summer songs, volume 4: the beach boys.

Our family grew up driving a remarkable number of sketchy cars. This is remarkable because in every other respect, my parents were so fastidious and so safety-conscious. Don't get me wrong--I know most parents are pretty committed to not killing or maiming their kids, but with mine it was always a really pronounced effort. Obviously this commitment ended just shy of where the rubber hit the road, and as a result my brother and I spent a lot of years rattling around the back seats of ancient Volkswagens, not-so-gently-used Civics, and one truly incredible powder-blue Buick Regal, inherited from a dearly departed relative. Many years and countless Honda leases later, this fleet of doom seems like a distant and impossible dream.

We didn't have a proper car stereo for a long, long time. Until we got the old Civic hatchback, we didn't have so much as a tape player. After the hatchback came the most ballin' whip the Fralicks would ever know: the Ford Aerostar minivan, which featured headphone jacks in every row (maddeningly frivolous, when you think about it, given that each set of headphones would just be plugged into the same stereo you'd be able to hear without them anyway). The jewel in the Aerostar's crown, though, was that my brother and I each got our own motherfuckin' ROW in that van. It was Family Road Trip Xanadu.

But that's not the story I'm telling right now. The story I'm telling is about the days before the minivan, the days when Noah and I would be jammed into the back seat with the cooler sandwiched between us, the days when we made up for the absent stereo by playing our tapes on Dad's portable tape recorder. Mostly I remember us listening to the Beach Boys. Occasionally I forced of my New Kids on the Block tapes in there. But not often. When we were growing up, my brother loved the Beach Boys. We taped their reunion concert off of PBS and watched it a dozen times on a scratchy VHS cassette. We listened to that Surf's Up! tape till it nearly wore out, windows down (our cars never had air conditioning), hot breeze in our faces. The song I remember most, for whatever reason, is All Summer Long. I loved it when I was younger. The xylophone in the opener, the tight harmonies, the perfect picture it paints of a gal and a guy driving around town and playing mini putt in their t-shirts and cutoffs. There's also something a little bit ominous about the line, "Won't be long till summertime is through." Enjoy yourself; it's later than you think. Even as a child I had a healthy taste for the grim detail.





Years later, the song was featured over the closing credits of one of my favourite ever Simpsons episode, the season finale where they all go to Flanders' cottage and Lisa decides to give up her yearbook committee-running, grammar rodeo buckaroo, nerdish leanings and reinvent herself as a hip dudette with a tie-dye shirt. She joins a group of a bunch of cool kids, drama ensues, and eventually she learns that the most important thing in life is to be yourself. (If you want, you could come over to my place and I could recite the entire script of the episode for you and also tell you everything about it that is great, but maybe we'll save that for another day.) Anyway, the episode ends with Homer tossing a beer can out the window of his car, at which point a hermit crab makes its home in it. As the beer crab skulks away, that xylophone kicks in, and the rest writes itself. As a teenager (and who are we kidding, as an adult too), I was a complete geek for both music and television. Watching that episode for the first time, I can't even put into words for you how excited it made me to hear one of my favourite songs on my favourite show. It felt like a sign. It was going to be a great summer. It had better be a great summer, because soon enough it would be over.

And as I write this, the summer is, in fact, nearly through. One more golden weekend and we'll creep on into September, seasons spinning around again. This summer went by in the blink of an eye. They always do. At times it felt like I was moving backwards instead of forwards as I found myself in places and with faces that meant so much to me so long ago. At times I felt like a much younger version of myself, doing and saying the kind of things I've spent years convincing myself I was too old for. It was a good feeling for a girl like me who lives in a perpetual state of nostalgic overload.

I don't mind the summer's end. Not really. Indian summer's always been my jam--the chilly evenings, the pleasant surprise of an unusually warm day, the early harvest, the sleepiness of autumn setting in. Yeah, I'm ready for that. Just give me a couple more nights of t-shirts and cutoffs and hearing my song on the radio, and I'll be good to go.