Escapes
DELIVERED D A I LY
E S S AY
When Summer Comes Back Around THE HOTTEST SEASON RETURNS, WITH RED SKIN AND ATTIC FANS AND THE REX THEATRE
By Ed Cullen
A
t one time, my natural world started in January, in cold, damp, North Louisiana, fresh off the excitement and, then, letdown of Christmas. Cold weather yielded to soft spring, and I lost my mind—which is to say I became so distracted by the elixir of spring that I couldn’t keep my mind on anything. Summer came and the natural world wrapped me in a steamy towel. If I forgot that I wasn’t genetically disposed to tanning and went to the beach, my skin burned to an alarming shade of red. Crimson is no exaggeration. One summer, gradual exposure to the sun over three months garnered for me what loosely might have been called a tan. If I pulled the waistline of my swimming trunks out an inch, one might discern two shades of white, the one above the waistline ever so slightly not as white. Creeping up on a tan over the entire summer was hardly worth the effort. The second day of the new school year, a classmate whose tan made his teeth look like upper and lower rows of bleached Chiclets observed, “Wow, didn’t you go outside at all this summer?” Women who don’t tan are said to have skin the color of milk, a high compliment. For men who don’t tan, the best we can do is “ruddy” which also describes a kind of duck. Once, in the outfield bleachers at a baseball game I thought to take my shirt off, be like the other bleacher bums, get a tan. Be cool. My teenage son had doffed his shirt as soon as we’d taken our seats. Genes contributed by his mother allow him to tan. As I was pulling my shirt off, my son howled, “Dad! Please. You’ll blind the batters.” The hilarious lad probably saved the game for our side— unless I’d removed my shirt when only the opposing team came up to bat. May through August and, some years,
into September and October, denizens of the Deep South who are my age survived in the illusion that moving air cooled us. For that to work, we first had to sweat. A lot. The summers of my childhood were to the sound of a deep roar, a sound between that of an approaching locomotive and the engines of a ship at sea. It is a noise impossible to describe if you didn’t grow up “cooled” by an attic fan. I think attic fans may have been the boundary between poor people and really poor people. Middle class homes may have had more than one attic fan. I can only imagine the wind turbulence inside such houses. Then there were people—the super rich—who lived in air conditioned houses. In the dead air and bright heat of summer, visitors had to be tricked into leaving the conditioned air or they would have remained until fall. Not only was the air cool, but, gadzooks, it was dry. One’s clothing had dried completely before being forced back into the sauna of summer outside. The stores downtown and the movie theaters in my hometown of Alexandria were air conditioned with the exception of the Rex theater. The poor Rex suffered the slur that patrons were handed two sticks with their ticket stubs, one stick to sit on and the other to keep the rats at bay. Wasn’t true, of course. There were seats, not the most comfortable but certainly better than sticks. I never saw a rat inside the Rex, but the planted notion of rats in a darkened room took but a slight touch on an unsuspecting arm or neck to produce screams of considerable duration. I don’t run into many people these days who watched movies at the Rex, but when I do, I recall for them the mighty fan high up the back wall and the fact that no one had ever proven conclusively that they’d encountered rats while
watching the Rex’s second-run features. I became a defender of the Rex, probably because I lived in a house where the air was made somewhat tolerable by a mechanical hurricane in the attic. I like to point out than the Rex is where a few of us serious cinema goers saw Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The film may have been sent to the country’s most humble movie house by accident, but the Rex had Lawrence and the Joy, Paramount, and Don theaters did not. With the return of fall and a less punishing sun, coinciding with a dramatic change in temperature and humidity, I was able to venture outdoors without laying on sun block with a house painter’s brush. Thus did the seasons cycle. One played and worked through the heat and cold raking leaves, mowing lawns for money, throwing the afternoon Alexandria Daily Town Talk, reading, going to the movies, building models of airplanes said to have won World War II, and pondering girls. We humans who weren’t girls were lucky to know a marvelous rearrangement of neural molecules that allowed us to see girls transition from special pals to wonderful ... I want to say “creatures” here, but I think that is no longer acceptable in our rapidly changing American language. Girls, in my mind, went from being special pals to, uh, people of equal or superior intellect who made kissing not a family obligation but a mind-expanding act. There. The evolving language is wordy. An evolving world has some of us marking time from March 2020 and The Shutdown. I hate it that we are regarded as two-shot, one-shot, or no-shot people. Can’t we unite as people born of different colors, some who tan and some who don’t? h //J U N E 2 1
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