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Amazing Summer of 1969
 
Music has always been a big part of my sometimes lonely life.  It was the Midsummer Eve 1969 and I had just turned 17 barely three weeks before, it was near sundown and I was coming home from work and I stopped my motorcycle to visit with two girls walking a dog beside the road.  It was the first time I laid eyes on girlfriend I would date for the next 3 years, she was wearing a brown short sleeve sweat shirt, white short shorts, and white shoes and within the first minute or so I offered her a ride and without hesitation she jumped on behind me and that began a courtship that would last a lifetime.  The Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet by Henry Mancini had been playing for more than a month on the radio as if announcing what was to come, it was the number one song on the Bill Board Hot 100 that last week of June and first week of July and that was the time when I first began to travel to my girlfriends during the day to visit.  Of course Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the best know love story of all time, a love story between Juliet a 13 year old girl and Romeo given only as somewhat older than her.   Renee' was 13 1/2 when we met and I had just turned 16 and the Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet was playing over and over on the radio so it was like this story was written about us.  I was already smitten, for me it was love at first sight so it didn't take much to convince me to be patient and wait for my girlfriend to get older and while we waited, we could get to know each other better.  John Mathas would release his vocal of this song as "A Time for Us" also in 1969  it made it to #8 on the charts and then for Christmas release his album of the same title.

The Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet was soon replaced on the charts with another very usually song, "In the Year 2525 (Exordium et Terminus)".  By Zager and Evans people I had never heard of, it too had been playing during the month of June in 1969 and it was still number one when July 20 1969 Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon

The summer of 1969 was an amazing summer and I was alive to witness it and be a part.  There has never been such a time before or since because ever point in time is different but the summer of 1969 was one of those points in my time like no other.  It was a summer of "first" that were very important in my life and they can never come again. July David Bowie released Space Oddity making "Major Tom" famous.  July 20 1969 Apollo 11 moon mission put a lander on the moon and Astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first man to step his foot on the moon and it happened in my lifetime.  I witnessed it setting on my girlfriend's couch in her living room.  Never again can a man escape the earth and travel to the moon and step upon its surface for the first time, I think that escapes most people who witnessed it, that had been done and no man can ever be the first man to step on the moon again.  The next first will have to be a woman stepping on the moon and I doubt I will get to see that in my lifetime but maybe it will happen.   Never will these songs ever appear as number one again by the same people who made them number 1 in 1969, we heard them for the first time in the summer of 1969 and they were timely almost as if written for that time.  MY girlfriend will never be 13 and I will never be 17 again, We will never gaze upon each other for the first time again, all those thinks happened only once time and I was there. 

Barely two months later the largest music event ever happen at a farm in New York near a community called "Woodstock" and history was made.  It was said that during those three days, Woodstock became the second largest city in New York State, second behind New York City.

It was an amazing summer in so many ways and those are the memories that sustain me when the Dementors come because sooner or later they come for all of us and if you don't have your happy thoughts for your Patronus Charm they will suck the soul out of you.  Is that why we make our Kodak Moments, to sustain us when the dark clouds come?