Steve (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} thesportinglife) wrote,@ 2003-07-24 12:51:00 |
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Hot fun in the summertime
Atlantans awoke today to a temperature of 63 degrees. On July 24. A month into the sun's annual personal Dixie barbecue known as summer. The high today is expected to reach only 85, with low humidity.
I can't remember another summer as pleasant as this one in my entire life. It would take two weeks of 90-degree temps in late September to erase the memory of these days.
Because, in the South, the summer is different from the one in Country Time Lemonade commercials. You know the ones -- couples strolling leisurely in golden meadows and kids floating down rivers so quiet that everyone is dozing in their innertubes.
I often found myself wondering, Is this drink marketed to Martians? I could only assume so, since no summer in my life had looked like the vignettes of those ads.
Where I'm from, the heat is so intense that the vegetation looks if not scorched then at least as beaten down by the sun as a farmer returning from a day in the field. And I assure you mosquitoes and lurking water moccasins keep a person occupied enough out on the water to prevent any siestas.
Growing up, I assumed the experience was similar for everyone else. Summer in the South wasn't so much about enjoying as enduring. At least for me it was and, for the most part, still is.
On my first day of fifth grade, when students still had to wear pants and my alma mater hadn't yet been retrofitted with air conditioning, the eccentric old woman teaching my math class, with a circulatory system equivalent to Atlanta's storm drains, didn't see a need for opening windows or turning her box fan to any setting other than "low." Some 20 minutes into her class, I keeled over from the heat. Thanks, Mrs. Millican.
It doesn't help matters that I'm what you might call pigment-challenged. My skin knows only three conditions: white, blistered or peeling.
The only time I ever tanned was two years ago, when my friend Tammy, a sun worshipper, swore up and down that five to 10 minutes a day in a tanning bed for a couple of weeks would give me the "base" I needed. She was right. But it also gave me, in addition to a nice hue, the base I needed to form a couple of moles at the base of my neck. End of experiment.
Of course, as the saying goes, more times than not, it isn't the heat that gets you but the humidity.
A couple of summers ago, I played golf on a lighted par-three course south of the city at 9:30 at night. So much sweat streamed from my arms and onto my palms that my club twisted mid-swing on every attempt, sending the ball on an even worse trajectory than my dry hands would've delivered.
But years earlier, I began putting together clues that maybe things really were different elsewhere. Maybe even on this planet.
The first indication was the J. Crew spring/summer catalog. During college, the dang things just kept showing up in your mailbox when you least expected, like literature from a Jehovah's Witness. So the sight of people wearing long sleeves -- sweaters, even -- was nothing short of comical to me and my fellow Southerners. Who are these people?, we would ask each other.
These models, who we were convinced were on the brink of heatstroke during the photo shoot, standing out in the summer sun, often on or near the water, would bring back memories of high-school freshmen football players wearing their new lettermen jackets during the first week of school.
It didn't matter that it was August in the South, where summer begins somewhere around Memorial Day and concludes on Halloween. It didn't matter that sweat-soaked leather doesn't emit a sexy smell. It only mattered that those jackets were chick magnets; they had one; and, most importantly, someone else -- some lesser man -- didn't.
I can still see my friend Steve sporting his -- he was pale, clammy from sweating all day and hovering close to one of the window air-conditioning units retrofitted at our school. I'm sure he would've straddled one of them if he could've done so without destroying the whole image he was suffering for.
But these particular clothes in the J. Crew summer catalogs had to be assembled for sale to someone, somewhere. Maybe the same people depicted in the Country Time commercials? It was all a mystery.
That is, until two years ago. I was on vacation in late July and found myself feeling something I'd never before experienced. I was cold. Yep, in July. I was trying to sleep in a tent in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and wanted something extra to give me warmth. Ah, the sweaters, I thought. Now I get it.
I had found the land known as Country Time. The land where long-sleeved preppy shirts adhere to collegiate skin only if it's been involved in a pick-up game of touch football -- and where the lights don't ever dim to brown as a result of every single person on the same power grid running their a/c at full throttle around the clock. I had found summertime bliss.
The discovery made my distaste for the heat and humidity of my homeland only worse. But I suspect my friend Tim, raised in Arkansas, loves summer. During his time off in July and August, he prefers to live the lifestyle sung about by Jimmy Buffett (also a Southerner).
And there are others -- several, in fact -- like he is who are also Southerners. Tammy, the friend I mentioned earlier, she is one of them. "Lake people," I call them.
These are the ones among us in the Land of Cotton who tan a deep, golden brown by walking to their cars and whose parents taught them to swim by throwing them in the nearest body of water, causing such psychological trauma that they develop an obsession with boating and all things aquatic. Maybe some of the ancestors of these Lake People once lived in Country Time. Damn them. Damn them all, for their inherent ability to revel in the South's searing summertime heat.
I, on the other hand, am plotting my flight from the South, at least on a temporary basis, to this new world -- maybe even farther north into its territory, to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. If I ever earn enough money and take on a career with enough flexibility to do so, I'll journey north to Country Time after Memorial Day every year and not return to the South until sometime around Labor Day.
Because I'll have to be back in time for the start of the season all Southerners can agree is their favorite: football.
Atlantans awoke today to a temperature of 63 degrees. On July 24. A month into the sun's annual personal Dixie barbecue known as summer. The high today is expected to reach only 85, with low humidity.
I can't remember another summer as pleasant as this one in my entire life. It would take two weeks of 90-degree temps in late September to erase the memory of these days.
Because, in the South, the summer is different from the one in Country Time Lemonade commercials. You know the ones -- couples strolling leisurely in golden meadows and kids floating down rivers so quiet that everyone is dozing in their innertubes.
I often found myself wondering, Is this drink marketed to Martians? I could only assume so, since no summer in my life had looked like the vignettes of those ads.
Where I'm from, the heat is so intense that the vegetation looks if not scorched then at least as beaten down by the sun as a farmer returning from a day in the field. And I assure you mosquitoes and lurking water moccasins keep a person occupied enough out on the water to prevent any siestas.
Growing up, I assumed the experience was similar for everyone else. Summer in the South wasn't so much about enjoying as enduring. At least for me it was and, for the most part, still is.
On my first day of fifth grade, when students still had to wear pants and my alma mater hadn't yet been retrofitted with air conditioning, the eccentric old woman teaching my math class, with a circulatory system equivalent to Atlanta's storm drains, didn't see a need for opening windows or turning her box fan to any setting other than "low." Some 20 minutes into her class, I keeled over from the heat. Thanks, Mrs. Millican.
It doesn't help matters that I'm what you might call pigment-challenged. My skin knows only three conditions: white, blistered or peeling.
The only time I ever tanned was two years ago, when my friend Tammy, a sun worshipper, swore up and down that five to 10 minutes a day in a tanning bed for a couple of weeks would give me the "base" I needed. She was right. But it also gave me, in addition to a nice hue, the base I needed to form a couple of moles at the base of my neck. End of experiment.
Of course, as the saying goes, more times than not, it isn't the heat that gets you but the humidity.
A couple of summers ago, I played golf on a lighted par-three course south of the city at 9:30 at night. So much sweat streamed from my arms and onto my palms that my club twisted mid-swing on every attempt, sending the ball on an even worse trajectory than my dry hands would've delivered.
But years earlier, I began putting together clues that maybe things really were different elsewhere. Maybe even on this planet.
The first indication was the J. Crew spring/summer catalog. During college, the dang things just kept showing up in your mailbox when you least expected, like literature from a Jehovah's Witness. So the sight of people wearing long sleeves -- sweaters, even -- was nothing short of comical to me and my fellow Southerners. Who are these people?, we would ask each other.
These models, who we were convinced were on the brink of heatstroke during the photo shoot, standing out in the summer sun, often on or near the water, would bring back memories of high-school freshmen football players wearing their new lettermen jackets during the first week of school.
It didn't matter that it was August in the South, where summer begins somewhere around Memorial Day and concludes on Halloween. It didn't matter that sweat-soaked leather doesn't emit a sexy smell. It only mattered that those jackets were chick magnets; they had one; and, most importantly, someone else -- some lesser man -- didn't.
I can still see my friend Steve sporting his -- he was pale, clammy from sweating all day and hovering close to one of the window air-conditioning units retrofitted at our school. I'm sure he would've straddled one of them if he could've done so without destroying the whole image he was suffering for.
But these particular clothes in the J. Crew summer catalogs had to be assembled for sale to someone, somewhere. Maybe the same people depicted in the Country Time commercials? It was all a mystery.
That is, until two years ago. I was on vacation in late July and found myself feeling something I'd never before experienced. I was cold. Yep, in July. I was trying to sleep in a tent in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and wanted something extra to give me warmth. Ah, the sweaters, I thought. Now I get it.
I had found the land known as Country Time. The land where long-sleeved preppy shirts adhere to collegiate skin only if it's been involved in a pick-up game of touch football -- and where the lights don't ever dim to brown as a result of every single person on the same power grid running their a/c at full throttle around the clock. I had found summertime bliss.
The discovery made my distaste for the heat and humidity of my homeland only worse. But I suspect my friend Tim, raised in Arkansas, loves summer. During his time off in July and August, he prefers to live the lifestyle sung about by Jimmy Buffett (also a Southerner).
And there are others -- several, in fact -- like he is who are also Southerners. Tammy, the friend I mentioned earlier, she is one of them. "Lake people," I call them.
These are the ones among us in the Land of Cotton who tan a deep, golden brown by walking to their cars and whose parents taught them to swim by throwing them in the nearest body of water, causing such psychological trauma that they develop an obsession with boating and all things aquatic. Maybe some of the ancestors of these Lake People once lived in Country Time. Damn them. Damn them all, for their inherent ability to revel in the South's searing summertime heat.
I, on the other hand, am plotting my flight from the South, at least on a temporary basis, to this new world -- maybe even farther north into its territory, to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. If I ever earn enough money and take on a career with enough flexibility to do so, I'll journey north to Country Time after Memorial Day every year and not return to the South until sometime around Labor Day.
Because I'll have to be back in time for the start of the season all Southerners can agree is their favorite: football.
