Summer breeze

See the curtains hangin’ in the window,
in the evenin’ on a Friday night.
A little light a-shinin’ through the window,
Let’s me know everything is alright.
Summer breeze, makes me feel fine,
blowing through the jasmine in my mind…
Sweet days of summer, the jasmine’s in bloom…

Summer Breeze
Seals and Crofts, 1972

This is one of my favorite songs, and its words and melody have stayed with me all through the many years since I first heard it in the fall of 1972. It’s force and staying power are somewhat mysterious, but there is a reason, and it’s rooted in a particular time and place.

Summer Breeze was one of about four songs I recall distinctly from that year and 1973, my last year of college at the University of New Orleans, and the year I truly felt I had gone out on my own, living for the first time in an apartment instead of the dorm, and with the end of four years of college approaching.

The summer of 1972 had been a golden interlude in the undergraduate journey I was on, the final summer I worked on the fireboat alongside the Mississippi at Algiers. After work, I remember taking long bike rides atop the levee beside that river on warm August nights when the moon shone across the wide river and illuminated a path before me. It was the summer I spent dreaming of the freedom and independence that would be mine once I had finished that degree and could finally move to South Carolina and begin my life away from home.

I spent all that summer lookng at classified ads for an apartment, near school, in a quiet neighborhood, within biking distance. As I’ve written before in this journal, I found it finally in late August on a rather inconspicuous street off Gentilly Boulevard. The street was named Wisteria, and it was near other streets similarly named after flowers such as Clematis, which was perpendicular to it. I liked that.

Those first heady weeks of getting used to an apartment were very happy ones because I was liberated from the cubicles that had been my home for the past couple of years. As I drove my car down St. Roch Boulevard toward campus each morning, I felt as if some weight had been lifted from me. It’s hard to explain. It was as if some dividing line had been crossed. I was in unfamiliar, but longed-for terrain, where everything was different. And, for a while on those drives, upon turning on the radio, that song, Summer Breeze, would be playing and I’d remember the “sweet days of summer” just past and think I truly knew what Seals was referring to when he wrote those words, “Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”

That fall turned into winter and spring semester followed. I was taking six courses each semester, doing virtually nothing but reading, studying and writing various papers. But for some reason, despite all the academic pressure that year, it was not a burden, but almost fun. The courses were stimulating, the classes much smaller, and I saw the end in sight.

And each day when I came home from classes, “I walked up on to the doorstep, through the screen and across the floor…” into the sanctuary that was my first apartment. How I loved that place, beat-up furniture and all. I can hear distinctly, even now, the big kitchen window fan as I turned it on, and the cool air was drawn through open windows in the bedoom, down the hall to the kitchen. And I would sit at a formica table and start thinking of the suppper I was going to fix, the novel I was going to be reading later that evening, and, the inviting front porch where I would sit outside about 9 or 10 most nice nights and gaze at the stars over Gentilly Boulevard and dream of the future.

(Written Nov. 26, 1999)