I’m lying on a turned-inside-out sleeping bag (the slick outer side feels better in hot weather) on an old couch cushion on the floor in my 1961 Spartan-Imperial-Mansion travel trailer. The box fan is blowing and I don’t have clothes on so it is not uncomfortable.
It’s midnight on what is statistically likely to be one of the hottest days of the year.
Today the usual family gang got together for Amy’s birthday.
However, some things were strange about this particular get together that made it oddly superior to many of those which have preceded it.
When I arrived, all the others were eating chips and drinking cold drinks, however, not inside in air-conditioning as one would expect, but outside in the heat. The temperature was in the mid nineties and faces were glistening and yet no one was complaining.
Everyone seemed so content that I didn’t think to mention the oddness of their sitting outside on a hot day in July. Ceiling fans were rotating and there were steady breezes, sometimes tossing napkins about. Could it be that after fifty years of ac people are beginning to readjust to the heat?
There was too-loud music playing so I had it turned off, but that didn’t turn off the traffic noise from Interstate 20 which was clearly visible in the near distance.
Someone informed me that there had not been space for us inside.
I joked about the ambience, pretending that it compared favorably with an outdoor meal some of us could remember when we had celebrated my 25th birthday overlooking Lake Constance in Switzerland over three decades past.
In contrast to the quiet elegance of that long ago meal when, as we were eating, a ship had passed nearby from which we could hear the strains of a band playing waltzes, these surroundings were more like some dystopian industrial or post apocalypse experience. Today we were paying to eat in the heat while being entertained by traffic noise.
It was a success.
We ate and talked and then regrouped and talked and talked until, finally, our food having settled somewhat, we felt the need, like some African tribe, to arise and make our separate ways back to our individual huts where our digestions would continue.
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