The Summer of Nightswimming.

Song and memories of joy.

While making dinner a few nights ago I was listening to the podcast Smartless with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett and their guest Michael Stipe, the lead singer of the band REM.

I haven’t listened to REM for a while, but as so often happens with ADHD minds, my brain completely ditched the podcast and snowballed into their catalogue. I thought of several of the songs that I’ve always enjoyed, but upon contemplating my all-time favorite REM song, I remembered how obsessed I was with Nightswimming when I was a teen. I listened to it, on repeat for months. I was entranced by the beautiful simplicity and feeling of calm that it invoked in me.

It played in my head while I cooked and then the memories came flooding in.

The summer after the album came out, my best friend and I stayed with her aunt for a short time in Toluca Lake, an affluent neighborhood in Los Angeles where celebrities like Bette Davis, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra once lived, and in more recent times Steve Carell and Melissa McCarthy. But when we were visiting, in the early nineties, Henry Winkler was a local resident and every time we went outside, I hoped to catch a glimpse of The Fonz. I never did.

My friend’s aunt was a television writer and possibly a producer as well, if my memory serves me correctly. I’m not sure what all she did, but I know that she wrote for the popular sitcom Boy Meets World, which blew my young mind because this woman knew celebrities and at that point in my life the only celebrity that I had ever met was Tom Selleck. Which wasn’t too shabby, because like girls and women of all ages at the time, I was enamored by him and his mustache. After shaking hands with him, I refused to wash my own shaken hand for several weeks lest I wash off Tom Selleck.

I digress.

My friend’s aunt lived in a two-story home in Toluca Lake. The house was beautiful with a formal dining room, game room/library with a pool table, a huge kitchen (stuffed to the brim with whatever snacks two teenage girls could possibly want), marble floors, a beautiful staircase and a view of (and access to) the lake. And then there was my favorite part, the pool.

I was way out of my young depths at the time. I lived with my single mother in a tiny mobile home where I occasionally ate government cheese, got a subsidized free lunch at school and supplemented my never-ending teenage hunger at the homes of friends and family in the desert north of LA.

That is to say the entire experience was other worldly. I felt like I was in a movie. I’d never even seen a house like that let alone stayed in one before. We had endless snacks and food at our request, a pool to swim in whenever we wanted, a pool table right downstairs and endless TV channels (we couldn’t afford cable TV at my house). And on top of all of that, she even had a housekeeper.

Young. Mind. Blown.

My friend and I spent the time that we were there watching the (then brand-new) MTV reality show, The Real World and a multitude of VHS tapes for movies that weren’t all yet available to the public, but were given to judges for award consideration. I remember watching, and crying our way through, the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia before it had been released in theaters.

We went to a really fancy Italian restaurant that served multiple courses where I embarrassed my friend because I didn’t know how to use all the silverware and had no clue what fingerbowls were nor why I was being served sherbet in the middle of the meal. I had the best meal of my entire young life there and my palette was pretty much forever ruined for crappy food.

One night my friend’s aunt took us to Tijuana (still the one and only time that I’ve ever been out of the country). We visited a bar where I got drunk for the first time and danced with college boys from the nearby University of California San Diego campus. The following morning, in a hungover haze, we went shopping on, what felt to me, like a shopping spree at the ultra-cheap shops that lined the streets near our hotel.

The whole trip was a blast from start to finish. But what does any of this have to do with REM?

Despite all of the high-class fun, my favorite part of the entire trip was the night swimming. My friend and I went skinny dipping nearly every night that we were there. It was exhilarating and liberating in a way that I had never felt before. We splashed around in the dark with only the stars and moon watching while we chatted and laughed and sang Nightswimming because it totally encompassed our present.

My friend and I lost touch quite a few years ago. But still, thirty years later, whenever I see or hear anything about skinny dipping or REM, Nightswimming plays as the soundtrack to those favorite memories of my summer with her in the pool of a fancy house in LA.