Hot Reads

When temperatures reach the high 90s, as they are expected to do this weekend, I often recall scenes from my youth. I know at some point we got an air conditioner (“we” meaning my brother and I), probably when we moved up into the refurnished attic bedroom. But for the first ten years of my life, we lived on the first floor in a small room between my parents’ bedroom and the bathroom, and I don’t recall any air conditioning there.

We sweated, and I have vivid memories of sweating. Probably why I can’t stand perspiring to this day.

Anyway, I also have vivid memories of what I read during those sweltering summer nights in that bedroom, in the top bunk bed: Star Trek novelizations, authored by James Blish.

I guess I was a trekkie back then. I know Star Trek, the original series with Kirk and Spock, aired regularly on Sunday evenings in reruns, and over time I saw them all. Blish’s novelizations were usually about 50-page treatments of those episodes, usually three in a paperback. Though I can visualize the covers in all their detail in my mind’s eye – the black border, the slanted Star Trek typography, the single picture on the cover in a dominant color (green, red) – I can’t recall with surety which episodes I read. I think the one about the Horta-blob, I think the one about the flying pizza that lands on Spock’s back.

And I lovingly read these books, seemingly only at night, only in my top bunk bed, and only when the mercury rose above 95 degrees or so.

Interestingly, writing this another old memory popped to the frontal lobe: watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the thick humid heat of my childhood home, melting on the blue couches. This was the first Star Trek movie, the one with the bald chick and V’ger, the great “alien” entity that Kirk and Spock et al had to keep from swallowing up the solar system. I liked it back then. Haven’t seen it in at least twenty years; may be due for a re-evaluation and a blog post.

All these memories aside, you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be reading this weekend with my air conditioner cranked into overdrive.