Hey Jude

Today I was randomly looking at blogs on this site and someone had a playlist of songs that included "Hey Jude." I immediately started thinking about my childhood summers on Cape Cod. Before my grandparents, in typical New England fashion, retired to Florida, they retired to Cape Cod. Of the two, I preferred the Cape. Indiatlantic, Florida smelled of sulfur, and my grandparents lived in a retirement complex. The neighborhood on the Cape was full of kids our age. Besides, Florida never appealed to me they way it did to my grandfather, who adored the idea of the endless summer. To me summer means sunburns and hot weather -- two things I would gladly do without.
Our first summer on the Cape, my grandparents drove to Missouri to pick us up. We were living in St. Louis at the time, and I affectionately called it Misery, mostly because it was. The locals, unused to military families, and divorce, ridiculed me incessantly -- because I talked with my New England accent, because I had a different last name than my parents. The summer there was the first time I had experienced any kind of suffocating heat, and I was more than happy to go to Massachusetts even though my grandparents had moved far from their old Lancaster home.
On the way back we got stuck in a large traffic jam, due to road resurfacing. Oddly enough, considering how many decades have passed, I can still remember the sensation of sitting in the sweltering back seat that day in the boat of a car my grandparents owned, that for some engineering reason only known in Detroit, only had two doors. When we reached Massachusetts, my grandfather discovered that the road resurfacing had left tar on the side panels. He was furious. As a gesture of good will for the kind generousity he demonstrated in fetching us, Kris and I were consigned to tar removal duty for a good part of the summer. This was an endless, and frankly ineffective, task.
At this point we hadn't met any of the kids in the neighborhood, and my grandparents seemed dubious about the small crowd, of mostly boys, that roamed the neighborhood on their bikes. There were only a few other girls in the whole subdivision. Two of them were a year or two older than us, and definitely had attitude. One was a bit younger, and the last one, who was roughly my sister's age is still one of my best friends.
It was obvious that the other kids were curious about who we were, but also didn't seem to know how to approach us. One day, while Kris and I were on tar duty, they were kicking a ball around near us. Finally, they kicked it one too many times close to us that I yelled that if they kicked the ball over our direction one more time that I would stick it where the sun didn't shine. Poor Timmy was left stammering his apologies. While in realty, I was probably more annoyed with having to be on tar duty than anything else.
Oddly enough, that episode eventually broke the ice and Kris and I started hanging out with "the boys," who were obsessed with the Beatles. Being 10, I wasn't yet able to understand that their obession with trivia and song statistics was part of a male bragging pattern, and I listen patiently to all their facts and figures. Only in college would I realize that citing obscure song facts somehow conferred intelligence, in the same way staring at the guitar player -- instead of dancing -- demonstrated that you were a true music afficianado.
One day we were all sitting in Sean's house and Rob was telling me how "Hey Jude" was 5 minutes and 7 seconds long (or was that 7 minutes and 5 seconds). Not realizing that the information was stamped on the disk, I was wondering if they'd sat there with a stopwatch, and was frankly impressed that they would have gone to all that effort. I guess he was trying to impress me, but I was a little less impressed a few minutes later when they showed me the information was on the label. The song however, always makes me think of that great summer we had far away from the heat and misery of Missouri.