The question it happens to be

I have always felt a bit melancholic at this time of year.  Even as a child.  Summer ends, school begins, and the carefree idleness goes away to meeting the expectations and doing the work of others.  Though it isn't the only reason that this time of year reminds me of the fact that the innocence of youth has come to an end.

One particular summer, years long gone by, as a child (teenager, really), I visited some relatives who lived in a small city west of New York City.  Spending that nearly month long visit seeing the sights and doing things I hadn't done before, like stuffing myself with ice cream in a day long tour of the local zoo, or learning to fly fish (unsuccessfully) by drowning some worms.  Even got a chance to drive a farm tractor.

And while out there, I became enchanted by this young girl that possibly ruined me for anyone else.  I can't recall how many nights I would sneak out of my relative's house, something relatively easy to do since I was on the first floor and they were on the second, to meet her by the river.  Sometimes to sit and talk, and well sometimes for more than just talking.

The hardest thing to do was get on the bus to go back home when my summer idyll ended.  How sad I had been to have to part with, as cliche as it might be for a teenager, the love of my life.  The worst part is that I couldn't write her after I left.  How do you explain to your parents you needed money for postage to keep in contact with a girl they didn't know I had met?

I kept that melancholy bottled up, even from my closest friends.  It was a time when all of us were discovering girls.  Though I was boneheaded enough to discover one hundreds of miles away.

I'm not entirely sure why it came to mind today, but it did, and of course, my melancholy deepened as I remembered in my mind things that had come to be the past.  As fortune would have it, my relatives out west did something that my family couldn't condone after I returned and I have never been back since this happened.

I sometimes wonder about her and try to imagine what her appearance is like now.  If she moved on, well, I'm sure she did, actually.  Or whether she has a spouse and children now and what type of job she might work at.  I'm not sure if I want to see what Time's hand has changed that glowing image in my head.  Do I want to remember her as my memory does or adjust it to reality?  Or am I using this memory to idolize something that can't ever be the same again?  To paraphrase old Bill Shakespeare: To idolize or not to idolize, the question it happens to be.