I just heard the news that John Hughes has died. For those of us who came of age in the eighties, his name means more than the movies. It brings back a whole slew of memories: names of boys and girls we knew, and places they took us, and the things we did and didn’t do.

It was Sven Delaney’s mother who drove, I remember that clearly. This was 1984, a hot Saturday in Mobile, Alabama, and Sven and his mother picked me up in a station wagon, one of those long sleek numbers with wood paneling and little silver ashtrays filled with secret cigarette butts. I was thirteen years old, and it was officially my first date.

Late in the afternoon, Mrs. Delaney dropped me and Sven off at the East entrance to Springdale Mall, with instructions to meet her in that exact location in exactly two and a half hours. I wore a slouch top that my mother had made, with a purple plastic necklace I’d ordered from the Esprit catalogue. I have no idea what Sven wore. It did not matter. I loved him, which meant of course that I did not truly see him. He was tall and blonde and had an interesting name, and that was enough for me.

I remember there being some embarrassment at the box office as we bought our tickets to Sixteen Candles. Sven’s mother was financing the operation, but my own mother had given me five dollars and insisted that we go Dutch. “I don’t want him thinking you owe him something,” she said, shoving the money into the pocket of my home-made pedal pushers.

He bought the tickets, I bought the popcorn, and then we sat painfully close to the screen–Sven was heroically nearsighted–and said not one word to each other while we waited for the movie to start. Looking back now, I realize that I didn’t see much of the movie that day. I spent the whole time calculating my popcorn grabs to coincide with Sven’s, so that we could brush hands in the bag. I kept waiting for a scary part so I could reach over and grab his arm, but the scary part never came.

I never clutched Sven’s arm, we never held hands, and during the scene in which Anthony Michael Hall makes out with Michael Schoeffling’s slutty girlfriend, I was so embarrassed I got up and went to the bathroom. In hindsight, the entire movie was, for me, an exercise in sexual frustration.

Not too long ago, watching the whole thing all over again, I realized that it’s a damn good movie, and you don’t have to be sixteen years old to find it funny. Ethnic stereotypes notwithstanding, Molly Ringwald is still a charmer, her grandparents are deliciously clueless, and there is something simultaneously depressing and hilarious about having one’s sixteenth birthday totally overlooked by one’s parents.

What is it about Sixteen Candles that makes it, for the most part, stand the test of time? And does it have true staying power, some element of universality that surpasses the slut-glam style of the eighties and makes it a movie for all teenagers in all times? Or am I giving John Hughes unfair credit simply because, for me, Sixteen Candles was the right movie at the right moment, a film that spoke to my adolescent angst the same way David Lee Roth spoke to my adolescent lust?

If you haven’t seen it in a while, I think it deserves a rewind. At heart, this flick is about what all great teeny-bopper flicks are about: hope. What other message can one take from a film that allows an uber-geek freshman (Anthony Michael Hall), to persuade the awkward-yet-undeniably-hot sophomore (Molly) to hand over her undies? And he doesn’t just get to carry them around in his pocket; he actually uses them for economic gain. As if that weren’t enough, he ends up getting busy in a Rolls Royce with the hottest girl in school, and Molly finds true love, or something like it. All this way back in 1984, well before the Internet age launched geeks into a long-deserved chic-dom, a quarter century before our own beloved Craig Newmark’s name got bandied about by the movie stars in Judd Apatow’s’s latest box office hit, Funny People.

Recently, as the credits rolled, I found myself getting all nostalgic. It wasn’t just Molly Ringwald I was pining for. Whatever happened to the Stray Cats and the Thompson Twins, who lent their decidedly eighties-style talents to the soundtrack? Whatever happened to jelly shoes? Whatever happened to Sven? I wonder where he is now. I’d trade my old collection of chunky necklaces to know if he ever loved me the way that I loved him. I spent three of my most formative years daydreaming about that boy. I wanted to marry him. The last conversation we ever had was in 1988, the summer after our senior year of high school, at a Monkees concert at the Civic Center in Mobile, Alabama. I ran into him at the refreshment stand, where he was buying a Coke and hot dog for his date. I was drunk on Mad Dog 20/20. I said, “Sven, do you remember our first date?”

“It was our only date,” he said, smiling.

“I’d like to know one thing.”

As he paid for the refreshments, I thought about what that meant in Alabama-speak, how the girl was going to owe him at the end of the night because she didn’t bother to go Dutch.

“Why didn’t you kiss me?” I said.

“You were twelve.” He peeled the paper off the straw and slid it into the little hole in the plastic lid–always the gentleman.

“Thirteen,” I said.

He shrugged. “My mother told me not to.”

“It’s not too late.”

He glanced around to make the sure his date was nowhere in sight, then leaned forward and planted a kiss on my lips. I can’t recollect whether the kiss was good or bad or mediocre, only that it was nice to see him again. And if the kiss wasn’t mind-blowing, that would be apropos. It was, after all, the decade of disappointment. For the generation that came of age in the eighties, the best thing we had going was the occasional John Hughes movie, that particular brand of cinema created just for us, a simple, engaging story in which the put-upon teenager always came out on top. The best we could hope for were two beautiful hours in the dark when we could forget about Ronald Reagan and trickle-down economics, all the things that were going wrong in so many ways we couldn’t begin to count them. We had the movies, and that was good.