A late-summer heat wave has come to Southern Ohio this week. That means temperatures in the mid-90s, and high levels of humidity.
I am reminded of another heat wave, in another late summer, 42 years ago.
In 1982, I was a freshman at a Catholic high school in Cincinnati. This was a working-class parochial school of the twentieth-century kind, not one of the posh private institutions that is so popular today.
The school building was old. (My mother had attended the same school, in the same building, in the 1960s.) There was no air conditioning.
Also, in those days Catholic school kids wore hot, uncomfortable uniforms year-round: dress slacks and a button-up white or blue dress shirt for the boys, a button-up blouse and a skirt for the girls. No wearing shorts and golf shirts to school, as is so common nowadays.
The early September of 1982 was an exceptionally hot one. Mr. Fairbanks’s freshman English class was held on the second floor, during the fifth period. Around one o’clock in the afternoon.
One day it was perhaps ninety degrees outside. Mr. Fairbanks had opened the windows, but the classroom was still a sweatbox.
We students were miserable, but Mr. Fairbanks was just as miserable. (As a male teacher at the school, he had to wear a tie, in addition to a dress shirt and slacks.)
As class was about to begin, it was clear that no one was in the mood for the lesson. Yes, this was 1982. But even in 1982, 14-year-olds from the suburbs had certain expectations where creature comforts were concerned.
Struck by a sudden burst of inspiration, Mr. Fairbanks stepped over to the blackboard and wrote, in large letters, all caps:
“THINK JANUARY”
Everyone laughed. Then Mr. Fairbanks proceeded with the day’s lesson, which—if memory serves—had something to do with diagramming sentences.
Did those two words on the blackboard do anything to lessen the heat? No. Nor did this turn into a life-changing, mind-over-matter exercise for me. I may have tried to “think January” for a minute or two, but there was no thinking away the heat that day.
What I learned in that fifth-period English class, 42 years ago, was that sometimes you just have to put up with unpleasant circumstances and situations. Some of these circumstances are simply beyond your capacity to change—like a second-floor classroom in an unairconditioned school building on a hot September afternoon.
When that happens, you have two choices: wallow in your discomfort, or set it aside and get through the minor ordeal.
Sooner or later, every heatwave passes. Think January for long enough, and one day it will be January.
And then it will be too cold.
-ET