Heat Wave

So we’re all in this together, suffering through this abominable heat wave. All the ACs in my house are cranking, and the house still festers in the high 70s. You’re bathed in sweat walking fifteen feet to the car in the driveway. The basement’s a rain forest from the humidity (oh, my books!). The little ones don’t even want to go outside to play, and I suffer from an onslaught of hey daddys.

Whenever it gets this hot, I remember back a few decades to when I was a kid. The late seventies. It was hot, but it never bothered us, as kids, as it does us, as adults. Wonder why. Must be that childlike innocence, that wonder that every new day brought.

Specific memories come to mind whenever the mercury breaks a hundred:

The six weeks of art school every June and July – Each week a different focus: drawing, painting, pottery, photography, filmmaking. Had lots and lots of fun with my friends there. Back in those days a boy under ten could walk six or seven blocks to the school unescourted, and parents wouldn’t blink an eye.

First forays into science fiction – I vividly recall reading Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles in the “cage” (my grandparent’s screened-in back porch) in the sweltering heat. Also The Amityville Horror and Watership Down, read under the fat old hot sun. (Surprisingly, the safety of bright daylight did little to keep the terror of Anson’s book at bay.)

Movies – in the early days of cable teevee, I remember melting and overheating on the living room couch, watching in rapt attention Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Smokey and the Bandit. There were others, sure, but these stand out as true heat wave memories.

Marathon sessions at the playground – diagonally across our house was a park about an acre in size. Two monkeybars, swings, “the witch” (a two-story slide / tower), a see-saw, a merry-go-round. Whenever it got reaaaaalllly hot, the neighborhood parents would kick us all out and we’d congregate at the park, a dozen or two dozen of us, and we’d play for endless hours.

The dark headlines of the New York Daily News – my parents subscribed to it for a summer or two. It helped shove me a bit towards adulthood, I think, and by that it I mean that the paper showed me the world could be a dangerous, deadly place. Jonestown, Skylab, the Son of Sam. I also recall reading the Gasoline Alley cartoon and not being able to make head or tails of it, but I had to see how the arc finished.

Miscellaneous memories – going to a nearby lake with the family and feasting on grapes and grilled chicken; a pack of me and my friends on bicycles trekking over to the grammar school and back one hot summer night; exploring the misty, Jurassic trails of the Woods a block behind my house; reading James Blish’s Star Trek novelizations while sweating in my bed at night; listening to Glen Campbell’s Summer Nights on my brothers yellow transistor radio that had an ear plug.

Yes, all these things come back to me, especially now as I sit in the basement click-clacking this out while perspiration is pooling on my neck and arms. Just don’t ask me to explain that last miscellaneous memory – I have absolutely no idea how or why that’s stuck in my noggin.