Kodachro-o-ome

Hearing Paul Simon's '73 hit in the grocery store made me briefly forget that my favorite season was coming to an end. What song always says "summer" to you? An open thread...

Sep 02, 2023

Clearly something went wrong with the exposure here, but this '71 photo of me at almost 6, in a kiddie pool in my childhood backyard, was surely taken with Kodachrome. film.

Readers,

I’ve been doing everything I can think of to make summer last but despite my best efforts, every day there’s a little less daylight, and each evening there are more of those crisp little breezes that remind you fall is coming.

It makes me wistful, and also a little anxious, because I tend to get depressed in the darker months. But the other day when I was in the supermarket I heard Paul Simon’s 1973 hit “Kodachrome,” and it made me “think all the world's a sunny day, oh, yeah…”

Instantly I was transported back to childhood summers in the ‘70s—running under the sprinkler on our front lawn; splashing in a plastic kiddie pool in the backyard; playing with cousins by the Ocean in Long Beach, a town away; looking up to the older kids at the smaller beach on the bay, at the edge of my neighborhood.

At the Ocean with my cousin Stephanie. I was almost 10, and it was the summer of ‘75. Surely this one was also shot on Kodachrome.

I could taste the concession stand French fries drenched in ketchup, smell the coconut-scented Copertone. I could hear little kids giggling, the cool teenagers gossiping as they blared the Top 40 on hand-held transistor radios.

As I shopped the grocery aisles that day I sang and bounced along, and briefly enjoyed the illusion that summer would never end. Afterward I realized that for 50 years now, “Kodachrome” has had that transportive power for me.

What about you? Is there a song that always says “summer” no matter what time of year it is? Help distract me from the looming end of my favorite season by telling me in the comments.

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