We were leaving a high school play that I had directed, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Lottery,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by Shirley Jackson. It was exactly this time of year, and the weather conditions were identical to what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s happening tonight: chimneys blowing over, fences being uprooted, animals shivering.<\/p>\n
As I was leaving the school, I saw the wife of one of my fellow teachers at Cuba High School make a dash that would have been the envy of our football coach at the time. But instead of a pigskin, Ida was carrying a child in her arms. She might also have been carrying a baby the other way, but I noticed only the child, about 2 years old.<\/p>\n
She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d made sure her husband prewarmed the car and unlocked it for her 20-yard sprint: she didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want the child to inhale one molecule of that beastly cold night air, and she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d insisted that the interior of their car be roasting for her arrival with babe in arms. By the time they got home, minutes later, they went through the same ritual: make sure the home furnace is roaring, and have six dozen blankets at the ready when she enters the house.<\/p>\n
Now that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not much of an exaggeration. Months later, when I discussed Ida\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cold-is-evil, hot-is-great performance, she tried to convince me of all the evils visited on people in the cold.<\/p>\n
It was an interesting discussion, one in which I was not allowed to give even a slightly contrary view. I listened to her spiel, which took me back to my own childhood in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
Now I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve always been a cool-weather person, one who dresses lightly, who sweats it out when the temperature goes above 75, and whose empathetic nature knows no bounds. So let me explain that coined expression and then go on to my superheated self.<\/p>\n
I like to read books about actual events. One true account is Jon Krakauer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Into Thin Air,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d about a disaster on Mount Everest. Another is the story of the Donner Party, whose expedition across the Sierra Nevadas in 1846 resulted in cannibalism and starvation. What do these two have in common? Well, they deal with freezing temperatures. As I read such accounts, I am able to empathize with the subjects and have been known to slip on a sweater or jacket in my identifying with the characters.<\/p>\n
The opposite will never happen. I will not subject myself to a book of ordeals people undergo when lost in the desert.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Lawrence of Arabia\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is simply not my style. Within minutes of digging into that kind of book, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d assuredly begin to perspire. And I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like sweating things out. Remember, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a cool-house plant.<\/p>\n
Having watched my many nieces and nephews being raised, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve become aware of how important it is for others to keep the young-uns warm. But why not cool? Can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a baby in bunting be even more uncomfortable when wrapped in too may layers?<\/p>\n
As a product of my mom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s-triple-bag-everybody child-raising philosophy, I recall being sent to school with, among other things, an undershirt, a thick shirt over that, and a sweat-shirt around that. The coat \u00e2\u20ac\u201d we called it a borreguera \u00e2\u20ac\u201d consisted of a thick wool outfit Mom required us to wear on the way to school, but which I would shed once I turned the corner at Orlando Marquez\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s store on Grand, on the way to Immaculate Conception School.<\/p>\n
All right! Maybe Mom made her point in the days when we walked to school and needed to trudge through a foot of snow, uphill. I.C. School, by the way, never called off classes. I believe I was also culpable in losing a heavy coat or two.<\/p>\n
But what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a kid to do when our homeroom teacher, Sister Mary Aguas Calientes, ordered all of us sniffling fourth-graders to stack our coats in a pile in the corner of the room, and some more-needy classmate accidentally makes off with my coat?<\/p>\n
As she aged and mellowed, Mom became slightly less vigilant about our attire; we still needed to wear three layers, but the heavy coat now was optional. And that was in August.<\/p>\n
This week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s weather has been reminiscent of the times we had in my youth. Some people may have noticed that I often wear walking shorts downtown and even to church. My neighbor, James Sandoval, I suspect, waits until the first snowfall to put on his walking shorts, a sort of defiance of the elements. And Jonathan Moore, of Dick\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, tends to wear walking shorts almost year-round. We exchange comments when we meet, usually to the effect that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re trying to change the weather by defying.<\/p>\n
As we go through days in which the mercury dips to below freezing, I secretly admire some of the hombres in this town who wear shorts and the flimsiest of undershirts or jerseys around town. I envy them from a distance, as the dress code at my work is a bit stricter.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, as we drove through Cuba just a few months ago, to survey the place where Bonnie and I spent three great years, I thought about some of my students of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s and wondered whether we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d run in to any of them.<\/p>\n
And I thought of Ida and wondered whether she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d passed on some of her warm-\u00e2\u20ac\u2122em-up techniques to any of her offspring, who in turn would teach Ida\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s grandkids how to roast.<\/p>\n
As I write this, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m aware that as people age, they generally become more sensitive to the cold. A trip to visit Mom and Dad, when they were still with us, invariably included at least one trip by Dad to the thermostat, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to make sure everyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nice and toasty.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We were leaving a high school play that I had directed, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Lottery,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by Shirley Jackson. It was exactly this time of year, and the weather conditions were identical to what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s happening tonight: chimneys blowing over, fences being uprooted, animals shivering. As I was leaving the school, I saw the wife of one of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1150,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions\/1150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}