WHAT I DID DURING THE SUMMER OF LOVE

K-E-W-I...1440!

That's what we listened to the entire summer of '68. I couldn't hear much of it but I got the gist. And sometimes I could hear, it just varied from day to day.

Forget the summer of love, it was the summer of Monopoly for Kirby and me. He taught me well, oh yes. For example, only Kirby could be banker and not because he was smarter (that was implicit) but because I wasn't great with money. This fact harkened back to another thing involving the purchase of popsicles that I don't want to discuss right now.

Kirby was the race car, he is still the race car when we play. The last time he visited, I hid the race car as a joke and when we went to play Monopoly, he flat-out refused. I offered him a Matchbox car (yes, I still have mine, don't you?) and he still wouldn't so I had to do a long pretend "oh-look-I-found-it!" thing and I doubt he was fooled.

I was the Scottie dog. Because of how dogs are, according to Kirby, I had to put a leash on my dog. It was dental floss.

So while Kirby got to say "Vrrrooom! Vrrrooom!" when he moved his car, he said "Wuff! Wuff! Wuff!" in an annoying high-pitched voice when I tugged dental floss to move my dog. He was imitating Mr. McMurray's dog that tormented us for years. But the McMurray dog was a German Shepherd, just so you know.

I am not saying Kirby cheated. I would never say that. I just know that he would tell me that light blue was a "better" color than bright blue and therefore I never craved Park Place. He felt the purples were also good, as compared to the yellows and greens. So I went for light blues and purples.

We played a game of Monopoly that literally lasted that entire summer. While Big KEWI played songs straight out of Vietnam, we moved Kirby's car and my dog around that board again and again. I could never afford a house (let alone a hotel!) but he let me make "The Projects" on Baltic and Mediterranean; I did this with gravel. He had all the hotels.

The weird thing was that despite how close to being broke I became, time and again, I never went bankrupt. We played on his front porch and it did not rain that summer, or it if did, it didn't get to our game. We'd just anchor down our money and go in at night. And sometimes, the next day, I'd feel somehow richer than I was when we quit the night before.

I am saying that I now believe Kirby was supplementing my income.

That was another thing: we had to have jobs. Kirby was nobody's fool; a monopoly doesn't happen out of thin air. So he was a corporate officer and a chef (I knew what "chef" was but did not want to ask on the corporate officer thing) and I was a hair-cutter. That was my dream that summer and it seemed okay with Kirby. Of course, it also seemed okay with him when, in college, I opted to be a neurosurgeon but graduated instead with an English major. Kirby was never real particular about my jobs.

He EARNED more money, see. So he HAD more money. Plus he was a banker in his spare time. I was a hair-cutter and my boyfriend was Bobby Sherman. (My boyfriend would still be Bobby Sherman if anyone can find him.)

I paid so much rent to Kirby on our Monopoly game that he leased the property to me (with an option to buy) and if I was low on money, he'd give me some fifties and tell me to paint the walls and "we'll call it good."

I should've known that he was practicing that summer for the businessman he would eventually be. I should have known that dental floss is like super-glue: you never really get it off of anything you tie it to.

Summer ended but the game never did. We called it a draw (with Kirby in the lead) and we play whenever we're together. But not on the same board we used that summer. I still have that original board, it's tattered and there are distinct popsicle stains on it. And track marks where Kirby's car spun out of jail (it happens, he said, it just happens sometimes).

I like the colors of Monopoly. I still think the purple and light blue properties are prettier than the greens and bright blues.

I guess Kirby does, too.

But the oddeest thing of all is something I've not mentioned.

For all of his business acumen at Monopoly, Kirby was, and is, colorblind.