A story of summer heat

Since the heat is so much on my mind, after two straight days of 90-plus temperature and thunderstorms last night, let me tell you about one of my adventures in the heat.

When I was first married, we had no air-conditioning in our spacious Queens apartment. But we had pretty good cross-ventilation, and our first summer together was pretty mild, so we congratulated ourselves on roughing it and saving the cost of buying more appliances.

The next summer, however, there was a blistering heat spell. Sleeping at night bathed in our own sweat became old fast, our moods were dark and tempers frayed during the day. The only relief we had was when we went to our evening jobs at a law firm in an icebox of an office building.

For the weekend during this heat, my friend Ed invited me out to go rollerblading. His friend John was in town, and we would go down to Battery Park City, right next to the water, where there was bound to be a nice ocean breeze. I weighed my options: I could stay home in my apartment with the shades drawn and no breeze, sweltering, suffering with no energy or will to do anything, or I could go out and risk heatstroke from engaging in strenuous exercise with the hot sun bearing down on me. Oh, and did I mention that Saturday was forecast to be the hottest day of the heatspell, with temperatures possible reaching 100 degrees?

Well, I don't know how I spun it to Kristin, my then-wife, but I convinced her that I would be perfectly safe rollerblading with my friends. So off I went. To go with the festive mood of the outing, I wore my new Grateful Dead concert t-shirt that our friend Allyson had gotten for me, at what would prove to the be the Dead's last concert in Madison Square Garden before Jerry Garcia died. I met Ed and John and Ed's wife Ginny, and off we skated, down the westside of Manhattan to Battery Park City. The sun was brilliant, just scorching, but there was also a breeze, a hot breeze but the air was moving at least, and while we were skating, the heat didn't really make an impression on us. And we stopped frequently to just inhale large quantities of water and juice and such.

We skated all over, drenched in sweat and grime before long, climbing over hills and gliding down inclines. We stopped in the middle of the day at a restaurant in Chinatown, one with minimal air conditioning, and just gulped down glass after glass of water. The food's saltiness was just what we needed. After that rest, though we were all a little stiff, we put our skates back on and skated back to the westside pedestrian ramp, and skated back up to the upper Westside, before I left them to get on the subway home.

I must have been a sight when I got home. The Grateful Dead t-shirt had dirt and grime stains on it that would never come out. Kristin was furious that, in retrospect, I had put my life in danger. All I could do was shrug my shoulders. I felt fine, and experienced no ill effects from our skating expedition. And then two days later we gave in and bought a couple of air conditioners. A very civilized thing to do. And everywhere I lived since then, I have been very careful to make sure I spend the hottest days of summer chilling indoors. No use risking heatstroke.