We'll Always Have Summer
On Wednesday nights when I was little, my mom and I would watch old
musicals. It was our thing.
Sometimes my dad or Steven would wander in, but it was pretty much
always my mother and me on the couch with a blanket and a bowl of sweet
and salty popcorn, every Wednesday. We watched The Music Man, West
Side Story, Meet Me in St. Louis, all of which I liked. But I loved none of
them the way I loved Bye Bye Birdie. Of all the musicals, Bye Bye Birdie
was my number one favorite. I watched it again and again, as many times as
my mother could stand. Like Kim MacAfee before me, I wanted to wear
mascara and lipstick and heels and have that
“happy grownup female feeling,” I wanted to hear boys whistle and know it
was for me. I wanted to be just like Kim, because she got all of those things.
And after, when it was bedtime, I would sing,
“We love you, Conrad, oh yes we do. We love you, Conrad, and we’ll be
true” into the bathroom mirror with a mouth full of toothpaste. I would sing
my eight-nine-ten-year-old heart out. But I wasn’t singing to Conrad Birdie.
I was singing to my Conrad.
Conrad Beck Fisher, the boy of my pre-teen dreams.
I’ve only ever loved two boys—both of them with the last name Fisher.
Conrad was first, and I loved him in a way that you can really only do the
first time around. It’s the kind of love that doesn’t know better and doesn’t
want to—it’s dizzy and foolish and fierce.
That kind of love is really a one-time-only thing.
And then there was Jeremiah. When I looked at Jeremiah, I saw past,
present, and future. He didn’t just know the girl I used to be. He knew the
right-now me, and he loved me anyway.
