Our AC Is Working (at last)

We've got our AC back! It had clunked off a few weeks ago, and although we have an annual service contract with an HVAC company we really like--and have used for decades--they were so jammed up with requests that it took a couple of weeks for a service tech to get out here.

Meanwhile, last week, we had a Warm One, and, lying upstairs, sweating in the dark, I was reminded of boyhood in the Southwest, in Oklahoma and Texas, where no one I knew had AC. It was, however, available in the movie theaters (adding to the attraction)--I remember the signs out front: IT'S COOL INSIDE!

I don't really remember seeing any penguins sitting near me in the old Sooner theater as I watched Hoot Gibson or Johnny Mack Brown or Bob Steele or those other B-movie cowboys on those Saturday mornings and afternoons, but I do remember the delight of escaping for a few hours the unforgiving Oklahoma heat.

There were definitely no penguins at our house. We had some standing fans downstairs, a few little desk fans here and there (they would rotate--back and forth), but on hot summer nights there was nothing we could really do but sweat and try to sleep.

When the weather first turned summer-hot, Mom would no longer use all the bedding for her, Dad, and her three sons. Just a bottom sheet. Nothing else--we needed nothing else. Windows wide open. All of us praying for a breeze.

Sometimes, Dad (and the neighbors, as well) would use the garden hose to water down the roof just before nighty-night, Steam rose.

Cars had no air-conditioning, either, though I remember that my grandfather Osborn, in his Hudson Hornet, had some kind of device in his window that seemed to help. It looked somewhat like the one below. Looks like some kind of James Bond weapon, doesn't it?

But we never had such a thing.

Joyce and I did not have air-conditioning in a car until the mid-1970s when we had one installed at Sears. It was all right--though it took up a lot of space and made some racket.

We did not have AC in our house until we got a window air-conditioner in the mid-1970s, Once, adjusting it in the window of our second-story bedroom, I carelessly allowed it to slip off its ledge and fall to the ground. Damn! I went down and got it, placed it (carefully) back in the window, turned it on ...

It worked!

We did not have full-house until the early 1980s.

And going to school in the Oklahoma spring and early fall? Brutal. All the windows fully raised, each breath of breeze as precious to us as to those long-ago sailors motionless in the doldrums.

When I began my own teaching career in the fall of 1966, there was no air-conditioning in our Aurora Middle School building--just large windows, which, on hot days I raised as high as they would go--and thought about Enid. Fortunately, my classroom was on the west side of the building, so if a breeze came, we got it

It was not until 1974, when the new Harmon Middle School opened, that I taught in a building with AC. But it often chose the hottest days of the year to take a nap. I kept a large floor fan in my room, selfishly aimed toward myself.

In the final years of my career, after I'd retired from public school teaching, I taught for ten more years at Western Reserve Academy, which lies only a few blocks from our house. (In most weather I walked or rode my bike.)

But the main classroom building had no air-conditioning--except in the administrative offices (just a coincidence I'm sure). So on hot days--more (hot) flashbacks to Enid, windows wide open, urging a vagrant breeze to wander our way. Sometimes teachers just gave up and took their classes outside, where the kids sat in the shade of a maple tree and pretended to pay attention.

So ... we'd had no AC for a few weeks here, and one of the things I'd forgotten about wide-open windows is how noisy it is, even on our relatively quiet street. People talking (loudly) on their front porch, dogs barking, pedestrians (some of them, uh, a bit affected by something they'd drunk) stumbling by, sharing words of wisdom (?) in voices loud enough to awaken a sleeping kraken, sirens, and those persistent birds that seemed determined to keep the sun here by screeching, determined (hours later) to awaken it with more of the same.

So ... when I switched that sucker on last night, closed the windows, heard the Sounds of Silence, felt, surging up through the system, breath cool enough to satisfy even a fussy penguin, I went to sleep almost immediately--and gratefully.