Thoughts of summers long ago

Happy first day of Summer here in the "Northern half of the world". It has felt like Summer for sometime now. We had a lovely rain a couple of days ago which brought the temps down a bit but a whopper of a heat wave is in the long term forecast.

My husband is usually a big fan of "the boys of summer", especially the Chicago White Sox. I say usually because they are having a dismal season this year. These days when he watches a game, it is almost as if one were watching a horror film with their hand in front of their face and peeking out just once in awhile. :)

Even if I don't watch the games, I love to listen to them. I was drifting off for a much needed nap recently when I heard the sound of a baseball game coming down the hall from the family room TV. It made me smile and sleep in safety. Even during those rare summer afternoons when I am alone in the house, I often turn on the TV just to see if there is a White Sox or Cubs game being shown...crank up the volume a little...and work to my heart's content cooking or cleaning.

For the sounds of baseball remind me of my father carrying around his little portable transistor radio and listening to his beloved Cubs games. There was the day when I was ten years old that he didn't come home (he had suffered a major heart attack) but baseball in the background can make me a child again.

We were a radio family, every morning it would be turned on for weather reports and the friendly chatter of familiar DJs and after breakfast, we'd hear "Let's Quiz the Mrs.". My favorite in my teenage years...WLS streaming from my own portable radio. Anyone who was a teenager in those days will remember such words as Sunday, Sunday, Sunday...at the beautiful U.S. 30 Drag Strip...Big Daddy... as the famous names of drag racing would roll off the tongue of the DJ. Not that I would go to a drag race mind you but I did find their commercials fascinating.

My husband and I lived in two different towns and almost a different generation but we both can wax poetic about listening to WLS at home or in our car and it providing the soundtrack of our teenage years. His was the California sounds of Jan and Dean or the Beach Boys, mine the British Invasion of the late 60s and early 70s...ahhhh...Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter. Sigh..the music coming from those radios was so much more innocent back then...and fun.

I can't count the times I would take a blanket to the back yard with my radio, a book, or the latest issue of Seventeen Magazine (which was completely different than it is now). If I was fortunate, there would be a picture of Bobby Sherman. One of the highlights of my teen years was taking part in a Seventeen Magazine "charm school" which was put on by a Downtown department store, the same store that had the nicest tea room. That particular store closed when the mall was built, charm schools are a thing of the past, and I didn't let my daughter come close to Seventeen Magazine in the 1990s.

My memories have also been going back to the scents of Summer, of which the slightest whiff can make me feel sixteen again. I was chatting about great home products with my daughter (a favorite subject) when we found we both had Method pump hand soap (from Target) on our kitchen counters. I told her how mine is the cucumber scent which reminds me of a facial mask that was very popular in my youth. I know...cucumber is a rather odd scent to become nostalgic over but it really was quite popular back then and everyone I knew used it (the girls obviously).

After our conversation, I tried to remember the other scents that we loved back then...Musk Oil, Heaven Scent, Wind Song, Golden Autumn, Channel #5 and #19, anything by Yardley. My older sisters loved Evening In Paris, which was still around into the 1960s. The coconut aroma of Coppertone automatically takes me back to trips to the "beach" with my friends or with the family as we went to my dad's company picnics in July.

What sparked the thoughts of Summers Past was a recent drive on the Highway, windows down, my radio turned to the Oldies But Goodies channel where my husband had left it when he used the car...feeling as if I was still in my teens driving my (used) Mustang convertible ...meeting my girlfriends for a movie and cherry Coke.

I would never want to return to those days for in reality, my teen years were often filled with sorrow. But there has not been a time since when I could also become so carefree and giggly. So, I'm thinking I may stop by a perfume counter soon and spray a sample of Heaven Scent behind my ears, stop by the candy store "Downtown" for a Diet Coke mixed with cherry syrup, put on one of my John Denver CDs...and just relax.