From time to time, I have been called a weenie, a wimp, even a softie.
And from time to time, I have agreed with that assessment.
Sometimes that charge and my agreement have been made at the end of a long day of, for instance, cutting and splitting and stacking firewood when I have had to punch out while the other folks keep on doing their impression of the Energizer bunny. It didn’t really matter that I was 20 years older than everyone else; the crime was that I was the first to quit.
Same thing for getting up hay, the square-baled kind. I have been retired from that profession for some time now and do not miss it.
When such accusations as those come up, I find I have turned into my father and tell those smart-aleck 40-year-old lads some of what he used to say to me, as in, “Just wait; you’ll understand one day.”
He was right.
I do.
And so will they...one day.
And while my other two parents — Mother Nature and Father Time — have bailed out on me and left me with lousy joints, namely shoulders, knees and hips, I find lately there is another part of life where the “softie” description fits.
Granted, the physical part is a big part. When I was a younger man, I was somewhat strong. Had pretty decent biceps from splitting wood by hand and tossing hay and carrying 5-gallon buckets of water and lifting chicken legs and ham biscuits to my mouth. Then arthritis and several surgeries set in and a different song started playing. Today I can turn the pages of books showing pictures of young men splitting wood by hand and tossing hay; I can still, however, pick up a chicken leg or biscuit.
The other part of life I have begun to notice more often lately has to do with temperature — not mine but the weather’s. I do not do 90 degrees well at all. Period. And the funny thing — not funny “ha ha” but funny as in funny “interesting” — is that just like the wood splitting, at one time it never bothered me.
The last few days, with their 92 degrees and 411 percent humidity, have been a good example. And during those days, and similar ones, I have begun to look for reasons for my shortcoming and I think I have hit on a couple. Maybe you can identify with them, that is if you have similar issues.
One has to do with the fact I’m just getting older and have earned the right to fuss. One day I was having a conversation with my one of my brothers when I realized I was airing a long list of complaints. As I started listening to myself, I commented, “My soul; I’m turning into a grouchy old man.” To which he said, “What do you mean, turning?”
I immediately took him off my Christmas card list and struck him with my chicken leg and biscuit.
Another reason probably has to do with the fact there is more of me to cool than there once was. A trim 44-inch spare tire around the middle requires more cool air than a 36. The distance between those two is not just eight inches but also about 40 years.
But the biggest factor of all goes back even more than those 40 years. While I am grateful to Mr. Carrier for his air-cooling machine, we’ve gotten so used to air conditioning that without it many of us are a bunch of whining, grouchy folks getting older and working on a spare tire or already sporting one.
When I was a youngster (there’s that dreaded phrase again, the one I swore under my breath I’d never use when my parents trotted it out during my childhood days), we went for years without an air conditioner in our house or vehicle. Today’s generation may find it difficult to believe but at one time, air conditioners were an option — as in “costing more money” — on new cars. If you chose not to add an A/C to your ride, you could fall back on the old standard “4-50” air conditioner — four windows down while cruising 50 miles an hour.
And as for houses, ours or anybody else’s, you kept cool by throwing open all windows, preferably with screens on them, and maybe, just maybe, having a big ol’ box fan you could set in one window to blow air through the house if you had a long hall. If you didn’t have a long hall, the fan, sitting in the window of the room where your parents slept, was mostly an early version of the noise machines that folks use today to help babies go to sleep. One day my dad got a bonus in his paycheck and went out and bought another box fan which he installed in my room at the other end of the hall. From there, it would pull in warm air that was cool enough at night to make a difference.
Later, he evidently got another bonus and bought a 20,000-pound air conditioner window unit which I helped him install in the dining room window on the front of our house. It was a good thing on that day that I had begun to develop some arm muscles. Later, he found a smaller used one he put in the window in my bedroom where the fan had been and that was the end of sleeping with the windows open, except for the brief periods of spring and fall when it just felt so good to do so.
When we started shutting up the house so, as my father said, we weren’t “cooling the whole world,” several things happened. One is I started sleeping through the night without sweating. Secondly, by shutting the window I could no longer hear the bullfrogs on Wallace Farrell’s pond as I lay in bed listening to them and Jimmy Capps doing “Our Best to You” on WPTF, although I could still listen to the radio.
But mostly, and I think this may be a big part of the overall problem, I started turning into the softie I am today.
While I miss hearing the frogs, however, I think I’ll stick with the A/C.
Funny (interesting) what we get used to, isn’t it? The life lesson here, I think, is to be careful what you start to get used to; it may stick around a long time.
