The best days of my life

What is it about Bryan Adams and his song
‘Summer of 69’? Why do the lyrics linger? Was it
90° in the shade and the harbinger of the end
of the golden weather, or the impending closure
of a glorious decade? He should have called it
‘The best days of my life’, it would have rested
easier, a better parable than the truth,
but the resonance of summer of ‘69 is timeless,
an allegory to an era, a metaphor for youth.
He didn’t write the song until January 1984;
right or wrong it is more a creation of the eighties
than a design of the endless summer of ’69.
© I.D. Carswell