We’re in the hot part of summer, when the glass jar of tea left to brew by sunshine gets so hot you might as well have boiled it up on the stove.
Our big black dog, recovering from ear-flap surgery, lies cone-headed in the sun and doesn’t seem bothered. But for us humans here in Madison, Wisconsin, the temperatures—mid-90s by day, down to around 75 at night—feel extreme.
In fact, we know so, for the National Weather Service is issuing Excessive Heat Warnings, and if you can’t trust your government, who can you trust?
When I was a boy, we needed no heat warnings. We could tell it was hot, all by ourselves.
You didn’t even have to go outside; it was hot everywhere.
That was in north-central Illinois, in a little town called Streator. Summer temperatures ran about ten degrees hotter than they do here. Every summer, we’d get a pretty good string of hundred-plus days.
A local entrepreneur, to get his picture in the paper, would fry an egg on the sidewalk in front of his gas station—at nine o’clock in the morning!
We kids, being kids, were not bothered by the heat. If we stopped and thought about it, we’d get to feeling kind of droopy and sweaty. But usually we didn’t stop and think about things. We were too busy running around the neighborhood, playing tag, or cowboys, or space cadets. Sometimes we armed ourselves with squirt guns, which provided a welcome spritz of coolish water.
If we got to feeling too hot, we’d find some shade or go inside. We’d stop running and sit still for a while. Let the sweat dry.
Have I mentioned—there was no air-conditioning? There was no place you could go to escape the fervid ambience. Not unless you went to the movies.
Our town had two theaters—the Plumb and the Granada—and both were air-conditioned. A child’s admission at the one cost a quarter, the other fifteen cents. But you didn’t ordinarily take off in the middle of a day without your family and go to the pictures.
Not when you could get cooled off for free by wandering through E. C. Van Loon’s Sporting Goods store on Main Street. That was the only other air-conditioned space in town. They kept the temperature cranked way down, and the lights off. I suppose the juice to run the A/C cost so much they couldn’t afford to turn on the lights, too.
Stepping into Van Loon’s on a blazing August day was like exploring an Egyptian tomb. The only light was what managed to slip past the dark green street awning and seep in the front windows, then bounce in ever-diminishing waves back to the rear of the store. You walked along narrow aisles full of balls and gloves, rifles and shotguns, and bright-colored fishing lures of every description—some of them designed to mimic bright-colored creatures never seen in any Illinois pond or stream.
It was all tantalizing. Intriguing. Great entertainment. But it was freezing. You could catch your death of cold.
Fleeing the store by the front door, you stepped into the vast sauna of a small-town summer and knew you were back where you belonged.
None of us had houses or cars that were air-conditioned. Such a thing was unheard of—like private citizens owning electronic computers.
We must have smelled terrible all summer long, but nobody noticed because we all did.
Sorry about that.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
