Communal Air

Fog is suppressed. Hair frizzled. Air stopped from cooling down by El Nino. Monsoonal flow is thick and sticky.

But think of it this way: monsoonal is communal. Whatever happens, happens to all of us. And, to some extent, we contributed to this sweltering phenomenum through neglect and avarice. There is big money in fossil fuels. Energy is the cash cow we've been milking for the past 150 years with calloused indifference to the consequences. The damage may be halted but is irreversible. 

To this ten-year old the summer heat tapped into my vault of childhood; weather, war and whooping cough, We had our heroes and our shared menace; infantile paralysis, traitors and the dreaded third rail.

Weather, particularly in triple digits, brings us together, setting off memories as when we lived in NYC or Philly or Jersey City. The illegal moisture from Mexico finds asylum in my head and with it a remembrance of distant summers. 

Low pressure trough, they say. It comes up like overripe fruit, pregnant with its bag of water. Thunderous maybe, tripping the sky electric. It’s not enough to quench a thirsty plant with its tongue hanging out. But enough to monsoonal me back to those afternoons in "Air-Cooled" movies (who cares what's playing?) and August nights on the fire escape. When the livin' was easy, languid but energy enough to chase a Good Humor truck when we heard that bell toll.

Games were postponed when they rolled out the tarp. Could just be a sun-shower. Some were rained-out, with a double-header scheduled the next day. Heat and humidity tied in extra innings.

There I was, empty mayonnaise jar with perforated holes in the lid, chasing after fireflies, leaping higher than a pop fly, delerious in the heat of my years.

On the subway with the overhead fan circulating vapors from under arms hanging on to straps. Maybe I grabbed a straw seat and got stuck to it even as we all whoosed under the East River to the canyons of tall rectangles.

That word monsoonal makes me swoon with the sound of it. Imagine an alto sax in cahoots with a lunatic moon; a recording of Sleepy Lagoon. The air is syrup, in a soupy spoon, thick enough to climb that cratered balloon. Every year we get a dose of this undocumented air from Baja or maybe Khartoum. 

Overhead fans didn’t do much but scatter the flies so people came out to un-stifle themselves. So did the gnats. They swarmed by gazillions all over the front window of my father’s drug store. 

It must have been the flag colors of the Ex-Lax sign that attracted the gnats. They covered that part of the window and gradually the rest of it in sufficient numbers to excite the neighborhood. I don’t think the store ever had such traffic, at least at the outside entrance. My father possessed a natural calm which could break a fever. He needed every bit of it to persuade the crowd we were not being invaded by an alien species. 100 degrees does strange things to all creatures in a shared inferno.