A number of years ago when we were staying at our usual rental cottage in the Waterville Valley of New Hampshire we turned on the television set one night soon after our arrival -- a Saturday night as it happened -- and ventured onto a channel that was featuring the music and musical groups of the 1950s and 60s, that very time when we were young, growing into adulthood and a committed pair of young lovers. Actually, by 1955 at age 18, we were married.

The two-hour-long program featured groups familiar to us and their music, playing segments that highlighted one group after another. Old film footage of the most popular performances of each group was juxtaposed against the very same performances repeated by those groups, now much, much older, but dressed as they had been back in the day and still capable of producing fairly good performances. We loved the show. The carpeted room in which we sat wasn't conducive to dancing, but it made us feel like dancing.

At home, it's a different story, albeit still the same story, as it were. Every Saturday late afternoon a French-language radio Canada show features of all things, English-language songs of that very same era, and music and songs are played in a continuous stream by the artists whom we danced to when we were young. The program replays the following day, Sunday, to our great delight.

And since we have a quite large kitchen with a ceramic tile floor and an 'island' smack dab in the middle, there is ample room for us to dance. And we do. Some of the songs aren't quite as conducive as others to making us want to dance, but the urge to embrace and move together in the old familiar way whose memory of body language has never dimmed is there, ardently urging us to respond to the music.

And we do. On Saturday evening, at the half-hour tail-end of the long program, and then again on Sunday evening, when the program is repeated, but strangely enough not in the very same progression of numbers. We instantly recognize from the first notes of the introduction, the songs we'll be hearing and often enough get the performers right, as well. One of us will hum or sing along with the words we recall so well, and our bodies sway and move to the cadence and notes of the music so familiar to us.

And it feels so, so wonderful. Nothing has changed in the memory-imprint of our bodies clasped in love and recall of our younger days, a feeling that the years have enhanced and made all the more precious to us.