Summertime, Summer Hours, and the Ghosts of Memories Past

And every night we'll have a dance
Cause what's a vacation without romance
Oh man this jive has me in a trance
Because it's summertime
- - The Jamies - Summertime, Summertime, 1958

It's going to be the "Summertime" Issue of American Digest for a bit. That means this page will not be updated daily as usual but will, I suppose, languish at times.

To announce this shift in a way that was a little bit entertaining and more than a little bit irritating I thought I'd find a clip of The Jamies obsessive/compulsive ring-a-dinga doo-wop ditty from the Stone Age of Rock, "Summertime, Summertime" (Otherwise known as "Earworm in a Can.")

YouTube, as usual, did not disappoint and served up this ancient artifact of long extinct teens dancing in a disappeared studio on an evaporated afternoon to a tune now mostly, and gratefully, forgotten.

While looking at this odd clip, I noticed that it used visuals that were slowly degrading until snapped up into this current digital version. Looking at these dancing shadows and time-smudged images was like gazing into the pool of a slowly dissolving memory of my own; one more than 50 years old. I would have been 13 in 1958 and it was likely that I actually watched this on my family's old and large black and white television. In some long ago suburban home that still survives but with a different family. One that seems to have an inordinate love for rock gardens.

It may have been American bandstand or it may have been one of the imitators. Most likely Bandstand. Soul Train was later and now a train I rode.

These images seem, in their blurring liquid state, to mimic my memories of those years... all fading back down into the soup of the mind as the neural circuits that formed the original memory were copied and copied and copied and copied again as the years piled on.

Now, like these images, that memory is not the crisp copy it once was. It's more like some xerox copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. I'm told that closer to the end all these ancient memories crisp up again. I think that's just one of the many things said to blunt the long slow slide into age and oblivion. For now, I think I'll pass.

For now I'll take comfort in the knowledge that, as the Bard says, "Golden lads and girls all must,: As chimney-sweepers, come to dust."

That and the fact that once again it's.....

summertime summertime sum sum summertime
Summertime summertime sum sum summertime
Summertime summertime sum sum summertime
Summertime summertime sum sum summertime summertime...

Posted by gerardvanderleun at June 16, 2014 12:31 PM