Terry Jack’s “Seasons in The Sun” ended up defining my generation’s ‘One Hit Wonder’. Released in December of ’73, it went number one in March of ’74 and remained in the top 40 through Memorial Day weekend that year. So to me it always felt like a summer song. It was also my first Teenage Tragedy song.

What many people don’t realize it that ‘Seasons In The Sun‘ was a cover. It was originally a French single from ’61. It was first covered in English by the Kingston Trio in ’63 – ten years before Terry Jacks, a Canadian,  covered it in ’73. Jacks was drawn to the song when his friend developed leukemia. Initially, he presented the song to the Beach Boys, who Terry Jacks knew, but after some initial work for them, he ended up recording it himself.

‘Seasons In The Sun’ will always remind me of those warm summer afternoons. The winter of 74’s grip was finally broken, as the dandelions fought our grass for sunshine. Once again we could play outside on our big side yard at our Gray House. It was sitting outside with that triumphant Spring Sun energizing everything it could see. This is how I remember first hearing the doom and gloom of ‘Seasons In The Sun’. Typically we had a volleyball court setup in our side yard. The jungle gym and tether ball were behind the house on the other side. Once spring dried enough we would be back on our big expanse of grass and Dad would eventually put the volleyball net back up. It was in the midst of the sunshine and a warming breeze where I first heard Terry Jacks mournful goodbye.

Even at eleven years old, the irony was not lost on me – the warm spring days with its promises of Life conflicted with a song about someone dying.  From the song’s beginning fuzzed up guitar melody, to the catchy chorus, to the angelic background vocals – this was a beautifully sad song. But at eleven years old, thoughts of dying were still fantastic. A concept I related to as well as I could imagine living in the year 2525. I was finishing Fifth grade, my first year at West Elementary. The art of dying was something your pets did, not anybody you know.

Skipper was our family’s first dog, a collie – as in the Lassie kind of dog. From a small child’s perspective he was a large long haired friend with four legs, a bushy tail, a pointy snout and ears that us kids would take turns trying to make them longer then they were. He had been my hairy older brother. One morning many years ago in our Red House, after waking up, I wandered outside only to find Skipper lying at the bottom of the concrete stairs that led to the laundry room. When I told Mom, she explained that Skipper had fallen down the stairs inside the house and broken his leg. Dad had laid him outside.

It was bright hot sunny morning and the sun reflected green off the flies that were gathering around Skipper’s eyes. I remembered the dried tears on my cheeks and the tightness in my throat whenever I looked at skipper. This was because Mom had also told me, that when Dad came home from work, he was going to bring Skipper to the vet to be ‘put down’. I don’t remember where my brothers or sisters were, I only remember my arm aching from swiping the flies away from Skipper’s eyes. I don’t know how long I stayed with Skipper that morning or when Dad came home that evening. There are no memories of tearful goodbyes as Dad carried Skipper to the back of the car. I only remember Skipper was no longer with us. And then after Skipper, there was Buffy; and then there was Jamie. (Full disclosure – we only had Buffy for a couple of years. Buffy’s bladder problem became someone else’s problem.)

Putting down Skipper down was a crack in my perfect world. So when Terry lamented the death of his friend in ‘Seasons In the Sun’ this eleven-year-old understood where he was coming from – after all, I had lost a dog, a brother. I wasn’t living in some idelic TV show world, I was dealing with the realities of life.

I am sure I was not the first kid to fantasize about my death and my funeral. Dreaming that Mom and Dad would finally give me the attention due me, instead of wasting attention on my brothers and sisters. So well portrayed in the ‘A Christmas Story’ scene when Ralphie comes home blind.

My old friends from Devonshire school and my new friends from West would both come to my funeral. And they would fight over who was my best friend and who I played with more. And the cute girl in the back of the class would admit she kinda liked me after all.

And my brothers and sisters would feel terrible on how they treated me and actually admit I was a great kid. Hope would put one of my old plastic dinosaur in my coffin. Lee would add my beat-up Monster magazine that mom had gotten me in. Dave and Dawn would fight over which cactus to put in by me and end up each picking their favorites.

My parents would be crying and blaming themselves. They would said they were too hard on me and that they should have gotten me that bike I wanted, or that dinosaur model, or not make me go to church all the time, or maybe they would not have fought so much. If I could have survived, they would promise never to fight again. That’s how I imagined my final scene in ‘Seasons In The Sun’.

Kids are so self-centered. Wanting to be the ‘best friend’ or trying to get sympathy from family members – but that’s a kid’s world. It was normal to think we weren’t being treated fairly in a family where we competed with each other for attention, love and material things. The fantasy of my death was a way to get attention from my parents and extract sympathy from my siblings.

But I wasn’t always innocent myself; of course not. Kids see the world through self-centering glasses. I remember one Easter we were hunting for Easter Eggs inside in our Red House Easter morning. As with any family, the advantage always goes to the older kids. So Hope and Lee were really cleaning up on finding the eggs that year. And, I’ll have you know, I wasn’t doing too bad myself. Dave, on the other hand, wasn’t doing well at all and started crying.

There tends to be an age growing up when you know what to do but you simply can’t do it as well as the older kids. Dawn wasn’t old enough yet to really care that she wasn’t getting as many eggs. She was happy with the 3 or 4 eggs she had been given. Dave was next to me, crying to anyone that would listen (i.e. Mom and Dad) that Hope, Lee and I were “getting all the eggs!” Dad came over to console him. He knelt down and spoke quietly in his ear.

At the beginning of the hunt, Mom and Dad had announced there was one special egg that was worth a dollar to whoever found it. They didn’t say what it looked like but that we would know it was the special egg when we found it. Dad was telling Dave where the special egg was – upstairs in the kitchen and taped to the underside of the bench where us kids sat at for our meals.

As I was running up the stairs I could already hear Dave crying. His cries turned to shrieks when he got to top and saw me pulling the special egg from its hiding place. Dad appeared next to Dave with a look that said – well, let’s just say I hadn’t learned any of those words yet.

Dave and I fought a lot growing up but we got along much more then we fought. Hope and Lee were two and three years older then I and Dawn were almost three years younger than me. Dave and I were only a year apart – like Hope and Lee – but both being boys, it was bound to come to blows at some point in our playing. When it came to fighting, I remembered what Grandma Zilligen said, “we would just let the boys fight it out in the farmyard.” But then again – Grandma was a nut job. Still – playing and fighting was something I did with all my siblings but mostly with Dave.

<insert cranky grandpa voice> “When I was a kid” </cranky grandpa voice>, it was OK to leave your twelve-year-old home alone to watch your six, eight and nine year old. The eleven-year-old didn’t need to be watched either but was willing to help the twelve-year-old. It was OK to leave the kids in the car when you ran into the store. We also played outside at night. And to be left home alone all evening. I have fond memories of our evenings without Mom and Dad. It was on those rare occasions when all five of us played together for an entire evening without someone getting on someone else’s nerves.

One thing we did together was played games – boardgames, though it was hard to find games you could play with more than four people. I think Mom and Dad indulged us with games – most likely because we could occupy ourselves and when our friends came over. They also make great Christmas presents for the entire family.

We had a lot of games, shelves full. I remember lots of them and more as I looked them up: Don’t Spill the Beans (an old game that’s being updated and still being sold today), Masterpiece (I definitely appreciated this one more after going to the Chicago Art Institute), Pivot Pool (for those us who only had bumper pool), Battleships (great two player game that has become a classic), Battling Tops (an all-time classic and one of my favorites), Stay Alive (almost forgot about this one), Happiness (from the hippies that brought us flower-power), Life (another classic but it took a long time to play), Aggravation (the old game I could never remember how to play), Toss Across (since we couldn’t play Jarts inside), Sorry (your standard game for when your friends came over), Crossfire (I loved the guns but we would eventually lose all the steel balls), Operation (I didn’t know this was actually a game, mainly because the batteries were always dead ), Ten Commandments (our friends would always stare at us when we brought this one out – we couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t play this), Landslide (I still think of this one when someone mentions ‘electoral votes’), Gunfight At OK Corral (like Crossfire but you just had to get the other guys gunfighter while you were shooting steel balls), Mystery Date (I only played this once because Hope made me), Gnip Gnop (stupidly simply game but fun – I called in it ‘ga-nip, ga-nop’ but I’m guessing its just ‘nip-nop’), Rebound (another game with steel balls, what a great invention those steel balls were!), Headache (Evil Sorry with the Pop-O-Matic), Clue (didn’t really like this one at first because there was too much thinking), Barnabas Collins (any game with skeletons was always cool), Trouble (basically just Sorry with the Pop-O-Matic), Hang On Harvey (I swear Mom and Dad would buy us any game, and we would play it), Uncle Wiggily (an older game we would play with our friends), Which Witch (since we didn’t have Mouse Trap, this game had the most things to assembly and after a hour of setting up you didn’t want to play anymore), Don’t Break the Ice (kinda like Operation – you didn’t know it was a game, you just played with it), Stratego (my first strategy game), Chinese Checkers (all us kids played this – because we all could at the same time), Kerplunk (a classic ‘Jenga’ time though I wonder why they didn’t use steel balls in this game, just regular ol’ marbles), Cootie (don’t think I ever played this, just made as many Cooties bugs that we had pieces for), Criss-Cross (Lee always had the timing down – to knock over your…yep, steel ball) and Hands Down (because plastic hands were so much better then real hands).

But typically when Mom and Dad left us alone, at some point in the evening, we would play ‘House’. Kids all over the world played ‘House’ but everyone plays differently. In our version, Hope played mommy and Lee play daddy (though I never really thought he took his role as seriously as Hope did – I suspect he was figuring out it wasn’t cool to play ‘House’. Girls could get away with it for a lot longer). Dave was typical a dog and Dawn was typically a cat. I played the role of a beast of burden – a horse, an elephant, a rhino, a tiger, anything Hope could ride around the living room. As Dave got older he too would play a rideable animal.

We would play in the living room of our Red House. Hope would take turns playing with the dog and cat and taking turns riding her pet rhinoceros. Lee would also take his turns and eventually end up on the couch directing the animals on how to play. Or sometimes he was the guest to visit the ‘house’. This went on until the dog and cat stopped staying in the ‘house’ or the elephant or horse got tired of being ridden and went downstairs to watch TV.

Sometime in the early seventies, Mom and Dad started attending a New Year’s Eve party. This meant not only would we be home by ourselves, we could also stay up until Midnight! This is also when Hope taught us to play ‘Sardines‘. We played lots of group games outside but there was not a lot of games you could play inside in the middle of winter. Sardines was perfect for kids that had to stay inside – at night.

First, you turn all the lights in the house off. Next, the person that is ‘it’ hides somewhere in the darkened house while everyone else closes their eyes and counts. We’d have to watch Dave, he was known not close his eyes sometimes. Then, everyone would hunt for the missing person (I guess you could call them the ‘sardine’). Once you found the sardine, you became one yourself and you had to squeeze into their hiding place with them. The trick was to do this without tipping off the others who are still looking for the sardine. We loved playing this game and while we would try to play whenever we could, it became a tradition to play it on New Year’s Eve.

The last time we played Sardines was New Years Eve 1974/75. We were now in the Gray House and there were more places to hide. We were no longer the same kids when our Sardines tradition had started. Hope was a freshman in high school, Lee would graduate from junior high that spring and Dave, Dawn and I went to West Elementary.

The bigger change was Mom and Dad were no longer living together and in the process of getting divorced. Despite the upheaval, or maybe because of it, Mom went out New Year’s Eve. I don’t know if Mom needed the time away from us or she was just letting us hold on to our Sardine tradition a little longer, but for one last time, we had the house to ourselves on New Year’s Eve.

We no longer played ‘House’ but we did play Sardines. Our last New Years Eve wasn’t the same, it had a different vibe. I don’t know if we had started early or if it was the stress the pending divorce and we lost interest, or more likely, we were just not into Sardines as much we had been. Actually, it was Hope who wanted to stop playing. She had heard that WLS radio did a countdown of the top 89 songs for the year. So sometime after 11:00 the lights came back and we turned on the TV. I was curious about this countdown so I went with Hope and Lee to listen to Hope’s radio, or we tuned the kitchen clock radio to WLS and listened as they counted through the last of the 89 songs for 1974. Midnight came and we celebrated a new year – 1975.

And we celebrated a new number one song. It was Terry Jack’s “Seasons In The Sun”. Listening to the song in the kitchen New Years Eve was so different. On one hand, it reminded me the warm spring days seven or eight months earlier. On the other side, the melancholy fit much better on that cold January night. Terry Jack’s lamenting about death snuggled nicely with our parent’s pending divorce. But none of us could have suspected that five weeks later, the seasons in our own sun were about to end.