RIVER CITY JOURNAL: DESPITE MISSOURI'S HEAT, MOST OF US MANAGE TO STAY COOL

Remember when the best way to combat July temperatures and humidity was to use a cardboard fan from the funeral home?

When it is mid-July in Missouri, everyone is thinking about hot weather, even if they don't have to be in it all that much.

Think about it. How much time do you actually spend in the muggy heat? Most of us live in air-conditioned homes, drive air-conditioned cars, work in air-conditioned businesses, shop in air-conditioned stores, worship in air-conditioned churches and watch movies in air-conditioned theaters.

I remember in the late 1960s when my wife and I lived in Dallas for a couple of years. We had friends back in Missouri who would ask: "How can you stand all that heat?" Why our Missouri friends thought Texas was any hotter than the Show Me State in July and August, I'll never know.

The fact is we lived in an air-conditioned Texas. To this day, I don't recall that Texas was ever hot.

Some of you, I know, get out in the heat in spite of the air conditioning. You mow your lawn. You play softball. You golf -- well, you complain a lot about how hot it is while riding a golf cart, and you call it golf.

I was golfing last weekend. It was a miserably hot and humid day with absolutely no breeze. What little relief my partner and I got was when we moved from one shot to the other and the golf cart went fast enough to create a breeze. "Go faster," I kept telling my friend, but the cart had its limits.

Another thing that struck me on the golf course that day was how comforting a huge shade tree can be. I remember growing up on the farm in Kelo Valley, and the best spot to be in in July and August was under the big elm trees in the front yard. The grass was always cool there. You could come in from working in the garden or mowing the lawn and find instant relief, particularly with a glass of iced tea or lemonade -- or even a big glass of cold water from the deep well, for that matter.

On the highways these days you rarely see anyone driving with the windows down, even in July and August. The other day I saw a car with a good-sized family in it on I-55. All the windows were down, which was enough to catch my eye, but I also noticed a youngster's arm sticking out the window. The kid was holding his hand flat into the wind, turning it ever so slightly and letting the rushing force of the wind turn his arm this way and that.

All of us used to do that when cars didn't have air conditioning. As I watched the youngster on I-55, I wondered how long it would be before the mother in the front seat would say something like, "Get your hand inside that window or you'll get your arm knocked off."

How many times have you heard that? There were three certainties in every youngster's life when I was growing up:

1. If you held your hand out the window when the car was going really fast, you would lose an arm.

2. If you played with a BB gun, you would shoot someone's eye out.

3. If you went swimming sooner than an hour after eating, you would get cramps and drown.

Can you imagine the anxiety of a youngster holding a BB gun out the window of a fast-moving vehicle on the way to a swimming hole about 10 minutes after lunch?

Nah, kids in those days didn't know about anxiety, and they never worried about the things their parents fretted over. We knew it was our parents' job to make a big deal out of everything. I never saw any kid with his eye shot out, did you?

Once, I saw a young man with one arm whose armless shirtsleeve was folded up to his shoulder and neatly pinned. I remember wondering if he had been holding his hand out the window when a big feed truck swiped the car and took his arm. It didn't occur to me at the time that he was about the right age to be home from Korea. ...

If there is anything good to be said about Missouri's weather in July and August, it is this: September is just around the corner. That may mean the end of summer activities for most of you, but for me it means both the temperature and mugginess are about to go down. I think that's a silver lining in the hazy cloud we call humidity.

I once heard someone ask an elderly man to explain humidity. "Stubborn rain," he replied. "And while it may not be heaven, it's a mite better than the alternative."

I agree.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.