Narrator quotes from The Wonder Years

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And for some reason, maybe the way he said it, I began to understand. He wasn't giving me an order. My dad, was asking me for help. That morning, as I stood with the man who was my father... The son of my grandfather, the man who would one day be the grandfather of my sons...I realized something. That not all gifts are simple. That some battles are fought out of love.

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Around the end of 1969 a funny thing happened: 1970. Not that anyone was paying much attention. Still, with a new decade on the books, maybe it was time to heal old wounds, get over old hurts. It was possible. After all. I'd gotten over Winnie Cooper. Yep, Winnie and I were friends now. That incredible smile, the way she tossed her hair, the heart-stopping lilt of her perfume... I was over that.

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I'd never felt so lost in my life. I tried to make sense of what had happened. I wanted to believe Paul had lied to me. Winnie, too. But somehow, I knew better. I'd been lying to myself. The funny thing is, now that I was sure about my feelings for Winnie... There they were: my best friend and my best girl. I'd brought them together. And now I had no right to interfere.

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Oh, yeah...Love. Once upon a time, it was...simple. If you liked somebody, you let 'em know. And if you didn't, you let 'em know. One way or another, you knew where you stood. But as you get older, communication gets more...complicated.

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My father and I never had "the talk", and we never finished the tree house. I guess some things between fathers and sons are left unspoken, and unfinished.

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The halls of RFK junior high often echoed with the sounds of music. The Kennedy Chorale. The Kennedy Madrigals. And of course, the Kennedy Now-Tones. They were all part of a long-standing family of song. But, as with every family, there was a skeleton in the closet. The boys' eigth-grade glee club. The singing group from hell. Twice a week, we transformed Mr. Frace's choir-room into kind of a chamber of musical horrors. Randy Mitchell - baritone. Doug Porter - monotone. Paul Pfeiffer - no tone at all. And of course... me. Not that we didn't have heart. It's just that the thirteen-year-old-male voice isn't exactly designed for... well... for singing. We weren't the stuff tabernacle choirs are made of.

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It was... cruel. Before our very eyes, Warren had transformed from lyric tenor... to... Well... a bullfrog. So the rest of us did the only thing we could. We panicked. But the die was cast. Paul sneezed, which was too much for Doug. Somebody laughed. And I dropped my music. It was kind of a chain reaction. I'd like to say we rallied, but... we didn't. It was no one's fault, really. I guess we'd just been pushed beyond our limits. We we're a bunch of eighth-grade boys. Not an ensemble of stout-hearted men.

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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.

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Once upon a time, our country was founded upon... faith. Faith in all its forms. But during the late nineteen-sixties, people began looking heavenward for new answers to old questions. The bravest among us journeyed into the unknown. While the rest of us stood by with our support. Our goodwill. And of course... Our taxes.

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As I looked at that blank page, I knew that whatever I wrote would be a lie - or at best, a wild guess. It didn't matter. Whatever life lay ahead of me - a life of hope, of possibility, of uncertainty - I felt sure I knew what it would take to survive. I guess what I'm saying is... for the first time, I understood that some things are bigger than death and taxes. Like family. Like faith. I could only hope Miss Stebbins would understand, too.

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There's a dream that's as old as natural grass, and nickel hot dogs... and being young. It's a dream every kid shares. The one big moment. Hero time. Of course, when you're five... that dream doesn't seem out of reach. Everyone plays the game about the same. Bad. Still, for all your short-comings... you've got the one thing that matters most. Potential. Then... as springtime rolls into fall, and Little League gives way to summer jobs... somehow the dream gets left behind.

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As I stepped back up to the plate... all the cares, all the worries, all the burdens I'd carried around for the past few days just disappeared. Suddenly, the outside world fell away. It was just me. And baseball. My moment had arrived. And I knew what I had to do. I'm not sure how I did it. My memory begins with the crack of the bat, and the sight of the ball rising. Maybe that's not exactly the way it happened. But that's the way it should have happened, and that's the way I like to remember it. And if dreams and memories sometimes get confused well... that's as it should be. Because every kid deserves to be a hero... every kid already is.

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Teachers never die. They live in your memory forever. They were there when you arrived, they were there when you left. Like fixtures. Once in a while they taught you something. But not that often. And, you never really knew them, any more than they knew you. Still, for awhile, you believed in them. And, if you were lucky, maybe there was one who believed in you.

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As I took that test, I thought about a lot of things: about how I knew him, and yet I didn't. About how he treated me like a man, and how I'd acted like a child. About how I'd let him down, and now I wouldn't. The thing is, even though I could almost feel him in the room, I knew I didn't need him for the answers, or the praise. I was on my own now.

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And I guess there was something in the way she said it that made me understand... Mom wasn't breaking my heart... she was breaking Paul's. Without breaking it. And in that moment, I began to realize a lot of things. Maybe my mother didn't go to the concert with Paul because she thought he was special... but because he thought she was special.