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Philip Spiess
HEAT
Right now it is hot where I am; I suppose it is where you are, too. It has been this way, it seems, for the past several weeks – not much rain, but plenty of humidity, and the sweat “rolls down like mighty waters.” The state of the flowers reminds me of what Jack Frost said to the rose: “Wilt thou?” – and it wilted. There is smoke from Canada pervading the air and invading the senses, but no one cooks out. The neighborhood pools, I suppose, are chock-a-block with kids, now that school is out for the year. I don’t know; I no longer go to the pool – the kids would not want to see me in a bathing suit. Why, you ask, am I even outside at all?
It was different in my childhood (and yours, too). That was, in part, because it was in the days before most people had air-conditioning. You drove down the highway on a vacation and passed motels advertising “Air-Conditioned”; you probably stayed in one for that very reason. You went to the movies in the afternoon because a prominent sign on the theater said “It’s cool inside!” – and it was. This sign was probably festooned with lit-up icicles to make the point, and it may have had the penguin figure of “Chilly Willy” on it, too. Our grandparents didn’t have air-conditioning, but most of them probably had an old-fashioned house with high ceilings, with windows wide open to the air, or else a dark house surrounded by old, overhanging trees, with blinds and windows closed and heavy drapes on them – an even older counter-system for keeping the house cool in summer.
We kids, if not outdoors at all hours, played in the basement, where it was cool (okay, sometimes it smelled a little mildewed). We ate ice cream (often from United Dairy Farmers, if not from a passing vendor truck) in a variety of forms to stay cool – ice cream cones (if they were in real waffle cones, they dripped out the bottom), Eskimo Pies (they often lost a bit of chocolate before you could catch it), Popsicles (the bottom chunk dropped off the stick while you were slurping at the top part), ice cream sandwiches (which got squishy as you ate them in the heat), creamsicles (that unlikely combination of orange juice and milk), even Dixie Cups (where you ate the ice cream with little wooden paddles, also used by younger kids for sucking down library paste) – no wonder we switched to Graeter’s as we got older!
On really hot evenings my father would take us for a drive around the shaded neighborhoods in the car. All the car windows were open to the night, including the “Cozy-Wings,” those triangle-shaped panes of windows-on-hinges between the ends of the windshield and the car’s front windows; you could turn them inward so the cool air (and bugs) came rushing in as you drove. Where are they now? “Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn” – replaced by internal car air-conditioning. (I never got an air-conditioned car until I moved to Washington, D. C., where the place is always full of hot air.)
Or maybe you went on a picnic with family or friends, perhaps to a county park such as Winton Woods. Or your family had a cookout in the backyard, kids playing while adults sipped at cocktails and kept an eye on the grill, a “barbacoa” cooking habit borrowed from the Caribbean natives Columbus found when he landed (he thought) in “India.” Another cooling weekday evening activity was a Groesbeck Fund-sponsored free band concert in one of the city parks (or Sunday afternoons in Eden Park). I acquired my love of music (German and/or Broadway, as it may have been) on Thursday nights at concerts in Burnet Woods, with Herbert Tiemeier, Withrow’s “Smitty,” or Walter Esberger conducting the bands they had put together; Marian Spelman was often the soloist. I could stand behind the band pavilion and watch all the old men drummers – snare, kettle, and bass (with cymbals) – performing for hours, the conductors and brass players invariably sweating profusely in the summer night.
But now we have heat. It does not have either the smell nor the feel of the heat of my childhood, a heat you often gloried in when you ran outside to play of a summer’s morning. It was warming and gentle, sometimes so gentle that you forgot it was there and received a well-deserved sunburn in return! (The smell and greasy feel of suntan lotion I will remember always, also the look and smell of my sister’s rubber bathing cap after it had melted a bit and stuck to itself, having been stored for the winter in what became, in summer, a hot, unventilated attic.) You’d revel in the summer warmth while bike riding or roller skating.
Now we have heat, and we are no longer used to it, because of the ubiquitous air-conditioning. It is so much colder than the houses of yore, which were warmed by the sun but cooled (sometimes) by the breezes coming through the windows. Or by fans, electric fans. They would turn and oscillate in homes, barber shops, the post office, the public library. They’d blow stacks of papers across the floor or scatter the petals of flowers that came within their range. They’d disarrange the hairdos of elderly women who may have already had a palm-leaf fan in hand to move the air around them. Now the cold air from air-conditioning, not the directed air from fans, surrounds us (I sometimes have to put on a jacket); we cannot even open the always-sealed windows in most offices and school buildings.
All this thinking about summers past has made me hot. I think I’ll sit in the cool (or by the pool) and read Henry Miller’s 1945 book, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
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A Close up of the top of the falls.
