That Mr. Softee jingle is already in your head — you’re welcome

You can hear it right now.

I did that to you. I'm sorry. I'm also not sorry at all.

That song — that specific song — is the purest form of audio memory New Jersey has. It hits differently than any other sound of summer. The ice cream truck jingle does not just remind you of summer. It is summer, compressed into about forty-five seconds of looping melody that will now follow you through your afternoon, your commute, and quite possibly into your dreams tonight.

You're welcome.

The truck, the song, the line out front

For years, working here at NJ 101.5, I had a front row seat to one of the great small pleasures of a Jersey summer. The Mr. Softee truck would park right out front. You'd hear the rumble of the engine first, then the jingle floating in through the windows, getting louder. And there he was.

Most days I'd stay put. Most days. But some days the temptation just won. I'd push back from the desk, head for the front door, and join the line. And here is the part that never got old — I was never the only one. Grown adults. People with job titles and mortgages and opinions about tax policy. All of us standing in the middle of the street in a line, waiting for a soft serve cone, looking exactly like we did when we were ten years old.

There is something clarifying about that. Something that cuts right through whatever the day has thrown at you.

I went for a walk Sunday afternoon and heard the jingle for the better part of thirty minutes. He was working the neighborhood just over from my trail — close enough to hear clearly, just far enough that getting there would have required cutting through someone's yard. I kept walking. The walk was the point. But that song stayed with me the entire time, looping the way it does, the way it always has.

At some point during that half hour I found myself wondering — did it ever have actual lyrics?

It does. It turns out almost nobody in New Jersey has ever heard them.

The song has a story — and it started in South Jersey

Mr. Softee was founded in 1956 by brothers William and James Conway in Philadelphia. The concept was simple and brilliant: put soft-serve machines in trucks and bring the ice cream directly to the neighborhoods. By 1958 the company had moved its base of operations to Runnemede, New Jersey — Camden County, South Jersey — where it remains headquartered to this day.

Let that sink in for a second. The largest ice cream truck franchise in the United States is a South Jersey company. Has been for nearly seventy years.

The jingle came a few years later. Jingle writer Les Waas adapted the melody from a century-old tune called "The Whistler and His Dog" and turned it into the Mr. Softee theme around 1960. The song has actual lyrics — words about creaminess and dreaminess and spelling out the name at the end — that appeared in early commercials and have been largely forgotten by everyone who grew up hearing only the instrumental version play down their street.

Finding out the song has lyrics as an adult feels genuinely strange. Like learning your childhood had a narrator you never knew about.

SEE ALSO: The NJ foods that don't exist anywhere else — and what happens when you leave 

The thing it actually means

Tom Kean's old New Jersey ad campaign had a line that fits here perfectly. New Jersey and you — perfect together. That was about the state broadly. But Mr. Softee earns that line on its own terms. "Mr. Softee and you perfect together!"  So Jersey!

The blue and white truck. The cone-head logo that is slightly unsettling if you stare at it too long. The jingle that arrives before the truck does and stays long after it leaves. The specific feeling of being a kid running out the front door with change in your hand, and then the specific feeling decades later of being a grown adult doing essentially the same thing — just with a credit card and slightly less running.

It is one of those things New Jersey does without thinking about it. Without needing to explain it. You just know it when you hear it.

I still haven't spotted the truck this year. But I heard him Sunday. That means he's out there. Working the neighborhoods. Doing what he's always done.

The season is starting.