When I was a kid we had two air conditioners in our house: one on the first floor, where my grandparents lived, and one in my parents’ bedroom. I remember a few rare nights when the heat was so unbearable that I slept on the floor of my parents’ room — but that was when I was really little, and it didn’t happen often. Mostly, I slept in front of a fan, and was brought up to believe that if the fan blew directly on my head all night that I’d almost certainly develop a sinus infection — so the fan was never really blowing ON me, it was sort of blowing PAST me.
It was hot.
I’m not saying this out of any kind of nostalgia — it sucked, pretty much, and I was really envious of my parents that they had the air conditioner, though I didn’t feel like the arrangement was unfair or anything. Resources were really limited in our family, and obviously air conditioning was expensive, and so there it was: there could only be one unit, and it had to go somewhere, so it went in my parents’ room.
I remember days spent improvising cooling devices. I set up a floor fan in my room, taped a sheet all around its perimeter, weighted the edges of the sheet down with books, and sat in the resulting air-inflated tent for hours, reading books and napping. (I actually do recall having sinus trouble after a few episodes of falling asleep with my head a few inches from the fan like that, but whatever.) Or I’d turn the air conditioner on in my parents’ room and curl up in front of it on the window seat, letting the cold air blow straight on the back of my neck, and drink glass after glass of instant lemonade with a lot of ice. Of course we had a wading pool, but no sprinkler; one could shoot water up from the hose and run under it, but there was always the issue of wasting water (these were the Carter years,* after all!), so we didn’t do a whole lot of that. There was the neighborhood public pool, but it was always really crowded and (is still now) shadeless, so that inevitably if we went swimming I ended up feeling hot anyway after drying off and walking home. Mostly, I remember heat-beating remedies at home.
(* – I was trying to find some page about the “Mickey and Goofy Explore Energy Conservation” comic book I remember from my childhood — you know the one, where Goofy explains how important it is to take shorter showers and to turn off the lights when you leave the room? — and holy moly, did you know that book was produced by Exxon? Someone should tell Mr. Tillerman.)
All the time that I lived in New York, I didn’t have an air conditioner, either. In New York I came to resent air conditioners: they expell hot air onto the sidewalk and make the already unbearably oppresive heat rising from the softened asphalt of the street just feel like injustice. I did learn about the strategies of taking advantage of public air conditioning as a way of dealing with the heat, though. Too hot in your apartment? Go shopping! Go to the movies! Go to a museum or a cafe!
The summer after graduation I subletted a space in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment with my friends Gina and Dawn. The space I slept in was a storage loft above the galley kitchen; I had a little fan up there and mostly it was ok for sleeping, though there were a few episodes that stand out in my memory. One morning I woke up almost delirious with the heat and could barely think clearly enough to be able to diagnose my disorientation as stemming from the fact that it had to be over 120°F in my little loft. I hitched my way over to the ladder and swung my legs over, gasping; and right below me was Gina, blithely baking muffins. It didn’t even dawn on me. I just said, “God is it hot!” and Gina looked up at me, and looked down at the muffins she was baking, and then looked up at me again and said, “Yes! You should maybe take a shower!”
Later that summer, on a weekend when both Gina and Dawn were out of town, I woke up feeling hot and stupid, came down from my loft and sat on the floor of the living room, and glommed onto the one rational thought I was able to form in my head: I need to get out of the apartment, and I shall walk down Broadway until I find a sunhat for sale for less than $20, then I shall turn left and walk to Central Park. So I did: I packed a jar of lemonade, walked out of the apartment at 100th St and Riverside Drive, walked over to Broadway and down to somwhere in the mid-80s before I found a store that sold me a nice broad-brimmed hat for $19.99; then I walked into Central Park, made it to Summer Stage, and fainted. When I came to, I could think only, “I need to go to the movies.” So I walked east to Lexington, got on the subway, rode to Houston, went into the Angelika and saw the next thing playing — which happened to be Orlando, a movie whose surreality was really all that my fried brain could have handled. After it ended, I felt much better, and walked to the 1/9 line feeling like a movie star in my new hat, with my almost-like-new air-conditioned brain, feeling light (headed?) and awake.
The point of the story, though, becomes apparent when you check the map: I walked 3.2 miles in 100°+F heat before I thought it would be prudent to get on the fucking subway or find some air conditioning. Hot is dumb.
We don’t have air conditioners in our house now, either, and yesterday and today have been hot enough to cook my brain into mush — so it’s not surprising I did another stupid thing today. At 3:30 I couldn’t stand it anymore, we had to get out of the house, and even though Golan was happily coding away in front of the fan I made a fuss and bundled us all into the car where I promptly turned on the air conditioning, picked a direction and drove vaguely off. I didn’t really start thinking straight until we got to Lawrenceville (where we bought an iced coffee) — even then, I made a lot of bad driving decisions and we meandered aimlessly around. The carbon footprint of us cooling off this afternoon was pretty high — but how great is it to treat the family to an hour or so of air conditioning? Worth any amount of future climate change!
Sigh.
I’ve been simultaneously amused and distressed by the stupidity of global warming politics these days. Gas is now $3.99 a gallon (but it’s going higher, of course, and soon) — now the pols who understand about peak oil and climate change are in a bind because how do you really break it to your constituents that the way to make life better in the long run is to make gas even more expensive? Not surprising the Boxer-Lieberman bill died in the Senate, and as weak and ineffectual as it was I suppose it’s just as well… but it really makes you wonder what the turning point is going to be. When will the senior senator from Kentucky be taking the floor to say “my constituents are paying $5 or $6 or $10 a gallon and by GOD we have to make sure that price keeps going up until they stop acting like a certain airhead in Pittsburgh who drives her family around on unnecessary shopping trips just to stay cool in the summer!”?
The fault, my friends, is in our house, not in our selves. Or at least the house bears equal responsibility, here. We live in a little kit-built house from the early 1950s, a brick-clad framed cube that’s perched on the edge of the virgin hillside fronting Schenley Park. There are so, so many things about the house that are heartbreaking to me — the fact that it has a lovely park as its back yard but no windows from which to appreciate the view, for example. But in the summertime we suffer from the fact that the walls are really poorly insulated (if they were ever insulated at all, the loft of the fill material tamped down long ago — the wall cavities are basically empty), the ceilings are low, and the windows are all single-pane aluminum casements (many with sheared-off operator hinges and broken locks) — in other words, our little brick cube can heat up like a kiln. And those casements? Impossible to fit with a standard window air conditioner.
Golan was reading over my shoulder as I typed the word “heartbreaking” in the paragraph above, and he snapped, only 3/4 kidding, ”I’m sorry you don’t like the house.” I actually like living here a lot, but the house itself has never had a lot of charm for me. Sorry, Golan. It’s a home, and I love my family, and the location couldn’t be much better — but I wrestle with this house a lot. And we can’t afford to re-build everything that’s wrong with it. So we endure, and I complain.
This year, I think we can resolve: we’ll replace two windows, and fill the walls with blown-in insulation. And maybe we’ll buy an air conditioner to put in one of the new windows. And, you know, contribute to the global problem.
). I had continual email at work, and I spent the majority of my workday sitting at my desk answering emails as quickly as they came in — I had zero interest in catching up on email at home, or randomly surfing the internet, or whatever. Instead I painted, and read books, and cooked dinner for friends, and took walks by the river, and spent quality time with my kitty-cats. It seems so amazingly idyllic from my current perspective, really.