Dept. of Tuesday

Lord Only Knows ...

... how this day is going to go. It's going to be extremely hot, as I mentioned in my last post, but I do have to go out and get a couple of things from the grocery. And, if I'm lucky, from the pharmacy. I have to check to see if my doctor's office has sent the prescription to the pharmacy. Occasionally I have to nudge them; we both hate it when I have to do that, but I'll probably have to do so this afternoon, since I'm going to be out of my painkiller tomorrow. Fingers crossed, for both the weather and the prescription ....

Dept. of Old Poetry

The Sun, My Lord, the Sun

After my last post, I checked the current temperature. At 10:40 a.m., in my neighborhood, the mercury stands at 95F, with a heat index of 111F. Not that pretty at all. It's supposed to ease after today, but I'll believe that when I experience it.

So I thought it appropriate to share a poem I wrote 29 years ago, in the wake of Chicago's disastrous 1995 summer heat wave, which killed somewhere between 425 and 719 people, depending on what source you check. It also killed our cat Rissa. My late friend Nick absolutely loathed hot weather, which he defined as anything over 65F, so I wrote the poem in his honor (and a bit in Rissa's honor as well.)

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The storms, spawned like mosquitos in the Gulf,

reached up and embraced us with heat this summer.

The dirty air lay over us, unable to rise.

The buildings labored and moaned to keep us cool

in the merciless downtowns.

We hated our clothing, hated our skins,

bathed uselessly.

We knew our sweat.

The air was thick with oil and garbage,

the effluvia of days that refused to end.

We woke to heat, walked in heat,

sank in it.

It defeated us.

We hid in airless caves, prayed for sundown.

Humid night followed cruel day and we were like children,

looking for kindness,

rewarded with nothing but another storm lingering on the lake's horizon.

Betrayed and bitter,

we leaned on our horns in the clotted intersections.

We clenched our fists

and closed our eyes.

We tasted stale salt on our upper lips,

slammed against the shimmering air, against each other

in realized desperation.

If the cool air had not surprised us,

the northern winds of final, blessed fall —

if the winds had not thinned our blood so that it ran in our veins again....

If we had not been able to breathe again,

we would have succumbed

and walked into the lake,

leaving empty streets echoing with the whine and snap of

useless air conditioners.

to Nick, October 1, 1995