Summer Breezes...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsHuV3Aj1os

When the title song, Summer Breeze, was released I was 10 years old. It was a pivotal year for me. I moved from the only home I'd ever known in a rural town, to a new home in the suburbs of Boston. After three years of summering in Maine with our new blended family, we bought a summer house on an island attached to the mainland by a causeway when I was 10. Both the suburban house and island house have become the two most constant places for me over the last, almost, 43 years.

My father built a house in Maine when I was a few years younger, and sold it a few years ago. So perhaps they are tied. In my most centered self it is the rural house and the summer house where I learned who I was and what makes me who I am now.

But the radio played in all these houses, and the cars that shuttled me between them. Music was a constant in my childhood. Rock, jazz, soul, classical and top-forty, which is what Seals & Crofts falls under in my mind. Just like I have a memory etched in my mind of riding in the front seat of my mother's green '67 Mustang convertible through the streets of Boston with the song Georgie Girl blaring from the dashboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-GApOqzgWM. It seems that summer and melancholy wishes blowing in the breezes are a deep part of my psyche.

And yet it was on the island with the causeway, that one January, when I was 17, I met a man at a New Years Eve Party. He was 13 years my senior, and yet a half a year later we'd be dating and I'd move on board his yacht that summer and sail off into the sunset with him two years later! So some of the ideas of making hay while the sunshines so that you can reap what you sew stuck!

I could go on for hours with other 60's lyrics that were sewn into my mind and make up. How the band of Chicago, Frank Zappa, Eagles, Jackson Brown, The Who, The Stones, Beatles, Gordon Lightfoot, Joy of Cooking, Jefferson Airplane/Starship, Emmylou Harris, Billy Holiday, Steppenwolf, Bonnie Raitt, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Ricki Lee Jones, The Pretenders, Denise Williams, Jonathan Edwards, Crosby & Stills & Nash & Young, James Taylor, BB King, Creedance Clearwater Rival, Otis Redding, The Smiths, James Brown, Elvis, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Grace Jones, The Monkeys, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Bruce Springsteen, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Jimi Hendrix, Annie Lenox & Eurythmics, Weather Girls,  REM, U2, Madonna, Kate Bush and so many others shaped my sense of self. Then there were the Musicals. Ahh the musicals that our entire family would sing at dinner or in the car or in the woods at the top of our lungs: Hair, Jesus Christ Super Star, Oklahoma, Carousel, Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, and so many more. Then, of course, Fantasia! Where image met music in perfect harmony.

Music and seasons. I understand why some writers add playlists to their novels and memoirs. It makes sense to me, as I can hear the sound track of my life really clearly. I can also hear the music mentioned in memoirs, and it does inform the reader to another layer of the person's state of being in a given situation.

So tonight, Seals & Croft's Summer Breeze, with it's kids piano playing (it sounds just like the toy piano I gave my wasband as a first gift) is peregrinating though me while the temperate breeze blows through my window.

Good night, music and memory lovers, G'night!