I unwrapped that old drive-in flyer right there in my garden, and I had to sit down, because inside was a strip of little photographs and a note, and the pictures were of Roy and me in a car, young and laughing.
The man who ran the projection booth at that drive-in for forty-nine years, an old fellow named Cass, had left the note. From his booth he could see every car in every stall, and over the decades he had watched this whole town court under the stars.
The photographs were of Roy and me in our car at stall 22 in 1963, mid-laugh, and in the last frame Roy leaning over to kiss me during the second feature. Cass had a little camera up in the booth, and he caught it.
From his projection booth above the lot, Cass watched half a century of this town fall in love in parked cars under the movie light, and when he saw a couple he had a good feeling about, he tucked a photograph of them into the hollow of the speaker post at their stall, so the very post they hung the sound on would quietly hold the night they started.
His note said a man in a projection booth sees more sweethearts in one summer than most folks meet in a lifetime, and that he could not bear to let all those nights go dark when the drive-in closed. He wrote that stall 22 saw more first kisses than any stall he ever ran, and that Roy and I kissed there in 1963, and that if the post ever came home to one of us, we should have that night back.
Roy and I had forty years. Cass had a feeling about us under the stars in 1963, and the old man was right.
I have that photo strip framed in my house now, a boy and a girl in a car in 1963, and it sits by the speaker post I stood up in my garden.
And I have gone looking for a few of the other couples whose photographs Cass tucked into their posts over the years. I found a pair still married after sixty years and brought them the pictures from the night they parked at the drive-in as teenagers. They cried and put them on the mantel.
I bought back one old speaker post because the cord was cut. It came full of the first kisses of my whole hometown, watched over from a projection booth by a man who thought young love under the stars was worth keeping, and I have been the one lucky enough to carry them home.