There is something about the itch of summer that makes me feel so young again: those last days of school, smelling of inked-over notebook paper and sticky reinforcements and worn down chalk, chewed stubs of pencils and sweet air through reopened windows. I remember waiting on the cusp of summer, which, then, spread out like an ocean of stars over a campfire: so very much time.
Or so it seemed.
Those days are shorter now – but the sounds remembered still so fresh and real.
Summer music is special: A song sung with friends; campfires and fireflies; the calls of distant loons in the moonlight; a tune on the car radio in a convertible with the top down and the sun and wind in your hair; a slow dance. I sang and danced my early summers to the Beatles. My first kiss was in a tucked away corner to Fool on the Hill. I can still feel the vibrations of the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean and the leftover sand between my toes; I still smell the salt air when I hear it.
For my parents, the song was Somewhere Beyond the Sea.
My Dad and Mom met at a summer wedding of his friend to hers. He was a groomsman; she, a bridesmaid. She was late getting ready and he bribed everyone else to take off so that he could drive her to the wedding.
They had a total of three dates before his heart was captured.
He was an Ensign in the Navy, a USNA grad, a pilot, all of 22 years old.
He proposed on a trans-oceanic telephone call from Naples, Italy (where his ship was stationed) to her dorm room in upstate New York (where she was a college senior).
Their song: Somewhere Beyond the Sea. Of course.
They got married at the Pensacola Naval Air Station Chapel in June 1951 – just eight days after her graduation. She wore Swiss organdy with a train; he wore his dress whites. They left the Chapel under an arch of swords, held up by my Dad’s fellow young Navy pilots.
It was raining; when the Chaplain pronounced them husband and wife, he added: “A wet knot never comes untied.”
Bermuda honeymoon plans were scuttled by unexpected orders; they spent a weekend at Bacon’s by the Sea in Fort Walton Beach. Souvenir ephemera are pasted into the first of my Mom’s family scrapbooks.
A few summers – and several interim Naval bases – later, my Dad’s squadron was deployed to Malta.
My Mom finagled her way onto a cruise ship, and subsequently into a first class cabin, and sailed across the Atlantic to Italy to meet him.
The ship docked not too far from the port from which he had called her to propose. Then, he had followed it with a telegram (and, later, a silk scarf, on the edge of which he had asked the maker to inscribe the words of his proposal).
This time, he was waiting for her on the dock.
And in Venice, a few days later, as they strolled, in the rain, into the Piazza San Marco, the sun broke out and, as my Mom remembers it, an impromptu orchestra, surrounded by pigeons, began playing their song: Somewhere Beyond the Sea.
That was my parents’ song; but now it is not just theirs, nor just mine – even though I never walk through any summer rain without hearing it in my mind’s ear. That song is now our family’s summer song; it has made its way out of our parents’ record collection and into all of ours.
In 1988, my parents and my brother and his new wife and I traveled to the Canadian Rockies for a family vacation -- it was a year in the planning.
In Vancouver, we boarded the train for an overnight trip to Jasper. At dawn the next day we were high in the mountains and, in the observer car, we sipped coffee and looked for the white spots of mountain goats and the black spots of bears. For eight days, we stretched our muscles in canoes and on mountain trails, reveled in green lakes and moose and elk and big-horned sheep and unencumbered air.
Dad and I hunted for fossils and on one rare afternoon alone, fished; he rowed, I trawled. We caught nothing. We said very little. Neither one of us ever forgot it.
At home, it had been an audaciously hot summer; in Canada, we welcomed the near constant cool rain. We wore yellow slickers purchased at a dry goods store.
On the last night of our trip, back in Vancouver, we splurged on dinner at a restaurant on top of a luxury hotel overlooking the harbor. We did not know there would be an orchestra and dancing with dinner, but there was.
And with dessert, that orchestra struck up Somewhere, Beyond the Sea.
My Dad had never been a voluntarily dancer. But that night, we saw his eyes light up as the song started; we saw him stand and ask Mom to dance; and we got to see, thirty-seven years after the fact, the original magic of their first dance together.
That week, that night: the magic of summer. And of summer songs.