It’s hot as hell.
I mean, damn near. Which causes me to question, how folks in “other” countries do this. I mean, we don’t have flies in the eye crevices kind of thing (not to poke fun, but seriously, we don’t) and so why am I nearly dragging myself from air conditioned point A to B, particularly during my un-air-conditioned moments (which last approximately 3 minutes at most) so painfully.
When it gets hot like this, and its been in the upper 90s with a ridic amount of humidity for days (save me), I get worried about black outs/brown outs and just not having any damn access to the AC. And less for me than my parents.
This fear is a lot less superficial than it sounds. I’m not (necessarily) worried about getting hot, or my daughter or boo sweating it out, but my parents. My father is a macho man. I’m sure even if he woke up one day on the tippiest top of the sun he’d not say a damn thing about it being hot. He’d probably just say, Boston drawl drawling: Whaddya-gonnnnna-do. Ehhhh? And he’d be right. Nothing.
But I remember when my mom was, for the first time in my life hospitalized. It was the summer before 5th grade. We’d received her “summons” letter that essentially said, hi, you’ve been abusing your kid. We have concluded you’re mental. It be best for you to come in, stay here, and said kid will live elsewhere. It was hot that day too. Or I was. Whichever.
So we walked the 1.3 miles south-west to what was then Mass Mental. I was sweating. We left our two cats Kitten (Pepper as her gov’t name) and Lady (she was my fav). Mummi was admitted and I became a temporary ward of the state. Hot.
Fast forward two weeks. I stop bed-wetting. My grandmother’s AC hits me perfectly from my new spot on the couch. A light bulb goes off when the dust in my 9 year old mind starts to settle: My cats!
Anxiety is reintroduced.
I quake, nearly sieze. I need to get my cats out of the apartment, get them fed, watered. It will ruin my mother. They were my only friends, hers. Our only “things”. Forces rally slowly. We return to Huntington Avenue. We walk up the two steep flights. My father enters first, solemnly as if he’s (again) failed me. Motions authoritatively, the way a man who is 6’5 can, that I should remain outside. I push past him. Hell, I’m 9 and I love my cats. I expect them to be dead, both from lack of love as much as air, lack of food, lack of human everything for more than 2 weeks.
I find two skinny love starved cats. Alive. One with a dry tongue and a pronounced ribcage. The other looking bright and strangely ok. Kitten (Pepper) was industrious.
I don’t know what to extract from this memory. But I have lived with a life-time of fear of things dying when I no longer see them. Fear of letting my mother down. Fear of things/family/pets feeling unloved when I can’t be present to say, hey: I love you/ need you/ want you to thrive.
I also hate when it gets too hot, but I am, after all, a New Englander.
Which leads me to today, and an impromptu prayer to the AC God.
Dear (AC) God,
Do not let there be a brown-out in Boston proper, (Back Bay). I don’t want Mummi or Lyman to get hot. I love them. Please send it to Concord instead. Uberbia can handle it.
XOXO,
DMR.
Fingers crossed it works.
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