…..Don Henley’s classic paean “The Boys of Summer” was playing on the radio as she drove east along Interstate 90, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the way her own summer had gone. Away from home for the first time, out on her own, testing her wings for air worthiness…..and then—like a lightning bolt from out of the blue–she had met HIM. She hadn’t planned on that happening, not planned on something like a serious relationship developing at all. This was to have been her summer dedicated to experimenting with independence for the first time, not with dependence on others as had so often been the case at home. Yet she had quickly fallen under his spell, grew to need him more than she had ever needed anyone in her entire life, and the summer had flown by in glorious fashion with its three months seemingly condensed into three short days. Now as she was headed back home while Labor Day rapidly approached, and he was headed off in the opposite direction–Don Henley was still waxing nostalgically about the importance of “Don’t look back; you can never look back!”–she began to cry—giant involuntary crocodile tears–for she knew the troubadour on her car radio was absolutely right, and that she would never learn nearly as much about herself in any summer yet to come than the one which had just passed and was currently receding ever further in her Elantra’s rear-view mirror as she continued driving eastward toward home…..toward a fresh year of college life…..toward a newly found level of independence…..toward a future, heartbreakingly, without HIM anywhere in it…..
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