As most of the world’s Northern Hemisphere is suffering through a record-breaking heatwave (it reached 101 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday in New York City where I live), my mind leaps back (whoosh sound effect) to this date in July 1966, exactly 60 years ago.

That heatwave reached heights of 107 degrees! And poor 9 year old me was in the midst of a battle with mumps. The viral affliction was not deadly in my case but I had to endure weeks of bed rest, alternately warm and cold compresses for my swollen glands, pain relievers for my fever and headaches, and eating bland, soft foods that my Dr. Weinert said wouldn’t stimulate excess saliva. Meanwhile, my little sister was able to join my parents in the inflatable swimming pool in our backyard as I lay in bed watching TV or listening to my handful of albums on my portable record player…over and over again. My mother did move the big rotating fan into my room. We finally purchased an air conditioner…the next summer.

Of course, there’s always hidden benefits to seemingly dire circumstances. Because of mumps, I missed the final two weeks of school. As quarantine was one of the requisite steps in the treatment of mumps, I was not able to receive the contents of my desk at school as they were personally delivered to my house by my favorite teacher, Mrs. Blank. My mother shook her head when she looked over the random things I had secreted in my desk. Sheets and sheets of paper on which I’d drawn panels of my own comic book creations. A broken wristwatch that I’d told my parents I’d lost. A clay bead bracelet I had bought at a school fair to give to my 4th grade inamorata, Carol (gloriously redheaded Carol), but chickened out at the last moment. A rubber ball known as a Pensy Pinkie to those in the habit of playing punch-ball or handball during recess.

As with so many things in my life, they came up with a vaccine for mumps in 1967, a year too late for this piker. Carol, the love of my short life to date, moved with her family to San Diego in the Fall of 1966. I tried being more “boyish” as my Dad put it in the ensuing years but failed to gain his approval. When my father got a new job as head of engineering for a major construction company in 1968, the family moved to Port Jefferson on Long Island. My mother taught Algebra and Pre-Calculus at the high school there. Early in the next decade, my parents’ marriage dissolved. Dad moved back to Los Angeles, where he’d grown up before moving East to attend college. I had to spend summers after my junior and senior years in high school with my Dad and his new girlfriend in Van Nuys, a northern suburb of L.A..

The long and short of that was I tried to ignore my gender dysphoria until I became an adult and even then I was so confused that I thought I was going insane. Years of intermittent psychotherapy never provided me with any decisive answers except a preliminary diagnosis that I was on the autism spectrum. It would be another few decades before I was able to confirm to myself that I am transgender.

Anyway, the record-setting summer heat has served as my own form of Proust’s madeleine, dipped in a tall glass of iced lemon tea, while I turn up my AC to Max Cool. 60 summers ago, lying in my bedroom in Forest Hills, Queens, a cold compress on my salivary glands, listening to my Lovin’ Spoonful album’s lead single: