Phoenix, what a hot, hot place we call home. Summer drags, stretched by the blistering heat so that by September, you no longer remember what cool is. Even if you leave the valley of the sun for cooler climates, when you return, it is still hot, and after a few days, it feels like it has always been a scorching heatwave. When the end of August rolls around, we start thinking, dreaming even, that we only have a few more weeks of this hot air that is so hot your eyes dry between blinks. It has to end soon; anyone who has lived through a few Arizona summers knows that after the first week in September if the temps are still over 100 (40 Celsius), things will get ugly as it appears that tempers boil over along with the mercury.
An interesting summer phenomenon here in Arizona is the carbecue. I heard this description one afternoon on some forgotten early summer day as a radio personality described the season’s first car fire – a carbecue. These flaming cars burn heavily black and nearly sink through the asphalt they burn on. Passing a carbecue is no fun task either as you can’t help but wonder, when does the gas tank explode?
Not as interesting but a very real problem is that of getting into a car that has been parked in the sun for more than 15 minutes with closed windows. God help you if you have leather seats and are wearing shorts. You wouldn’t believe that old cow skin could have thermal qualities that can blister your posterior. Or try driving with pinky fingers because the steering wheel has become a drooping molten torture instrument used to burn the palms of sinners. Shopping in the heat is also problematic. Thirty minutes in a hot parking lot when it’s 114 degrees (46 Celsius) and your car will be over 195 degrees (92 Celsius) when you return – do not put the eggs on the seats. With the air conditioning blowing full blast, you still cannot be comfortable that the cheese you just bought isn’t sweating, that the raspberries aren’t wilting, and if soy milk could curdle, it would be well on its way to cottage cheese.
Ceiling fans, floor fans, small desk fans, fans on computer components, heavy curtains, and the air conditioning blowing, it is still hot inside our homes. Although the temperature inside would be considered comfortable in any other part of the world, the outside seems to radiate a kind of heat particles that are carried through the walls by invisible gnomes who race around you, making you sweat in a 77-degree room (25 Celsius).
Trying to find peace, er, coolness, I change into shorts and settle down in front of my monitor. You would think I would have learned by now, but my attention to the screen and inattention to my derriere comes with a price. After sitting in a leather chair for 20 minutes, I get so stuck to the surface that no doctor has ever removed a bandage, no kid has ever removed the masking tape from their hair, and no woman who gets that Brazil thing will know the pain of trying to peel both thighs from the flypaper of a chair that has glued itself to my lower side with the power of stickiness only equaled by those urban legends of people freezing their tongues to a frozen metal pole. After prying myself free, I know I won’t let that happen again, at least for the next 10 minutes. Caroline laughs at me from her cloth chair.
It is 10:30 p.m. here in Phoenix, Arizona now and it is still 96 degrees (36 Celsius). Tomorrow, we expect 109, and the ten-day forecast says we will stay over 100. We started a week ago with the old song, “Why are we living here? Next year, we’ll be in Oregon, or Washington, or…”. Time for a cold drink.