Hot Summers

I am a little bit freaked. As I sit at my desk in my air conditioned home office (a table in a second bedroom used either for me or junk storage, depending on the circumstance) they are telling me on television that I am sitting under a heat dome. Lordy, Lordy…what the hell is that? Isn’t it bad enough I am told there are super viruses floating around, the country is going to broke on August 2nd, the cost of gas is going up again, the stock market is going to crash, and that I won’t be able to retire until I am 85…and now I have to worry about a heat dome?

Well…that’s what they said in some dogged attempt to explain the hot weather. Of course, there is always that old stand-by global warming. But that is so déclassé. A heat dome is much better.

Actually I am somewhat amused by the all of the haranguing around about the heat. What am I missing? It is summer, isn’t it? And it does get warm in summer, doesn’t it? It’s hard to remember this past May when it rained every day and we shivered our butts off. But such are the trials of weather aficionados who relish outlier weather.

It doesn’t seem so unusual to me. I remember summers like this when I was a kid. We used to watch the temperature sign at First Federal Bank at the corner of Market and Midlothian. We would watch it climb into the 80’s, then the 90’s. It was a REAL event when it hit the 100's, and it did that plenty of times. Or at least it seemed that way.

Our cars weren’t air conditioned. Our houses weren’t air conditioned. We use a lot of fans and opened the windows. When my family moved from our downstairs duplex to our house in 1958, the house had a ceiling fan on the second floor that did a fairly good job of keeping the air circulating around the house. When I got a little older, we bought window air conditioning units for the upstairs bedrooms…which were really not that great. The technology just wasn’t there. But we were happy to have them nonetheless. If we really wanted to cool down, we would go out to eat or to a movie at establishments that proudly displayed signs with polar bears and icicles saying it was cool inside. That was a treat.

Speaking of which, if it was real hot, my parents would take me to the Dairy Queen…which only had one flavor most of the time, vanilla. Chocolate would pop up maybe once a month and it was big deal!! And the cool drink you sipped would most likely be a lemonade...and on a special occasion, a Coke or Pepsi in glass bottles. If it was really hot, my buddy and I would ride our bikes down to the Lake Newport Boat Docks and use the vending machines with money pilfered from my mother's desk drawer.  Cokes were a quarter!

My family finally got air conditioning for the house in 1970, the year I went away to school to a non-air conditioned dorm. The family car got air conditioning in the mid 1960’s, but it was still an expensive luxury for secondary cars. I didn’t have a car with air conditioning until 1975 when it became part of the standard package for all but the most basic of cars.

I often think it’s ironic that now I close the windows on my sun porch to keep the air conditioning inside, when in the past I would open the windows on the sun porch to let the cool evening breezes in. Tempus fugit.

Long gone are the days at Shady Run pool, then a stop at the dairy on Indianola for Popsicles. Long gone are the long hours sitting on my neighbor’s back porch where we would talk until midnight or later because it was too hot to go inside. When we did, we might continue the conversation through the open windows…or my neighbor would ask me what was on television at three in the morning that made me laugh so hard (cable television had 12 channels which included the four local stations).

Summers are different now. And I have to admit I would be lost without my air conditioning. But I think tonight I am going to turn it off, and open up the sun room sliding doors, and see if I can hear anything going on at my neighbor’s house. Maybe eat a Peanut Buster Parfait. And try to pretend that now was then...when things weren't so complicated.