The song Summer Wind just came on. It’s a great song but holds a little different meaning for me than it might for others. (sings) “My fickle friend, the summer wind” may invoke a nice stroll in Central Park for some. Or the wind coming of the water at Coney Island for others. Not for me, it’s something quite different. You see, I come from the desert and summer is a different beast for my people. I’ve lived in the city for the last seven years so I don’t experience the sensation much anymore, but last week while making some dinner, I turned on the oven, for the first time in months, to preheat. I forgot I had turned it on and was doing other things and it was about a half hour before I got back to the oven. I grabbed the pan of spinach/potato pancakes and bent over to put them in the oven. I opened the door and that wave of heat wafted out and covered my face, making me do that half-shrug, close-your-eyes turn away. And I thought of home. That’s what a summer wind is like for us. Growing up, that was the sensation every day when opening the door to leave home. Well, if there were several extremely high wattage bulbs inside of the oven it would have been the same sensation, it was blindingly bright in the summers growing up. I think I got my first pair of sunglasses when I was six or seven. Not for any sense of style or a desire to be cool, it was out of necessity. Now I forget to wear them. It gets bright in the city sometimes, but nothing compared to what it was like back then.
When I was in my twenties I went to work in restaurants, like you do. I worked with a lot of people from all over theworld and I did my time in the kitchen as well as in the front of the house. I use to stand next to this huge conveyor belt oven for hours on end. The heat blasting from it reminded of my childhood and made the job much more bearable than it should have been. I’d take things out of the oven and put them in the pass through window, under heat lamps. Every now and then, when missing the proper utensils, I would grab pans with my bare hands and pull them quickly out of the oven. Or grab a plate that had been under the heat lamp for ten minutes without thinking twice. It took a while for me to realize that other people in the kitchen would wince as I did things like this. Apparently this was not normal. My early years in the desert seemed to have helped me develop some sort of extraordinary ability, my own quirky little super power, if you will. The summer winds have conditioned me, I can stand the heat.
(sings to herself as she exits)
The summer wind came blowin in, from across the sea
It lingered there, so warm and fair, to walk with me
All summer long, we sang a song and strolled on golden sands
mmm-mm, mm the summer wind
Like painted kites, those days and nights, went flying by
The world was new, beneath a blue umbrella sky
Then softer than a piper man, one day it called…
(beat)
mmm-mm, mm the summer wind
