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?
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