IT”S SO HOT…

A dog was chasing a cat down the street and they were walking!

And so it has been very hot in New York and the Eastern Seaboard. It is something that makes me crazy, and along with the humidity is the real reason that I hate the summer. Why do we need humidity anyway? The heat is not so bad, but what does the humidity do for Mother Nature?

It was at a miniature golf course on a brutally hot day once, when I saw a father with 3 kids. "Who’s winning?" I asked cheerfully. "I am" said one "no, I am" said another. "No," the father said: "their mother is!"

If you live in the city, where an apartment house is called home, then you are probably the most miserable anyone can get, unless you have central air. For years as a child, growing up in Brooklyn, we lived on the top floor of a building with a flat roof, and on days where the heat and humidity went through the roof, you simply died or got out of the building. We couldn’t afford air conditioning, so we would sleep on the linoleum floor to get some kind of coolness and relief! It got so hot the tap water was giving hot water on both the hot and cold!

We used to have a fire hydrant, or as it was called in Brooklyn a “Johnny pump’ in front of the apartment building. When it got this bad, someone would get a huge wrench and open up the spout, and then the neighbor kids would come and we would find relief until the cops or fire departments came to close it off.

Recently while in the city, I was amazed at the attire some of the girls were almost wearing! Stepping onto the street in the sun, the heat rose from the concrete sidewalk and seemed to take our breath away. If you dared go into the subways, the heat and humidity hung on you, and you felt that you had just finished doing heavy labor or had run a mile in heavy coats. Oppressive. It would stay that way until December, as it had no way to escape, but it always found a way to get into the subways immediately! If I had a business meeting when I was working in the city, wearing a suit was a terrible waste of sanity, going through the subway in a non-air conditioning train, sweating through your clothes, water rushing down your face from the crown of your head, made for a cranky art director by the time he got to the meeting. Then you would hit your building or meeting place and the air-conditioning would greet you with a shock, as a chill would then go up and down your spine.

One year I was in Palm Springs California, and made the mistake of being there in the early summer. The temperature was 112 degrees, but there was no humidity. Walking to the pool from my rented apartment without shoes, I immediately had blisters under my feet! The pool water offered absolutely no relief that I had to get out of it to get relief!

What I find the worst is I don’t feel like eating, or moving, in fact I don’t even feel like thinking and my attention span along with my patience is very short in hot and humid weather! I always loved the winter, to me the cold allows me to become invigorated, and willing to do things, as my ambition level rises to all time highs!  

But what am I complaining about, I’m going into my pool, see ya!