Don't blow your brains out!

Old Coots know how to beat the heat!

Every time there is a hot spell a flock of “experts” swarm to the media to offer advice on keeping cool. Some are global warming advocates, trying to cut down on green house gasses. Some are good Samaritans, trying to make sure the elderly and the very young don’t suffer when the temperature soars. The cat and dog people step in with their advice too. Us old coots get a chuckle every time the weather advisors take the stage. Our society can’t deal with the environment anymore. We’ve been spoiled by air conditioning. It’s everywhere: in our cars, our homes and the places where we shop, dine and work. We’ve lost the ability to cope with summer. When we were kids in the good old days we got a drink from a hose, not from a bottle of chilled water from France. Our parents warned us when we did, “Be careful. Don’t blow your brains out!” Of course it never worked. We’d put the hose in our mouth and trust our friends to turn it on gradually. They never did; they always cranked it up full blast. It’s why my generation is so dumb. We blew our brains out getting a drink from a hose.

It was a lot harder keeping cool in those days. People didn’t have air conditioning in their houses or pools in their back yards, except for those metal framed, canvas, kiddy ones that were one-foot deep. We didn’t care that our legs hung over the side; we’d lie down in the tepid water and pretend we were swimming at the lake. It wasn’t too exciting but it cooled us off. It didn’t take much to entertain a bunch of kids who had blown their brains.We’d spend hours running around under the sprinkler and taking turns soaking each other with a hose, a pail of water or squirt guns, the kind that had to be refilled after about ten squirts. We would have killed for one of the half-gallon soakers that today’s kids have at their disposal. When we got older, we rode our bikes to one of the public pools. My favorite was the First Ward pool, the one behind the Ansco Film plant. It cost thirty-five cents to get in. If you turned in your locker key on the way out, you got a quarter back. Mine never made it past Lamb’s Ice Cream Parlor on Clinton Street.

You had to learn to sleep “hot” in those days. Sleeping “hot” was an art. You had to fluff up the sheet just right so it didn’t cling to your skin and you had to turn your pillow over every half hour to get to the cool side. You never fell into a deep sleep on a hot night in those days. You just made the best of it. I had a fan in my room, but only if I could sneak it up the stairs without my parents noticing. It was a "droner." It sounded like a small airplane coming in for a landing. The blades were metal and could nip off the end of your fingers if you weren’t careful. Those were the days before manufacturers were required to child proof everything. Those were the days when parents taught children to keep their fingers out of the fan. It was a wonderful device. The drone lulled me to sleep and the rotating mechanism alternated between cool blasts of air and dead still heat. It was the variety that made it feel so good.  

We may not have had air conditioning when I was a kid but we had something better, Kool-Aid. Nothing was quite as satisfying as a glass of frosty Kool-Aid on a dog day afternoon. Especially the way we made it, with a full cup of sugar, two if mom wasn’t watching. A lot of folks had a back porch in those days, the lucky ones, that is. It was a perfect place to slumber on a narrow cot or a hired man’s bed on a hot night. People bragged if they had a sleeping porch, like they do today if they have central air. We didn’t need “experts” to tell us how to cope with the weather. Ours was a self-reliant society. We even figured out that a hot drink on a sweltering day made us feel cooler. It didn’t take a scientist on TV with an anatomy chart to convince us. We didn’t watch the “Discovery” channel; we discovered things for ourselves. We didn’t complain about hot weather. It was what we waited for all winter. It’s why you see us old coots all over the place when the temperature heats up. We enjoy the heat. We don’t know any better; we blew our brains out getting a drink from a hose when we were kids!