The Nicks Mix:  Novels and short stories, comic and cartoon and caricature art, music and musings and a kid's corner--from today and the reflective past.

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A few days ago my sister and I were talking on the phone about the summer heat.  She thought that it was hotter now than back in the day, like in the forties and early fifties when she and I were growing up.  Of course sister Barb has lived in subtropical Jacksonville, Florida the last thirty-five years, while our growing up was in the northern Midwest in Pontiac, Michigan.  Florida's summers may have over time dimmed Barb's memories of just how extreme the old days were.  Next time we talk I'll remind her of what I'm certain she's knows but has forgotten: back in the old days everything was more extreme!  Yep, summer was way hotter and longer, winter way colder and the snow way deeper; and all year round the winds were way stronger; and you had to walk everywhere and everywhere you had to walk to was way the heck farther away than it would be today! 

That was just the way things were. 

It was for certain the way that summer was.  Hot.  Unbearably hot.  It was awful. So awful it was somehow exquisite.   

Way back then there was no such thing as air conditioning--at least not in our experience.  So how did we cope?  Well, during the worst of the summer dog days we would at night lay sheets on the floor and sleep down there.  My sister Barb agrees with me on that memory.  But a lot of our memories were different.   Some of the other things you did to cope with the extreme heat of those distant summers weren’t done by kids like Barb--because she was, you know, a girl.

And as a girl she didn't play ball for hours beneath the blistering sun, not like us baseball-obsessed guys did at our handmade ball field that was bordered by the woods.  What's more, along with obsession we were so short sighted and dumb we never even brought water.  No, we'd wait until we were all about to have heat strokes and had to take a break.  Then the older guys would browbeat a couple of the youngest guys into going home and bringing back milk bottles of water from the garden hose.  Man, did that water refresh!  And it let you play obsessively at least another hour under the blistering sun.

Here's another thing that really refreshed and helped you to survive the nearly unbearable heat of those summers past--a bottle of ice-cooled Nesbitt Orange. In our small neighborhood stores all the soft drinks for on-the-spot consumption were chilled in ice-coolers, which of course made their refreshment capacities more extreme than those of today.  Personally, I was by habit a Pepsi guy, but during the dog days nothing could equal a Nesbitt Orange, and after snapping off the cap on the opener attached to the cooler I would chugalug a bottle of the cold delicious orange stuff straight down.  Which always made me feel sort of sick within a few minutes.  But being short sighted and dumb, I did the same thing over and over, all through the hottest days.  You know, extreme measures for extreme conditions. 

Another sort of extreme thing we did was to swim bare-bottomed.  We did this at two different locations and neither one was entirely ideal.  One was a water hole in a large field along Pontiac's eastern city limits.  This place was known as 'Bare-ass Beach' and it was rumored to contain quick sand.  Then there were small but scary eel-like bloodsucker critters in the shallows that you had run past through the muck before you could dive into the water hole.   Once there, however, you were so cooled and refreshed you almost forgot about quicksand and bloodsuckers.  Even cooler and more refreshing, though, was the Clinton River that ran through the same woods that bordered our ragged ball field.  Both the woods and the Clinton were two of our favorite places in the whole world.  Both were visually splendid--but the Clinton River was said to be factory polluted.   So swimming in it was, if I remember right, outlawed, at least by my parents. But again, extreme measures were sometimes called for, and that flowing old Clinton sure cooled a guy off in a hurry!

In time, while short sightedness and dumbness remained readily available, some of my buddies and I found our more innocent approaches to summer dog days had morphed into those more consistent with the 'rebel without a cause' aspects of the mid-fifties.  In the July and August hot sunny daytimes and sultry evenings we found ourselves spending a lot of time just hanging around; street corners and those neighborhood stores with the ice coolers were favorite spots.   We worked to impress each other and others by looking cool and tough: we had grease in our hair, our collars were turned up, our jeans were tugged down, and we practiced the tough guy arts of cigarette smoking and spitting through teeth.   We also clowned around and punched at each other and passed a football back and forth in the street--an activity that could cause a game of touch to break out. 

But languid dog day heat kept teenager clowning and punching and football activities tamped down, waiting for cooler September.  

Until the heat abated, however, alternatives were sought out.  Swimming was still a favorite, but now often after dark and at lakes driven to in cars with rumbling dual exhausts and lowered suspensions.  Beer drinking was another favorite, though not readily available to underage guys (or girls, when they were around).  If beer was secured, a favorite place to drink it was, again usually after dark, atop the railroad trestle over the good old Clinton River on our neighborhood's outskirts.  The river kept our beer cold, and the trestle's height made it a dandy place to keep lookout for cops who were rumored to sometimes cruise the dirt path through the field opposite.  But I don't recall ever seeing them there.

What I do recall is an incident that occurred during a particularly hot night in 1956 in the first summer after high school, and that becomes the final illustration of this 'back in the day' summer reminiscence.

In the wee hours, some time after another group trestle-over-the-river drinking excursion and a good mile removed from there, two of us guys wound up the night sitting and talking on the steps in front of his house, polishing off our final two beers.  It was, I know, an August night, because the cicadas were in full whining buzz.  My buddy was known as Mal.  He was a genuine tough guy, a boxer and street fighter who I'd formerly been almost terrified of.  But sometime during the winter we'd begun hanging out and by summer we'd made a strong connection, which had a lot to do with our senses of humor.  We were both decidedly drunk, and the talk had turned serious with normally close-to-the-vest Mal divulging factors of the difficult home life that probably had influenced him becoming a tough guy at an early age.  This kind of talk could only go so long, and we began speculating about what time it might be.  About a half block removed was a local saloon with a decent sized outdoor clock hanging in front.  The saloon was already closed, so we knew the hour must be late, but our long night's drinking had made eyesight uncertain in us both.  We both squinted and peered at the clock and took various guesses at the time, ending up in debate and finally leaving the steps and approaching the saloon.

The 'clock' was revealed as not a clock at all.  It was instead a sign worded in unlit neon with this:

It's Cool Inside!

Air conditioning had obviously arrived to our experience.

And from that point forward summer dog days would never be quite so extreme. 

Or exquisite.