant, being a tad too young). We sang Dayenu, with Patti and me trying our best to conserve our voices.

We raced through the Seder, struggling to hear and be heard through the tiny speaker of a ‘90s-era cell phone over the din of musicians practicing their parts. I marveled at how many of the highlights we could include, and how, with the book’s help, we actually captured the essence of the story in such a short time. (Too bad the Rugrats weren’t around when my grandfather was conducting his four-hour all-Hebrew Seders!) And by the time a bell rang and we made our way back to rehearsal, sated with matzo and grape juice (or was it wine?), we had all learned an important lesson (as Dave Barry did not say):

Gustav and the Rugrats would be a good name for a rock band.

Waiting for the tram at the Universal Studios tour, we filed past a statue of Lon Chaney in the old silent classic, Phantom of the Opera. It was almost lifelike in its detail— sunken eyes, jagged teeth, black cape. We admired it and passed it by.

Our hearts all skipped a beat, so you can imagine the child’s terror, her scream piercing the waiting area.

A small crowd gradually arrived, waiting, chattering. A father and his small child stopped in front of the statue. The father was explaining who Lon Chaney was when, suddenly, the statue came alive, snarled, and swooped menacingly at the child. Everyone jumped back, startled; our hearts all skipped a beat, so you can imagine the child’s terror, her scream piercing the waiting area. The actor set down a tip jar, then turned to the girl, cajoled her, gave her a sweet, until, safe in her father’s arms, tears drying, she asked him how he could stand so still for so long. At that moment the tram arrived. We boarded and the actor reassumed his pose for the next round of victims.

Thirty years later, I have long forgotten what else we saw at Universal Studios. But after witnessing stone turn to flesh, I understand that anything, no matter how inert, might merely be awaiting its moment to awaken into life.

Not steak. Photo credit: SparkRecipes.

I lied to my mother about how long I’d practiced the piano, figuring I’d make up for it before my lesson on Saturday. Besides, it was a little white lie, like when she served us liver and told us it was steak. My father lied to us when he said the spankings hurt him more than they hurt us. When he got cancer, his doctors lied to him about his prognosis and asked my mother to collude. After my father died, my mother remarried. She lied to us about how happy she was, then went to the neighbors’ house to cry.

The lies we told each other—and ourselves.

My teachers lied about the conquest of the west and the causes of the Civil War, and the principal lied about how much the school district could afford to pay them.

In the evening, on TV, we saw Southern senators filibuster the civil rights bill in the name of states’ rights, and we heard tobacco executives deny that cigarettes cause cancer. We watched Huntley and Brinkley report the Pentagon’s lies about the body counts in Vietnam and how well the war was going. Then we watched the president lie about why we were there. And we all desperately, desperately wanted to be deceived.

One of many beaches on Aruba that I’ve never seen. Photo credit: Vlad Man via Pixabay.

My senior year in high school, out of the blue, my parents planned a family trip to Aruba over spring break in April. This was unusual. We traditionally spent Christmas skiing in Colorado, but beach vacations were rare since Florida trips with my grandparents in early childhood. That was as close as I had ever been to the Caribbean. It sounded balmy and exotic and a welcome break from the Michigan winter.

Spring break on Aruba? Oh yeah! There was only one problem.

The only problem was, I couldn’t go.

I had signed up to be pianist for my high school musical, Bye Bye Birdie. It was the most ambitious production the drama department had ever attempted. To meet the challenge, the director scheduled rehearsals every day of spring break. As pianist, I was indispensible—and I had made a commitment. Regretfully, I had to stay behind.

My parents made arrangements for me to stay the week with my best friend Bud. There was nothing novel about this; I had slept over with him many times and felt like a member of the family. The only problem was, Bud’s family was hosting an exchange student that year, a boy named Kees from Holland, who occupied the spare bed in Bud’s room. No worries: I could bunk with Bud’s sister Ilene, two years younger.

If this sounds strange, it was. I’m not sure whether Bud’s parents trusted me to be a gentleman with their adolescent daughter, or they considered me a suitable mate and hoped we would perhaps become a bit more intimate. The fact was that I had grown up with Ilene and considered her more of a kid sister.

The week came, my parents and siblings took off for Aruba, and I moved down the street. Bud and Kees were also in the play, so we drove to rehearsals together. Far from being a burden, the week was actually fun. It felt like theater camp and, spending so much time together working on a passion project, the cast and crew became a close-knit community. With the intense rehearsals, the show was coming together nicely.

Besides, there was this girl.

Her name was Patti, she was a sophomore (Ilene’s classmate), and she was the choreographer. She was smart, confident, and pretty, with long straight hair parted down the middle. Her skirts were as short as the school allowed and she had the legs to match—a dancer’s body, lithe and graceful. She turned pages for me when she wasn’t working with the cast. Next to me on the piano bench, her presence was electric. During breaks, we talked and bantered.

Okay, we flirted. During one break, I came up behind her onstage and put my hands over her eyes. Instead of guessing who it was, or slipping out of my grasp, she fell back into my arms.

As intense and fun as the daylong rehearsals were, the evenings were dull. We had no homework and Bud and I had already been accepted to the colleges of our choice. I wanted to go out. I wanted to ask Patti out.

The only problem was, I already had a girlfriend. Wendy was a senior at a Detroit high school that wasn’t on break that week.

Wednesday afternoon, after rehearsals ended, I called Wendy. “Want to go to a movie tonight?” I asked casually. “I have to study,” she replied, as I knew she would. “That’s okay,” I said. “I might go anyway.”

I called Patti and invited her out. “I thought we might go see Bonnie & Clyde,” I said. She accepted without mentioning that she had already seen it.

I picked her up and drove into town to the theater. The date was so last-minute that we slipped into our seats a few minutes after the movie started. That was actually a relief to Patti because we missed Faye Dunaway’s brief nude scene.

Afterwards, I took her to HoJo’s for fried clams and a soda. Even in the harsh restaurant light, she glowed. We talked and talked. Finally I drove her home and kissed her goodnight on the front stoop.

I drove back to Bud’s in a daze, undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. “How was your date?” Ilene asked. “Good,” I said. “There might be more.” “I’ll have to get to know her better,” Ilene said.

A few days later, I called Wendy and broke up with her.

On Sunday my family returned from Aruba, tanned and rested, telling tales of beaches and snorkeling and exotic Caribbean food.

I didn’t care. I had the girl.

One day, we might even get to Aruba together.