RECORD STORE TALES #1144: “In The Summertime” (2020 Hindsight)

Remember the summer of 2020?  It seems so far away now.  It was the “summer that wasn’t” for a lot of people who were quarantined at home during the first major pandemic in 100 years.  I knew I would have a lot more perspective on it eventually.  Hindsight is, as they say…20/20.

After that harsh winter (got severely sick twice, and don’t know if it was Covid at any time because tests didn’t exist yet), I needed a break.  Then Premiere Doug Ford closed the beaches.

It wasn’t just the big city Toronto beaches that closed, but even our little private beach.  It made little sense to us.  Weren’t we safer outside?  Even travel to the cottage was prohibited in 2020.  Only “essential travel” was permitted.  The idea was not to stress out-of-the-way hospitals, and prevent the spread of the disease.  We all know how well that worked!  At least I didn’t get Covid for three years (that I know of).  This was the reason beaches were closed:  to discourage travel.

 

Since we own property in cottage country, my parents used that as a reason to travel.  Property must be inspected and cared for, especially after a winter like that.  I used mental health as my reason.  My wife and I needed the cottage or we’d have snapped here in our tiny little apartment.  By the end of May, we finally made our first trip back up to Lake Huron.  Nobody reported us, nobody judged.

We own a piece of property that is beachfront.  There was no way we weren’t going down there.  It was a cold May.  There was nobody around.

We cherished every second we had at that cottage, even though we were alone and social distancing from any neighbour we ran into.  That actually suited me fine.  As a classic introvert, I really thrived during social distancing.  Not shaking hands, not seeing people in person…sometimes, it felt like my own personal utopia!

Beaches started to open up in the spring, and with this came the onslaught of “Sooners“.

People weren’t going on holidays.  Most of them were stuck at home.  Instead of going away on a holiday, they instead made day trips to beaches like ours.  My dad called them “Sooners”.  Sooner:  “a person settling on land in the early West before its official opening to settlement in order to gain the prior claim allowed by law to the first settler after official opening.”  That’s what my dad dubbed the annoying beach-goers that crowded our little area in 2020 and 2021.  There was “Man-Bun” and his two girlfriends, and a family of umpteen kids whose mom let them run around naked.  Those were the memorable ones.

I’m going to take you on a slight detour here.  Another thing that happened in 2020 was the temporary halting of many of our favourite TV shows and movies.  YouTube began to seriously thrive.  This is when my friend Uncle Meat introduced me to many new channels I had never heard of before.  I began consuming the work of Todd in the Shadows by binge.  One of his main features is a series called “One Hit Wonderland”.  One of the tracks he covered in that series was “In The Summertime” by Mungo Jerry.  It was a deep dive on what made the song a hit, and why Mungo Jerry never followed it with anything as iconic.  I became obsessed with the song that summer.

My dad believes in asserting your territory, especially where Sooners are concerned.  For him that meant sitting down on our beach chairs, ensuring nobody used them.  For me, that meant singing out loud like we owned the place.  There was more to it than just that though.  I was genuinely just happy to have a beach to go to, and my childhood beach at that!  So I sang, and I felt every single note in my heart as I reached up to touch the sun.

In the summertime, when the weather is high,
You can stretch right up and touch the sky!

Jen joined in.

When the weather’s fine,
You got women, you got women on your mind,
Have a drink, have a drive,
Go out and see what you can find.

Wait a minute…did he just sing “have a drink, have a drive?”  1970 was a different time for sure.  Still, it sang well as we raised our voices in song.  Nobody turned to stare.  Everyone (and there were a lot of people!) stuck to their own groups.

Ahh, social distancing.  Gotta love it.

The one and only flaw with our perfect afternoons of singing?  I only had one verse of “In the Summertime” memorized.  It got repeated over and over.  Nobody noticed.

Now that things have returned to something resembling normal, the Sooners have gone.  Social distancing is no longer necessary.  I don’t mind.  I still sing “In The Summertime” when I hit that water.  I still stretch right up so I can touch the sky.  I still think Mungo Jerry wrote a great song.  Its corniness is its charm, but unless you’ve sung that song at the top of your lungs while enjoying a brief respite during a global pandemic, you haven’t experienced “In The Summertime”.