How to think about your everlasting summer
Or, what happens when, as usual, you look back
“Your everlasting summer; you can see it fading fast.” You know these lyrics, right? It’s the first line of Steely Dan’s “Reeling in the Years,” the one song that I like by that band (to be honest, I don’t love the chorus or the instrumental part, but the verses are good) (though, in general, I hate Steely Dan), and it is apparently referring to a failed relationship, or rather the song is, but that line, to me, is about the end of youth. Summer is the season of youth; it is practically where all my memories of youth take place, the ones where my friend Hilary and I are passing the books “Unsolved Mysteries” and “More Unsolved Mysteries” back and forth on a camp bus, where I am taking endless cold baths in a clawfoot tub in Astoria, where I am waiting for the subway after midnight and the hot air blows down the tunnel into my face. The city I grew up in was hot and miserable in the summer and I have so many perfect summer memories.
There was this one summer, when I was 21 years old, temping and living in Astoria with the aforementioned clawfoot tub but no air conditioner, and this guy in my office liked to say to me, You know, it got so cold last night with the air conditioner on that I needed a blanket! What a cut up that guy was! Whereas I, hardly sleeping at all, wanted desperately to curl up under my desk and sleep in the air-conditioned serenity (I need to mention that my friend Melissa, when we were both working in publishing the following year, just around the corner from each other, genuinely used to take naps under her desk. She would simply push her chair in, and no one was the wiser). But back in Astoria, I took cold baths in the clawfoot tub and lay on my bed with a fan blowing on me directly and listened over and over to Elvis Costello’s “Mighty Like a Rose,” which had just come out that summer. This is a good memory now, but at the time I was hot and exhausted. This is how memories work.
But now. Now there is a heat dome that has descended on the northeast, but we have air conditioning. I genuinely hate it, but I do recognize its necessity. I remember reading an article about Madonna, of all people, in, I think, Rolling Stone, sometime in the 90s, and she said that she hated air conditioning and just preferred feeling the actual air. Totally relatable, though maybe by now she’s changed her mind. But let’s dwell on that article for a minute because I have it saved somewhere in a plastic tub of various things I have saved but have not looked at for some time. Madonna was asked about two song memories, and she talked about one summer when she was living in a fifth-floor walkup, carrying her bike up the stairs for the millionth time, and she had her headphones on and Prince’s “When Doves Cry” came on, and she just sank down on the stairs and cried. It seemed to me that Madonna was always famous, but that story made her sound like, you know, a real person. I think the other memory was about a time that she was dancing in a club and girls threw drinks at her. At Madonna! Can you imagine? She was once just a 20-something living in the city, hoping to get famous. When you think about the fact that she had to hustle like everyone else, it makes you realize how long ago this was. The other day I saw someone post on Twitter that Madonna was underrated. And I knew exactly what they meant.
Meanwhile, let’s get back to the summer. (Let me say right here that summer has not technically started yet. It’s one of those things that I am a stickler about for absolutely no reason. For example, my daughter has a birthday in December, but it is technically still in the fall. That “technically” is doing some work for me, but I have yet to determine why.) Anyway, once I moved out of the city, I did not have air conditioning in my home for many years, and I always liked to say that there was really only a week or two in the summer that we needed it. This was true. We got by with fans in our windows, and I’ll admit we did kind of suffer for that hot week or two, but out of a mostly glorious summer, it was fine. Now, unfortunately, those days are over. It’s not just that I live with someone who acts like he is basically on fire from the moment it goes above 80, but rather, well, you know what’s happened.
Back when summer was much more pleasant, on the hottest days, I loved to take my girls to the library. I’m talking those days when being in a lake or pool (something we did nearly every day) was not enjoyable with the sun beating down on you like it was trying to kill you. But the library! It was air conditioned! And just going through all the books (some to read there, some to check out) counted as an activity for us. And we took our time there. Afterward, I often took my girls to Panera, which was near one particular library and was also air conditioned. And thus, we moved through the days this way. This was our everlasting summer.
But I can see it fading fast. It’s just that I really had no idea that middle age would involve so much looking back. It’s like you spend the first half of your life experiencing things and the second half looking back at those same things. They are beginning to make sense. Not that nothing is happening now. It’s just that nothing feels as intense as it once did, when everything was happening for the first or maybe second time. When I lived in New York City, I was younger than even Madonna when she was dragging her bike up those five flights of stairs. It was always summer, even though of course it was not. And now it is summer again and it is hot, and I am remembering the hottest days of my younger years. I remember them fondly, even though I may not have experienced them that way. The fact is, I didn’t really know what summer was then. I’m beginning to get it now.