Heat

Weather Forecast: Fat Men in Tank Tops

/ cigarman501 / 7 Comments

“I hate dressing. I hate the heat. I hate sweaty people getting aggressively close to you when you’re walking down the street.” – Johnny Weir

The temperature is climbing and will touch ninety if the weather liars are to be believed. I don’t need the weather liars to tell me that the humidity is climbing toward ninety too. The air will feel like triple digits they say. The air is not mid-July or August heavy but if the air were a human it could stand to lose a few pounds. So could the guy in the pea green tank top.

Hot and humid weather brings them out like darkness draws cockroaches. Industrial sized men in cargo pants that reach below their knees, flip-flops, and tank tops they have not only grown into but have grown well beyond.

Anyone who knows me, or sees the way I dress, knows that I’m not a fashion snob but I do own a mirror. I sometimes wear cargo shorts that hit just below the knees, but I never wear flips or slides outside of the house. My toes are in too bad a shape to subject people to that. Looking at my toes the descriptor “gagger” comes to mind.

Tank tops? Never have I ever. Why? Again, I own a mirror. As the ravages of age have befallen me, I don’t even like to wear short sleeves. Since a 2006 heart attack, my weight has remained a somewhat constant one-eighty, down from two thirty-two the day of the event. I’d like to weigh my all-time low of one sixty-eight, but that all-time low may be a mirage.

While my weight has remained constant, my body has changed. I blame my abhorrence of strength training. My chest has fallen into ass and my arms have shriveled. Think of a potato with twigs for arms. I should rethink the mirror thing.

I wish Mr. Pea Green Tank Top had been a mirage that dissipated rapidly. Instead, he picked a table directly in line with my line of sight and began to scratch an underarm featuring underarm hair that reminded me of one of Star Trek’s Tribbles.

He was like watching a train wreck you could not avert your eyes from. A pie shaped, very florid face with thin hair above, sweat plastered to his forehead. His triple chin sat atop a tank top stretched to a breaking point and a chest that should have featured his wife’s bra.

For a moment I mentally applauded his fashion confidence…just not his fashion sense. This was a man comfortable with his considerable heft and was displaying it proudly. I’m sure had he known what I was thinking, he would have exclaimed, “Kiss my porcine ass cheeks, I’ll wear what I want. If you don’t like it eat somewhere else.”  

He would be correct in his thinking. It is none of my business how others dress but I found that my appetite for a fish taco had waned. For some reason, the fish didn’t taste as good. Maybe I am a fashion snob.

I was also reminded of an industrial sized friend who asked a young lady out on a date. The object of his desire asked, “Why should I go out with you?” His answer was, “I don’t sweat much for a fat guy.” She liked his sense of humor, went out with him and they have been happily married for several decades.

If I have offended anyone, let me reiterate. I am not fat or health shaming him. I am questioning his fashion choice…I am also questioning an eating establishment that doesn’t feature a tank top banning to go with “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”

Don Miller’s author’s page may be found at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Don-Miller/author/B018IT38GM?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

“Lawd Have Mercy…I’m Gonna Melt”

/ cigarman501 / 7 Comments

“By July, a damp Southern heat had settled down on the town like warm sweet syrup.” ― Marti Healy

Lawd, it is July early, just a few days past the Fourth, and it is already hotter than new asphalt laid down in August. It’s a still heat…nay it is stagnant. It hangs like a heavy curtain. I imagine being wrapped in a wet, wool blanket and forced to sit in a sauna. I just took a shower after an early morning fitness walk, and I don’t know why I took the time to dry off.

It is a silent heat. The birds aren’t singing or flying about. The only movement I detect is the swarm of mosquitoes chasing a swarm of gnats. I just mentioned three of the five most hated things about summer in the South. The other two? Stinging critters and the humidity.

According to biology, sweat evaporation is necessary to keep the body cool. It ain’t working. I’m sweating gallons but the humidity is so high the perspiration drips from my nose and runs downhill into my shoes.

My mind wanders to a hot, midday August practice. Football in the South, gotta love it. The player was an industrial sized defensive lineman dragging himself through whatever hell I was having him do.

As I watched him huff and puff, I asked, “Are you okay?”

The young man didn’t even look up, “Coach, I’m okay, I’ve just dyin’ of heat castration.”

I knew better than to ask but I did, “What exactly is heat castration.”

“Coach, when it’s so hot I’m sweating my balls off.”

It is as still as the inside of a coffin and I’m not moving fast enough to create a breeze. Southern authors might describe the heat as “sultry.” No, Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat was sultry. I’m sitting on the hot tin roof without her. (For those not old enough, Elizabeth Taylor starred in the movie “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” She is referred to as Maggie the Cat by her husband, portrayed by Paul Newman.)

Elizabeth Taylor making a slip look “sultry”

I think our Southern summers are trying to kill us. I need to cut my grass. I walked out before checking the temperature on my phone’s weather app. After I got outside, I no longer needed to check it. “Lawd, I’m gonna burst into flames.”

I decided the grass could wait. After checking the daily forecasts, cutting might have to wait until October. The heat index, what hell feels like to the skin, is 105.

I have grown fat and soft. The heat didn’t bother me as it rippled the air over the corn, cotton, and hay fields of my youth causing heat mirages to form over the fields. Well…it bothered me, but I didn’t let it stop me…I wasn’t allowed to let it stop me. That is not the case now. It stops me dead in my tracks.

I live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. It is cooler here than the rest of the state. I don’t know how people live in the midlands. Orangeburg is located just south of Columbia and just above hell. Living there must feel like living on the top of a double boiler.

Before you folk living in Texas, Arizona, and Death Valley, California, chime in, heat and humidity are relative to where you live. You live there, I live here and I’m sweating like a sporting lady sitting in the front row of a church.

As a young church goer, I remember sitting through summer sermons in our unairconditioned church. Tall windows open for wasp to fly in but are catching little of a nonexistent breeze. If there was a breeze it always seemed superheated as if from a blast furnace. On a particularly hot day, our stoic minister recorded what had to be the shortest sermon of all time. “If you think it is hot now, just wait. Mend your ways or suffer hellfire. Benediction please!”

Overdressed women with funeral home fans frantically trying to move the air. Overdressed men in suitcoats sitting stoically as perspiration pooled in their underwear. The women’s movements create more heat than the heat they dissipate. My own perspiration caused my shirt to stick to the varnished pews.

Summer may be trying to kill us, but we wear our sweat stains like a badge of honor and produce creative and colorful ways to describe it. “Hotter than a blister bug in a pepper patch” and it’s close kin, “Hotter than a goat’s ass in a pepper patch.”  “Hotter than the devil’s housecat,” and my all-time favorite, “Hotter than two rats screwing in a wool sock.”

Blister Bug (Beetle) One of 7500 different varieties that cause painful blisters. Not nearly as sultry as Liz Taylor.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Eugene Walter, “Summer in the deep South is not only a season, a climate, it’s a dimension. Floating in it, one must be either proud or submerged.” Proud to be submerged in what must be a vat of very warm molasses.

Still, without the summer there would be no scents of honeysuckle mixing with jasmine and gardenias. There would be no lightning bugs, no lonesome call of the whippoorwill, no blue tailed skink living on my back porch. There would be no watching dragonflies chase each other over the cooling waters of the local lake.

There would be no anticipation of rain from the tree frogs, their croaking rising with the late evening breeze and the distant display of heat lightning. If fortunate, the blessed cool after a thunderstorm and the smell of ozone in the air.

There would be no tomato sandwiches and corn on the cob roasting on a grill. There would be no smell of BBQ slow cooking in a smoker…well, you can slow cook pork in the winter too, but winter tomatoes are God awful.

Summer might be trying to kill us, but it gives us sustenance, not physically but emotionally. We are all proud survivors…until we are not and in the South the dead don’t quite stay dead. I wonder if the ghosts of our past sweat as much as we do.

Don Miller writes at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR1M-GLJxRmzg_d2txgswxw3AvY26zxoXZH02axPJ0gJN3Kn77lEDX79vPY

Summers Now Past

/ cigarman501 / 4 Comments

Or when I reaized Peter Pan had died.

My best summers are behind me not ahead.  If memory serves me, my best summers ended when my hand could reach around the end of a hoe handle or I became strong enough to heft a square bale of hay and toss it onto the back of a flatbed truck.  It certainly ended the summer I walked into the den of heat and noise that was Springs Mills.  Peter Pan died that day.  Despite my best efforts I had grown up.

The last day of school before the summer break.  Elementary school kids squirming in their seats waiting to cast off the chains of their forced imprisonment.  “I’m free, I’m free!”  And just like that, it was September again.

No more Tonka toys and little green soldiers in a sandy ditch.  No more corn cob fights with Mickey and Donnie Ray around the barn. No more playing war in red clay banks around the cornfield.  Fewer trips to the river to check trotlines or intently watching a bobber while praying for a bit of a nibble just to let me know something was down there.

Ode to youth now past.

Here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge a high-pressure dome is making life unbearable.  Hot, hot, hot.  Humid, humid, humid…but no rain.  Hotter than two mice mating in a wool sock and even the devil is bitching about the humidity.  Despite the humidity and the thunder that rumbled around yesterday, my garden is dryer than a popcorn fart.

There is something about the heat and humidity that brings the memories back.  I question how I survived without air conditioning but somehow, I did.  Tall screenless windows at school, perspiration dripping on notebook paper as I practice my letters.  A wasp flies through the window causing a momentary lull in the activities.

No reprieve at home or at church on Sunday.  Humidity and heat causing my shirt to stick to the lacquered seatback.  Ladies in pillbox hats, gloves, and long sleeves fanning as if their lives depend on it, and it may have.  Men in suits and ties sitting stoically in their own perspiration.  The minister announces with a thump of his Bible, “If you think it’s hot now…just wait.  Benediction please.”

As I remembered, my back was bent toward the ground as I straddled the short row of beans.  Perspiration ran down my nose and was soaked up by the dusty soil underneath me as the rivulets landed with a plop.  My sweat ran like the Catawba River during the rainy season when my revelation occurred.  I was thinking of a simpler time.  In my mind my grandmother is beside me, both of us straddling a row, the sweat running down both our noses.

Summer was the time to make hay while the sun shone…tomatoes, beans, squash, okra, watermelons, and corn too.  The sun shone hotly and pulled the moisture into the air encapsulating me in what seemed like a wet, wool blanket.  Hot, moist sun-heated air.  Squash and cucumbers wilting, corn stalk leaves drooping in the afternoon heat…humans wilting and drooping as if they were plants.

As I shift briefly to the present, I realize, there will be good Summers ahead…they will just be different.  Miller Kate and Noli cavorting, splashing in the pool remind me of their mother searching for crawdads and salamanders in the stream by the house.  A memory that brings the smile to my face.  It is about their memories and dreams now.  Mine are still focused on the past.

I remember the welcomed afternoon thunderstorms.  The smell of ozone heralding the cooling winds to come…a few minutes of chill until the sun returned…heat and humidity with it.  Storm clouds outlining the distant water tower in Waxhaw to the east, the western sun reflects off of the tower and makes the thunderheads seem ominous.

My grandmother’s admonishment, “Don’t stand in the draft you might get hit by lightning” or “Get away from the sink!  Lightning will fry you like fatback.”  Needless to say, nothing electrical was turned on especially the TV.  Lightning strikes were worrisome on her hilltop if the lightning rods on the hip roof of my grandmother’s house were to be believed.

Despite sitting in a low ‘holler’, the transformer down the river road from my house was hit a few times and I remember mini lightning flashes jumping between the telephone and the lights over the kitchen bar.  Probably shouldn’t answer the phone.

Ball jars filled with water and wrapped in newspaper to keep it cool.  It didn’t work.  Water was welcomed even warm.  There were times I would have sucked the water from a mud puddle if I could have found one.  Those transcontinental rows of corn that needed to be hoed or forty ‘leven thousand hay bales to toss and stack.  There is nothing much hotter than corn, hay, or cotton fields during July and August.

Inside the relative cool of a non-airconditioned kitchen, sweet Southern iced tea, or a glass of chilled buttermilk, helped to quench your thirst.  Drops of condensation succumbing to gravity on the side of an iced jelly glass…Sylvester the Cat staring back at me, a huge grin on his face.  He knew how much I enjoyed the tea and the peanut butter cookie that accompanied it.  

Late in the harvest season, a watermelon might be picked and put in a nearby stream to cool.  Maybe a ripe tomato or two.  Late afternoons we would crack open the bounty and fight off the horse flies as watermelon juice mixed with the sweat and dripped from our fingers and faces.

In this new timeline, I think about cracking open the Tanqueray and adding some tonic and lime.  What? We have no lime?  Wait! Ah, I found one.

I stare out of my French Doors wondering if I really want to leave the air conditioning to cut grass or pick beans…or do anything else…  How did I get so old?  I also know that the extra piece of watermelon I want to eat will add at least two trips to the bathroom during the night.

I once had an old man tell me the problem with getting old.  “Young man, you know what is bad about gettin’ old?”  I think I was fifty at the time.  In his overalls with a fedora pushed back on his head, he answered the question I had not asked, “There are no dreams left for old men.”

I thought I knew what he meant.  Dreams of love, or an unreasonable facsimile. Getting ahead in the world, earning triumphs and victories, winning another state championship, and overcoming the disappointments of being close but no cigar.

The old man was correct.  There are no pursuits of state championships any more but I would edit his comment.  “There are no young man’s dreams but there are dreams.”

Dreams of a different time when Peter Pan was still alive.  Dreams of summers without a care in the world…a time when I knew I never wanted to grow up…but yet I did.

Still, I shan’t be sad.  There will be good summers ahead as long as my sun continues to rise.  I won’t dream only of the past.  Even dreams must change with time.

***+

The image is of a summer sunset from Pixabay and found on The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Don Miller’s author’s page may be found at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR3YwCXc-tSERSihnz93ceDKB3PzxGIYX3lVWrJx3-mYmPV89rNT4j7PvxA.

Deafening Silence

/ cigarman501 / 2 Comments

 

I’ve been outside three times this morning…and it’s not yet seven-thirty.  The puppies woke me way too early.

I am troubled by the silence…the sounds I don’t hear.  I seem to be drawn to the quiet like a moth to a flame.  Everything is muted, even the vehicles climbing up the grade toward Hendersonville.

I don’t understand the silence and I am a bit disturbed.  Usually, the birds and bees are active by this time, chirping and buzzing.  But nothing is moving…just the toad that keeps trying to find a way into my house and the mosquito he must be chasing.

I don’t really mind the toad and admire his persistence.  I wish he would nab the mosquito. The blind puppy dogs seem to mind, picking up his scent and leading me to his location.  Waiting patiently for their “good dog” treats after I remove the interloper to his normal habitat.   Where is that damn mosquito?

Now I am looking at the bird feeders and they are not attracting any kind of activity…squirrels included.  I squint into the pre-dawn light to see if they were emptied during the night.

Did some spaceship descend from the heavens and abduct my wildlife deciding they didn’t need my toad?  I’ve seen too many end of the world movies.

My murder of crows has been quite active recently but not this morning.  Why I wonder?  Why are gatherings of crows called murders?  As I ponder, I realize I really have seen too many horror movies and am crazy as a loon.

It is as if the very air is absorbing sound.  Not a leaf moving.  The citronella torches I just lit are burning straight up, reaching toward heaven.  The heavily scented smoke defies gravity, swirling neither left or right as it disappears toward space.

It has been hot and dry…for us.  I think that makes us all crazy…wildlife included.  Mid-nineties in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.  Pre-dawn has become after dawn and there is no dew on the grass at all.  We need rain badly and a break from the heat.  It is as if the wildlife has already hunkered down in a cool place for the day.  Maybe that’s why the toad continues to break and enter.

Maybe it just my diminished hearing or my increasingly bad mood.  I find myself anxious and a bit depressed.  Am I depressed because of…or is because of why I am depressed?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if I even make sense.

What I do know is the silence is as oppressive as the building humidity and heat.

According to the local weather guru, there is hope on the horizon.  Rain chances increase late in the week.  Nothing for sure…just like life.  Maybe what rain we do get will wash away the silence…or maybe I should get off my ass and make some noise.

The featured image from https://dahni.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/words-matter/

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Or his author’s page at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM