Moon River
Posted Friday, November 27, 2009 07:33 AM

 

 
 

 

Moon River
Moon River, wider than a mile,
I'm crossin' you in style, some day.
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker,
Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way.
Two drifters off to see the world;
There's such a lot of world to see.
We're after the same rainbow's end;
Waitin' 'round the bend;
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.
 
In fall of 1961, after graduating from South Pasadena High School, I was about to leave for college at the University of Redlands. Some of us had actually been together since kindergarten. It seemed there had never been enough time, so many things had been left undone and unsaid, and now all the time was used up. I can recall wandering around on the football field after the graduation ceremony looking for the mortarboard I had launched into the air, a new altitude record for hand-based headgear. I was thinking about our last day at school, that it had been over too fast, and that people I wanted to say goodbye to were vanishing, heading to their own graduation celebrations with family, vanishing like a wisp of smoke in the wind. Our world was changing, and I had never in my life wanted so much for it to stay the same. Once our days had stretched out before us seemingly as numerous as the grains of sand upon the beach, if we wasted some of them carelessly, how could we know?
As I prepared to leave childhood behind, I remember thinking that nothing would ever be the same, and I would no longer be able to postpone the inevitable. Real life loomed ahead, away from our somewhat sheltered existence in “Our Town,” South Pasadena, and so I spent a Friday night, three days before I was to leave, with a girl I had known well and sometimes dated the last year of high school. She was going to be a senior, and so did not share the weight of the rite of passage that loomed before me the final days before departure. Nevertheless, she understood and was in tune with the moment, and it was great to be able to share it with someone who understood.
We went to the carnival that had always visited South Pasadena the week before the beginning of the public schools, cruised Henry’s Drive-In for a burger and then went back to her house for a last goodbye. She had a new record, and we played it over and over while we held each other and danced.
"Moon River" is a song composed by Johnny Mercer (lyrics) and Henry Mancini (music) that very year. It won that year's Academy Award for Best Original Song in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Although it has been performed by many artists, notably Andy Williams, nothing can match the magnificence and the beauty of the original score by Henry Mancini.
The power of Mercer’s lyrics, combined with the music of Henry Mancini, exactly captured the feelings of romance, nostalgia and optimistic anticipation that thousands of about-to-be freshman felt in the fall of 1961. We wondered what was “waitin round the bend,” and so we clung to each other and slow danced till the magic hour of 12:00, our curfew in those simpler days.
The experience was so compelling I bought the record and repeated the experience again the next night with a different girl.