My Foolish Heart

It was the summer I was 10, one of many spent at our bungalow colony. My parents were the head counselors, which meant my father worked all day and my mother held forth with the smartest and most troubled pre-teen girls. I was starting to see who they all were.

These were good summers, and that year I began to notice girls in a way that was edgy and new.

Fridays were movie nights. The kids saw cartoons and maybe a Disney film. Then parents got them “home” and returned for the “grown-up” movie.

I felt self-conscious and cheated leaving with the younger kids. The teenagers, glamorous and competent, doing things I didn’t fully understand, could stay for the grown-up movie. I guessed these films were about the mysteries I wanted to know about.

That summer I loved Nora, and she was interested. Bumping together during free swim was thrilling.

This particular Friday the grown-up movie was My Foolish Heart. I didn’t know it was based on a Salinger story. What I did know was it was about love, and I wanted to see.

My parents sent me back to the bungalow and I prepared for bed. Then a miracle. Both of them came back for me. It was OK, they said, to see the movie if I wanted. I was ecstatic and grateful in a way rarely matched before or after.

I never learned why they relented. Perhaps they heard from other parents that the movie wasn’t “so bad”. Or maybe they saw how much I wanted this. Or, even more likely, they saw that some of my friends were allowed to stay. As head counselors they were in the public eye.

I absolutely loved the movie, which starred Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward. Salinger’s story of loss and fate was given an uplifting romantic ending, one I later learned Salinger hated.

I loved the romance and the sense of occasion. I was becoming privy to grown-up things, and others were starting to see. I understood the movie, which made me proud. Life was changing. I was on the cusp of something exciting and hopeful.