See you in September

Anyone who knows this song tells his/her age, hands down. Not among millennials, definitely, unless a hip grandparent belted it out for show during a family reunion. 

Okay, I volunteer as first in line. How innocently we bounced to it in my youth, glossing over the lyrics about summer’s beginning and ending—that with the sun burning hot, it could singe bindings both of clothing and desires.

But the song, written by Sid Wayne and Sherman Edwards, first recorded by The Tempos of Pittsburgh in 1959, does not really hint at “wild abandon,” instead, at a youthful feverish scramble to take in as much of the sun’s heat that weakens to uselessness most of the year here in North America.

Fun vacation, which would surely include camping out—such a dream in winter—that, for many, could revert the world to romance, though not unlike a thunderstorm, might dash hopes; hence, the song’s refrain: “will I see you or lose you to a summer love.” 

While frolic on water does figure in Philippine summers—that not until this year, also marked a break from school, though it differed in months as we know—none of the urgency would be as intense because, well, the sun neither withdraws nor does it grow cold.

Boys could plunge from a cliff in a daredevil-dive by the river a few blocks from home, or girls wade, even submerge in a stream anytime of the year, as long as drought, with its capricious temper, did not hit their province. Hardly would camping dodge them out of languid evenings, as well—by moonlight, they just huddled in the shadows.

Peeled of metaphors, summers in my early teens spent with uncles, just five years older, seemed the wild (as in nature) idyll I keep nibbling at. Imagine this: a trek to wooded hills edging the rice fields from across a dirt highway at high noon, when the heat (curiously as heavy as winter freeze) deadens sounds so much so that bird calls seemed to blow through glass.

Bamboo groves would crackle in the wind, and trees swayed like ghosts in the glare. I remember catching wing-wheezes of shifty-eyed birds, and held many breaths to pick from the tail, giant red and green dragonflies.

Whatever cotton shift I wore would be stained indelibly with duhat juice, the feared-for sign about which Mama would scold my uncles for taking me. But aside from the horror of getting bit by toxic insects or, worse, a snake, my mother must have been more afraid of the “danger in the summer moon above,” as the song says, from the boy who stalked me and maybe tailed us into the woods.

I guess Wayne and Sherman used the moon for rhyme and simpler lyricism, but if they remembered and read on it, “danger” does hover in summer skies, not from the moon, but the brightest-ever “Dog star, Sirius” of the constellation Canis Major, to whom has been ascribed signs by ancients, both ominous, as when “plants wilt, men weaken and women easily aroused” among the Greeks, and beneficial, as in the flooding of the Nile to quench the soil among the Egyptians.

So named as “glowing/scorcher,” Sirius rises starkly visible in the East only during the summer months in the Western Hemisphere, when the sun inches farther to the horizon, according to a Wikipedia lesson. Its stellar brightness in exact conjunction with the heat from July to August, the “Dog Days of Summer,” with “certain emanations” that had “malignant influence” has been feared by many more ancients in volumes of lore around the globe, where it appears at different latitudes.

But back to the song, though softened, “See You in September” does tease with a clue as to its influence; though invisible here again since a week ago—I’m so tempted to read into it the world’s compounding crisis.