We sat in his sunroom, me on a bean bag, he on the floor and watched The Breakfast Club without pausing. When the credits rolled, I was lost in a way I would only be a handful of other times in my youth. It was the first time I had ever seen someone write childhood as if we were all being seen. Even as a fourth grader, those common themes were beginning to run rampant, and we had all begun to wear either an invisibility cloak or one of potent popularity.
I walked home that early evening in a heightened sense of reality. Thirty four years ago and I can still remember what the neighbor's lilac bushes smelled like as I took the path to Pine Trail. I was too young to recognize that I had fallen a little bit in love with Judd Nelson's character, John Bender. Too naive to recognize that I wanted to be Molly Ringwald. But all of the characters were like coming home.
Tonight I watched it for perhaps the hundredth time, the lines on the tip of my tongue, as familiar as my own. I have shown it to my older three at various times over the last decade, and knew I needed to introduce it to the twins in this spring of crazy. A spring when they have recognized that their childhood friendships are ending, and that life is bigger and scarier than they ever thought it could be. I wanted them to find the companionship in five strangers that has given me solace these last thirty four years.
There are moments in childhood you can't relive but will spend an eternity trying to recapture. The first slow dance you had five minutes before the end of a school semiformal, when you had spent three hours waiting to be asked. The first hasty kiss you received in a superhero movie the first week of summer. The day your parents surprised you with a trip to a theme park you knew they could never afford. And the first time you saw a movie that changed your whole life.
I cannot recreate that day in Micah's sunroom. But for the rest of my life, I will see the beauty in that hour and thirty seven minutes. I will think of the man who wrote this screenplay in only two days when he was a mere thirty two years old, and how he had somehow managed to remember the angst and enormity of his youth, while so many of us shed those layers like coats.
As an adult, I find myself comparing the movie to the lives in which we are still all acting. The ones who will never be able to achieve more than the popularity they lived in their climactic youth, the ones who seek to overcome negligence by either overindulging or overtrying. The ones who put more pressure on themselves than anyone else possibly could. While one of my favorite movie lines belongs to Gordie at the end of Stand By Me, the best outside quote used in a movie is one from David Bowie, written long before he ever knew it would be used in a teenage movie. "And these children that you spit upon, as they try to change their world are immune to your consultations. They are quite aware of what they are going through."
As I watched this again tonight, for perhaps the last time in a long time, I thought of the children of 2020. The ones who are proving to be stronger than we assumed and the ones who will wear a scar of these times into adulthood. I think how John Hughes would write them, in a way that is simple enough for the grown ups to understand and complex enough for the children to feel seen. I had a debate with my twelfth grade teacher once, in which I told him that he made my brain itch because of the questions he asked, the symbolism he wanted us to see. A tiny little seed of rebellion was growing at the time, the first time it had found its way out of the soil, and I found myself questioning all of the things we were meant to read. Shakespeare was, and is, an absolute befuddlement to me. Dickens, a treasure you must dig to find. Lawrence, a horny bastard before his time. And as a grown woman who finds herself pushing outdated and overhyped classics on my own children, I no longer am afraid to admit that the writers who hold my respect are the ones who leave me feeling the way John Hughes did so many years ago- awash in the scent of lilacs and feeling just a bit less translucent.
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