Tasting The Lemonade

With the advent of Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook, my stalking capabilities have far exceeded the late night drive-bys and threatening notes of my youth. I've spent many, otherwise productive hours, combing the annals of these sites searching for the names and faces that populated my youth. How refreshing then, to receive a request from an old friend, whose slender visage once incited in me all the passion and ardor an 11-year-old could stand to muster.

We’d met at a pool club- Cabana Club located in West Orange, New Jersey. It was the kind of place that stood as a vestige of the past. Turquoise cabanas that, in their heyday, shielded the wealthy from the sun, were then crumbling and peeling, their wood warped and distended with moisture. But still we flocked there. Hundreds of families crowding around mahjong boards, slathering spf and evian mist on our tweeny forms. We were there for the last two summers of the club’s existence, before the teal sign I passed under so many times was released from its perch and a century of suntans were bulldozed to make way for a condo development. For two summers, he and I, along with Kate and Josh, were the very best of friends. We knew nothing of eachothers lives outside the walls of Cabana Club but we were eleven- there was nothing else to know.

Here he is, 11 years later. The same spindly fingers that plucked clumsily at an electric guitar were now tapping away at a keyboard somewhere upstate in search of me. Here was his message in a bottle- a wordless friend request on Facebook!

I wrote him a quick note. Just the basics, lest he be indifferent to my kind advances. But the letter he wrote back was so sincere. He’d clearly grown into a wonderful young man with love and excitement in his life. This was my response to him:

Dear David,

When I was young, well not so young, maybe around the time I knew you, I went with my parents to visit my brother at sleepaway camp. The camp, it turned out, was located not far from the camp that my mother had worked at for many many years in her youth. Walking around the town she pointed out all the things that had changed and all the things that had stayed the same.

She talked about a lemonade that she would always get when she came in to do her laundry. It was the most amazing lemonade, as she described it. Sour and sweet balanced such that neither was more prominent, a beverage so refreshing it could quench no thirst in the present, but only in the realm of her (admittedly somewhat faulty) memory. Then, we saw it, the very same shop selling the very same lemonade that had moistened so many a panting tongue so many years ago. I urged her to go inside and get herself a glass, certainly to get me a glass, and pouted for the rest of the day when she refused to revisit a place that had provided for her so many exquisite memories.

That was probably the day I realized that my mother was extraordinarily wise—she knew that even if the same old man was squeezing the same lemons, the product could never taste as good as it tasted in her memory. I've come to call this the "tasting the lemonade" effect.

I however, have yet to develop the wisdom of my matriarch. I revisit places (like Cabana Club after it was shuttered, but before it was steamrolled), people (like Leigh Feldman who I fell in love with in Egypt at the age of 16 and then invited to my 21st birthday party) and things (like the shoes I whittled down to stubs while living in Paris but still wear in New York because, well, you know). I revisit books and films and clothing and lovers that thrilled me once because I think that maybe, just maybe there's some nectar yet to squeeze from the fruit of my memory. I taste the lemonade, and often, too often, it's sour.

But your note was honest and friendly. And you've traveled and laughed and probably loved. You're not at all disappointing like shuttered pool clubs, indifferent lovers, or tatty stilettos. You're still just David…and you still play the guitar!

Sometimes you've just got to taste the lemonade


*Jordana