Narrator: Every kid needs a place to go to be a kid. For Paul and Winnie and me, that place was Harper's Woods. It was ten minutes from home if you walked it. But to us, it was a world all its own. We'd grown up there together. Playing games... catching fireflies on long summer evenings. Sure, they called it Harper's Woods, but we knew better. Those woods... belonged to us.

Narrator: Every war has its casualties and every victory its price. But life goes on. Nothing really changed that night. Nothing big anyway. Just a very little piece of something that was never going to be the same. Not ever. The thing is it's hard to tie a bandage with just one hand...sooner or later though you learn.

Narrator: Every year when I was a kid, my parents threw a Christmas party. Everybody in the neighborhood came. Dad played the "big cheese"... Mom played "Donna Reed"... and a really stupid time was had by all. It was a time when hopes were high. When the neighborhood was young. It was fun, before fun got so... complicated. Before life got so... simple.

Narrator: Everybody know politics is a dirty business. Yet our greatest national heroes have always been politicians. Maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe it takes a certain kind of person to get down in the mud... and come out with the bricks of statecraft. After all, in America, they say any kid can grow up to be president. What they don't say... is how.

Narrator: Everyone knows what happens when you fall in love. You hold each other close, you kiss, and then... you live happily ever after. For Winnie Cooper and me, "happily ever after" had arrived. After years of waiting... we were ready to face the future, together. Passing notes in class... sharing Tater-tots at lunch... being a couple. It was all kinda... wonderful. Course, in eighth-grade, part of being a couple is doing what other couples do, even if it was, well, kinda stupid. And so long as we had each other, we were ready for anything. Well, almost anything.

Narrator: For most kids I went to high school with, Tuesday and Friday nights meant homework, hanging out, dating - the usual agonies and ecstasies of teenage life. For me, those nights meant something else. My high school job. I was "Kevin Arnold - Chinese food delivery boy". Where you found harried waiters, agile cooks, Peking ducks, and of course... Mr. Chong. After four months on the job, we'd finally learned how to communicate.

Narrator: From the moment a father first lays eyes on his daughter... she's forever daddy's little girl. And he's forever her hero. A giver of gifts. A granter of wishes. A knight in shining armor. And in return... she gives to him that love and respect which is special between dads and their girls. Of course, for my sister and my father... that special love and respect took the form of... guerrilla warfare. But the week of my sister's birthday... they brought out the heavy artillery. During that week, Mom was sort of like the UN... trying to mediate the warring factions. And failing miserably. Me? I was kinda like... Switzerland.

Narrator: Genetics. The heartbeat of heredity... the lynch-pin of the family. Parents supply their children with the same basic building blocks. The same blood types. The same involuntary responses. The same essential gene-pool. Yet, despite all this potential for similarity... sometimes things get confused. Sometimes, Mother Nature, in all her wry sense of humor... goes off and creates... total and complete opposites. Like me and my brother, Wayne. It was hard to believe we ever occupied the same womb. The only thing we had in common... was our complete and utter contempt for one another. All in all... my brother and I were just two different branches on the family tree. Me, the good branch... Wayne... the dead-end.

Narrator: Growing up in the suburbs, in the '60's, you were pretty much sheltered from the forces of change unleashed by the outside world. But what about the forces of change unleashed from within? Change. Not always a pretty sight. In fact, it could get pretty ugly. But that was the stuff that movies were made of. That wasn't the real world. Or was it?

Narrator: Heck - I was no Superman. Not really, anyway. But if Debbie Pfeiffer needed a hero... so be it. She had plenty of time to grow up, and figure it out on her own. After all, a little stardust in the eyes never hurt anybody. Least of all, me.

Narrator: I couldn't exactly say we made theater history that autumn evening... maybe we weren't even very good. The thing is, it didn't matter. We made it though. And the critics were kind. And a week later... Mr. Cooper moved back in with his family.

Narrator: I couldn't really say what I did that summer. It passed in kind of a blur. What I remember... are green lawns and sprinklers... and the smell of backyard grills. And the nearness of friends.

Narrator: I didn't sleep. I laid there... thinking about what had happened to Karen... to me... to all of us. About how big the world is, and how full of strangers. And how I might never see my sister again. In nineteen-sixty nine, people tried so hard to find themselves. Sometimes they got lost. Sometimes they found their way home again.

Narrator: I don't even remember what I got for Christmas that year. But Dad gave Mom a bracelet that knocked her socks off. Oh, yeah... and he did get us that color-TV... two years later. For me, that year Christmas stopped being about tinsel and wrapping paper, and started being about memory. At first I was disappointed. Until I learned that memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you wish to never lose. And I learned from Winnie, that in a world that changes too fast, the best we can do is wish each other Merry Christmas. [Kevin opens Winnie's present, which is a four-leaf clover] And good luck.

Narrator: I felt him watching me. And somehow, I knew what he was thinking. How much I'd learned, how much he taught me. But I was fifteen. I lived in a world that was new and alive, and exciting. And everything here was old. Maybe it was stupid. That's also part of being fifteen. I traded in my tie for a stupid hat and a plastic name tag at the mall. When I left a month later - no one cared. But every time I pick up a flat-head screw, I think of old man Harris, and how those cowbells clanged as I walked out that door. And even though I can't say exactly what I gained... I know I can't measure... what I lost.