Summer of '42.(movie)

As a kid, I rarely went to the movies. My one memory of a summer movie is of a movie about somebody else's summer, a nostalgic look back--way back!--to the "Summer of '42." I believe the movie is famous for a funny scene about buying condoms, but perhaps all summer movies feature some amusing scene with condoms. I wouldn't know.

I grew up one of seven children in a family where making plans took up about as much time as executing those plans, and even the most meticulously arranged and carefully orchestrated day failed to satisfy everyone. One person's idea of a good time always bored somebody else. The older kids were jaded about what the younger ones were just beginning to experience. A piano lesson would be scotched because a trip to the dentist couldn't wait. Over time, invisible strings slowly tethered one child to the next, and those two hooked up with a third, and so on and so on, so that movement by one led to a lot of jerking of the others, and freedom, if not impossible, was always a tangled mess.

That we all managed to eat together every night and squeeze into a church pew on Sundays was exhausting enough. My general sense was that summer movies, like summer itself, belonged to other people. When friends talked of movies they'd seen--or hiking or fishing trips they'd taken--it sounded to me like bragging. My vacations were vacant, an emptiness filled with feral joys, but still I felt vaguely gypped and carried some resentment at missing out on a part of the year that seemed to have been invented just for kids.

Once in a while, though, I'd be invited along with one of my friends. Most of my official summer fun happened in the presence of other people's kind parents, but even then I would worry, in a child's intuitive way, about the aspect of charity these outings involved. I could never quite lose the helpless and bewildering sense that I was merely being tolerated. I'm sure that this sensitivity is fairly common in children, simply because they are so attuned to the dynamics of power, being without it themselves.

My father always made sure that I had money. At the back door, he drilled me on manners, concerned about propriety and appearance in the wary way of men of his generation, men whose ...