Column: Summer breeze, makes me feel fine

Summer isn’t my favorite time of year. That’s autumn, with its cool weather and colorful leaves. As a kid, I liked school and often got bored over the summer – raised as I was in the era before scheduling children’s days during their academic breaks became common.

It was a different time, and our summer days were loose.I had a stay-at-home mom, and our block in Overland Park, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., was teeming with other kids about my age. So were the surrounding blocks, and the neighborhood park, South Lake – the site of summer picnics when I was very young, and experimentation with cigarettes and alcohol when I got a little older and more rebellious.

The other day, I heard a song on the radio that took me back to my happiest summer memories, the way only certain songs can do.

See the curtains hangin’ in the window

In the evening on a Friday ni-i-ight

If you’re of a certain age, you probably recognize that as the opening lines of “Summer Breeze,” by Seals & Crofts. It has the power to transport me back in time.

It’s the 1970s. My mom has dropped my sister Margie and me off at Young’s Park Pool, two or three miles from home. This happens a lot during the summer. We always want to go there. (And I imagine now that my mom enjoyed the breaks from us.)

Sometimes, I go with my best friends, Jim Scaramucci and Bobby Jordan, and it’s one of their moms who drops us off. But today it’s just Margie and me, and I like that. I lucked out in the big sister sweepstakes. She’s nice to me and looks after me.

Young’s Park is an outdoor public swimming facility, pretty big and sophisticated for the time. It has a big pool, a medium pool and a baby pool. I’ll have nothing to do with anything but the big pool – even though, once an hour, kids have to leave it for a 10-minute “adult swim” that strikes me as entirely unfair.

As she’s three and a half years older, Margie is entrusted with the money my mom has given us for snacks. My favorite is the frozen Milky Way bar. We are supposed to wait a half-hour after eating a snack before getting back in the pool, and the waiting is hell.

[An aside: When people said, “You could get a cramp and die,” I took that quite literally, not realizing how cramps work – how getting one might make it difficult to move in the water, thus putting me in danger. I honestly thought that, when the cramp struck, death was instantaneous. I wondered why the lifeguards weren’t regularly fishing out dead kids who only waited 15 minutes after their Milky Way.]

The lifeguards, by the way, are the closest thing to celebrities I know. Tanned and beautiful, they wear whistles and have the power to make anyone “sit out” for unacceptable behavior, the most common form known as “roughhousing.”

Margie works on her tan a lot, and sprays lemon juice in her hair to get natural highlights. I mostly just splash around, I guess, although I can kill hours doing so and never want to leave when the time comes.

The radio is always on and piped into the swimming area via big speakers, which also announce things like “Would the Harris kids please report to the front desk? Your ride is here.” Or something more embarrassing, like “Heidi Miller, your mother has dropped off your retainer.”

Now, the ‘70s don’t have the greatest rep when it comes to popular music, and I confess to being into the most benign of it all. While Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin are out there somewhere, rocking the slightly older crowd, we at Young’s Park Pool are treated to the Carpenters, John Denver, and Tony Orlando & Dawn.

We listen to songs about being on top of the world, tying yellow ribbons and someone who fills up another person’s senses. I don’t quite get that last one.

When “the Hart kids” are paged on this particular Friday evening, Margie and I part ways briefly to exit through our appropriate locker rooms. I avert my eyes in mine, as there is actual nakedness around, and I’m too young for any of that. Instead, I concentrate intently on the song that’s playing.

A little light a-shinin’ through the window

Lets me know everything’s all ri-i-ight

Margie and I meet again out front and hop into our mom’s green station wagon. She has the radio on, as usual, and tuned to the same station. As we pull away, the three of us sing along.

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine

Blowin’ through the jasmine in my mi-i-ind