No: It’s not about the 1963 hit song by Martha and the Vandellas. A walk about the neighborhood in the early afternoon is something that only the hardiest among us can safely undertake. It is hot outside. As I write this, the temperature in Indianapolis is 90 degrees. With the humidity, the heat index makes us feel as if we are wading through 92 degrees. And we are promised at least 96 degrees before the end of the weekend. In the third week of July, Texas and Oklahoma reported record high temperatures of 115 degrees; 28 states issued extreme weather alerts as temperatures soared across the nation. In the U.K., where summertime temperatures rarely reach 86 degrees, 104-degree temperatures were recorded “for the first time in history.” That’s some hot stuff.
The second office I managed as a loan officer for a lending company was in Madera, California. I visited the office before my bride and child came to live in the town, and the residents had some valuable information for me. “It gets up to 108 degrees here,” I was told, “but there is almost no humidity. You won’t know you’re too hot until you drop dead.” That rather dramatic characterization of the dangers of the area’s heat impressed me so much that I drank gallons of water every day just in case the weather heated up.
I’ve often told people that I prefer hot weather to cold weather. I grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, where the average wintertime snowfall was 95 feet. (It seemed.) I could never put on enough clothing to stay warm on my walks to school. (School bus? What school bus?) The hilly streets provided icy adventures for fashion-conscious young men (me) who wore leather soled shoes and full-length leather coats. If you slipped at the top of an icy hill, your coat became a toboggan that would rocket you screaming to the bottom of the hill. Five years after my graduation from high school, I headed for the warmth of other suns, in Los Angeles, California. When a job transfer brought me to the Midwest in 1978, someone I met in New Albany, Indiana invited me to go skiing at Paoli Peaks. I asked why I would go to snow and cold on purpose.
In July 2008, I spent three weeks with my good friend in Clearwater Beach, Florida; she was a schoolteacher for whom school was still in session. I was newly freed of employment so, while she taught in air-conditioned comfort, I roamed the beaches and baked in the sun any time I left the cool bars and pool tables. That was the hottest three weeks of my life, even hotter than Madera. And since the ocean was within walking distance of her front door, the humidity was monstrous.
I interrupted my writing of this column to take a walk. It was 73 degrees when I started out, and 40 minutes later, it was 75. The heat is projected to climb to the 96-degree mark, which has me reconsidering my “heat versus cold” outlook. Maybe we can have a little of both, mixed in a way that provides us with a more temperate environment. As Goldilocks said as she tasted the third of the three bowls of porridge she found at the house of the three bears, “Not too hot and not too cold: Just right.” (Or in the possible words of Cassidy Hutchinson, “She said something to the effect of, ‘the porridge was … just right.’”
But as the St. Louis rapper Nelly sang, “It’s hot in herre …”
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