Lazy Hazy

I’ve never been a warm weather guy. To quote the great Anna Nalick, “summer just wasn’t my season”. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve learned over the years to enjoy all the seasons, but some I enjoy more than others and summer doesn’t rank near the top of the list. And, the crazy thing is, it never did…even back in the day…when summers meant nearly three months off.

Now, for the second time, don’t get me wrong. I looked forward to summer, like all of us did. In fact, like the rest of those of us of the male persuasion, I could think of little else as the calendar turned to May, the weather warmed, and the days got longer. Part of that, of course, was the anticipation of those three months when we could do, pretty much, whatever we wanted. And another part had to do with our selective memories. Yeah. Time to digress.

As we mentioned in a previous missive about cookouts, our memories were selective, and in the right way (if, you know, there is one). The right way…in that, in anticipating something like summer, we remembered all the great things about it, and pretty much forgot about all the negatives. And, again, we were this way about everything to such a degree that Mom always felt it necessary to caution us that everything would not be, as the great Al McGuire sometimes said, “seashells and balloons”.

When we were anticipating one of our two annual Kennywood trips (another blog) so much so that it was all we talked about, Mom would remind us that there would be lines. And we’d ignore this reminder, imagining ourselves blissfully floating from ride to ride all day. Much like we’d ignore all cautions on a cookout day that we had to wait until the coals heated up or, prior to the Fourth of July, that the fireworks wouldn’t start until dark, so we’d have to wait.

 So, yeah. Selective. Very selective. And, when it came to summer, that meant remembering all the fun we were going to have and forgetting all about, you know, the heat…which we, basically, could not escape. Yeah. Time for a trip to the Wayback. The way Wayback…1896. (History, baby! Buckle up!)

In August 1896, New York and New England were hit with a ten-day heatwave that claimed the lives of 15-hundred people. The temperature was above 90 as was the humidity…with absolutely no wind at all. The result? A heat index of over 120 for all ten of those days. Oh, and as the actual temperatures were measured above street level in those days, the temperature on the street in a city like New York, an urban heat island, was likely 120 degrees. Worse, temperatures barely fell at night, and the humidity remained constant.

The worst of the death toll came in the New York city tenements. Those overcrowded buildings, with five and six folks to a room, offered no relief from the heat. And, as the city had a law against sleeping in public parks, residents, attempting to find enough comfort to sleep, were forced to do things like sleep outside on fire escapes (several children fell from same and were seriously injured or killed), on building roofs (people fell off those as well and were killed), and even down at the piers (more than one person rolled into the river and drowned).

There was absolutely no escape from the heat, for human or animal. So many horses died in New York during those ten days that their bodies couldn’t be removed from the streets and simply lay where they fell. No escape, except for those who decided to escape by committing suicide. And, there were several of those.

Now, why am I telling you this? Because, those folks had no air conditioning, much like none of us did back in our school days.  And I mean none of us. Not one member of the old gang had it, none of the adults in our family had it, and even most public buildings didn’t have it. So, again, we couldn’t escape the heat.

Now, obviously, none of us were in the kinds of straits in which so many of those folks in 1896 found themselves. We did have things we could do to make ourselves somewhat more comfortable, so none of us was going to die of heatstroke. But, while we might be more comfortable, there were days and more than a few of them where actually being comfortable wasn’t going to happen.

What did we do? Well, first, we spent as much time as possible outside. As the indoors weren’t air conditioned, it was always cooler outside, especially in the shade, where we tended to set up if we were doing something passive like playing a board game or cards. And, if we needed to be inside, there were always fans…which could help…or not.

I can still remember going to my paternal grandfather’s house during the summer months. Grandpap had a big chair he liked to sit in, and a few feet in front of that chair on a table sat a huge box fan he’d have blowing directly on him. But what that fan was mostly doing was blowing hot air around, and, absent any kind of air flow from the outside, actually making said air hotter by doing so.

Other fans worked better. We had window fans at our place, and those helped some. They were two sided, one designed to suck the hot air out of the house and the other to pull cooler air in from outside. They didn’t do much during the day, when there was plenty of heat both outdoors and in, but, at night? If it cooled off some, they could make it possible to sleep comfortably. Other nights? Yeah. Not so much.

That was always the worst part, for me at least. If we were outside playing ball or something and got hot, we just went to the hose, squirted some of the cold water over ourselves, had a drink, and got back to playing. If it got really bad, we’d walk down to the A&P, which did have air conditioning, go inside, and walk around until we cooled off a little. Mom always made sure to have plenty of cold drinks in the fridge, especially in the summer, and, if it got too uncomfortable inside, well, we could always go out, even after dark. Sit on the porch or the patio.

But, at bedtime, it was another story. If it were one of those nights, a night when it didn’t really cool off and when the humidity remained high? Well, the window fan wasn’t going to do much, and you were going to swelter in bed even if you tossed any and all covers off the bottom of the thing. Now, there was a kinda/sorta fix for that. You could stay up later…one of the benefits of summer vacation.

School night bedtimes were pretty inviolate in our house back in the day. Oh, on occasion, if something very special might be on TV, you might get a one-night pass to stay up an extra half an hour or even an hour. But, pretty much no other reason would suffice, because any of that other stuff you could do tomorrow. Tonight? Yeah. Bed.

But, on non-school nights? Things were liberalized. Now, during the school year, this liberalization was of limited utility. Our body clocks were set to “school”, so, while we might stay up an hour or so later on a Friday or Saturday night or if we were on a school vacation, that was it. In the summer? Different story. After a couple of weeks of sleeping in (a little) and staying up later, the clocks adjusted. Soon enough, we could stay up until 2am if we wanted…and that was the kinda/sorta fix. We’d stay out of bed until it was, pretty much, as cool as it was going to get. The problem was that strategy rebounded on us.

Now, as you may know if you’ve been here a few times before, I was more the “early bird” type, while La Soeur was a “night owl”. But. Neither of us was one of those folks who could get by on four hours sleep a night. Once in a while? Sure. But not regularly. So, the later we went to bed, the later we slept. And that meant that the heat of the day was hitting us at the other end of the sleep cycle.

But all of this, the heat, the nights it was too hot to sleep, the bugs, all the other things we didn’t like about summer? All of that was out of mind as we marched past Memorial Day into the last few days of the school year, which always ended sometime in early June in those days. All we could think about was that, soon, we’d have almost every day to ourselves and plenty of time to do all those things we never seemed to have enough time to do when school was in session.

I’ve often said that I had thirteen “last days of school”, and my memory of each of those days is unsullied by a single cloud in the sky. I remember each and every one as having featured bright sunshine pouring through the big windows of the school, beckoning us to come out and start our summer. And, of course, we couldn’t wait to do just that.

Now, here’s the part we didn’t get. Those first few weeks, early and mid-June? They were the best part of summer vacation. Oh, July and August were great, but they featured a lot of that heat we had to deal with. June? The weather was cooler, especially at night and in the early part of the day. I can still remember going out to play as a little kid and running through the dewy grass, our shoes and socks soaked. Mom might have even made us wear light jackets. But, soon enough, the jackets were discarded, and the shoes and socks had dried and, often, we were treated to one of those June days, one of the most beautiful of the year. Warm, but not hot. No clouds. No rain. No humidity. Just. Gorgeous.

Yeah, the June weather was usually the best of the summer and there was another factor, too. The newness of it all. We had stuff we wanted to do, all that stuff we didn’t have time for during the school year, stuff Mom had been telling us for weeks we’d have “plenty of time to do” once school was out. Well, school was out, and we did have plenty of time. So, we got stuff done.

We never ran out of stuff, mind. Not once in all those years. We could always find something fun to do. Sure, there were moments of boredom, but never any days of boredom. So, July and August contained plenty of fun. But, not as much as June had. No, not quite as much as that.

And, it was those days, at least in my case, that I thought about every year as May arrived and the end of the school year loomed. Those perfect, early June days when the weather was gorgeous, and the entire summer lay before us. And, on those days, even fall, my favorite season of all, wasn’t something I was much worried about. Yeah, I looked forward to the cooler weather and the holidays and football and all of that, but, even at six or seven, I got the fact that this, this, what we had right now, was pretty great, something to be enjoyed. Because, before we knew it, it would be over for another year. And, soon enough, for a lifetime.