Be a big fan for anyone with no air-conditioning
Somewhere today within the gravitational pull of this newspaper’s presses, a person who is used to air-conditioning is sweating it out because his air-conditioner fix-it man has ordered a part that is somewhere in a box and in the mail but, most unfortunately, not in his air conditioner.
I feel bad for that person. Last week, I was that person. Five days. A hundred nights. My recovery has been slow.
Recent fan drives — I read of ones in Bossier and Grambling — will always get my attention from here on out. I’m good annually for one fan for someone else as long as I can afford it, because the only thing wrong with no AC when you’re used to it is you can’t sleep, you can’t eat, you can’t think. You can only be hot. There’s nothing cool about that.
Funny what we get acclimated to. In New York City the mayor called a special conference early in the week to announce that 500 “cooling centers” were opening up around town to help residents beat the heat.
I’d always thought cooling centers were jails. “He’s been in the cooler since spring for breaking and entering; he stole a guy’s air conditioner.” (I can understand why.) But in this case, a cooling center is a public place that allows any and all inside for the special purpose of cooling off. You’ve got water, shade and, in the best of cooling centers, air-conditioning.
New York is doing this because the temperatures there were to be in the low 90s all week and, the mayor said, the heat index for the rest of the week would be “as high as the high 90s.”
In other words, temperatures we would consider as a mild cool front.
Again, it’s funny what you get acclimated to. Our lows have been in the high 90s, the highs have been around 105, and the heat index registers Equator Hot. This would be no hill for a climber if he lived on the Equator, but it would send a New Yorker to the hospital.
Same goes for cold weather. A Denver person can be comfortable in short sleeves in weather 40 degrees. We’d shiver. I told you one time of a friend who’d just moved to Louisiana from up north and was washing his car in his driveway in April. “Is it always this hot?” he said.
I turned away.
One of the reasons baseball pitchers don’t pitch as many complete games these days — this is just my theory, but I’m convinced — is that they grew up in air-conditioning. We’re just not used to being that hot for nine innings anymore.
In the modern world, air-conditioning is about as high as you can go when you are talking about convenience. But ignorance is bliss. Most of us above 50 grew up without air-conditioning. We never knew just how hot and miserable we were.
To begin with, we were outside most of the time, so we were more “at home” being hot, or at least overly warm. Inside, we had ceiling fans and window fans. Some people swear by the attic fan. We had a window unit air conditioner, and water beaded up and this miracle would hum and you adjusted the vent to hit our face and it was the most wonderful machine I’d ever been around in my early life. I never took it for granted because it was, after all, a luxury. We did not run it all the time, just as we didn’t run the Impala all the time or go to Myrtle Beach all the time or have grandmamma make waffles 24 hours a day. Luxuries.
Things changed when that cool dude Mr. Carrier invented AC just more than a century ago. It took a while to perfect, to make it reasonably priced to the masses, but now, we’ve all bought in. And when it goes out, so does the light in our air-conditioned eyes.
Next time I’ll tell you exactly what it’s like. Meanwhile, stay in the shade, eat ice cream and, even if you’re not thirsty, hydrate, (which is soccer for “drink water”).
Contact at teddy@latech.edu