Flavors Of Youth Movie Quotes

Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!” I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened. We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks. I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back. “What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?” …Round…round…get around…wha wha wha-oooooo… “What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know. “Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.” …Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip…I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip… “What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy. “It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—” Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street. “—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished. “What?” “The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.” “Man!” I said. “That sounds…that sounds…” What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth? “Cool,” Davy Ray supplied. It would have to do. …Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone…I get arounnnnddddd… I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.

but what he wouldn’t have given to drive the Mazda one more time to the Food Emporium and wait in the parking lot with the AC on, and WQXR, while Barbara disappeared into the supermarket for twice as long as she’d promised and returned with enough food for a family of eight. How swiftly life vanished. What he wouldn’t give to take the kids to the Beach House restaurant and sit in one of the booths near the door, not so comfortable but cheery, the black-and-white tile and the pretty green-eyed waitress, and he’d hold Barb’s hand under the table like high school sweethearts—the American high school fantasy he knew only from the movies—while the grandchildren, beauteous in their youth without knowing it, Ines, newly silent, long-legged like a foal, arms crossed over her tiny breast buds, watching everything with those Byzantine blue eyes; chubby Lev with his blond curls and porcelain-white skin, his high giggle, in whose face François saw his own, only fairer; Aude, sparkles on her little fingernails, her spindly waving hands like seaweed in the current, singing pop songs under her breath; and her solid little brother, named after François’s beloved long-vanished mother, a different mirror of his youthful self, always the clown . . . what he would have given to pay their absurd prices one more time, to order the ceviche—not very good—which slithered cold down his throat and snap the bland breadsticks, their sprinkled sesame seeds their only source of flavor. . . . All that was most banal was revealed to him, again, as beautiful, each physical sensation a tiny explosion of life, a burst of love . . . but it was better, perhaps, not to have known which visit was the last. What was the saying? It’s always later than you think. He’d hoped—he’d always been an optimist, in spite of everything—for more.