The Condition of Air

Well, I think I just stepped into the last phase of my life. With the summer weather finally upon Chicago, and the bones and joints slowly seizing in my increasingly sedentary state, I've come to believe that I've sealed my fate.

I grew up fairly poor. My father ran his own business, opening a barbershop during the prepubescence of the post-war baby-boom, when young men still had their hair cut regularly enough to keep barbers in business and feeding their families. But then The Beatles introduced American kids to drugs, free love and long hair, and the innocence was over. By 1970, Mom had to stop having kids and go to work. With seven kids, however, the paycheck usually was eaten before it was cashed.

So we went without a lot of the things that friends whose parents made lots more money than did mine took for granted. One of these things was air conditioning. I spent my youth riding out the heat and humidity of Chicago summers. If it was too hot outside, then we ran the sprinkler. When we ran up the water bill too high, then we sat in the house practically naked, in front of a box fan. In the morning we drew the shades and closed the windows on the east side of the house and opened the windows on the west. As the sun traversed the heavens through the day, we closed the windows and shades on the south side, and then on the west side to keep the heat at bay. Those were dismal summers. Too hot to do anything but park in front of a fan and watch the Cubs on TV. Truly dismal summers.

I developed a thick skin in those days, eventually eschewing air conditioning when it offered itself to me, for I knew it was but a temporary respite, and I would only return home to a fan blowing the warm humid air around the house. So I chose to embrace the muggy, accept it as that which made me stronger.

And it did make me stronger, as I learned when I moved to Georgia, where the summers last almost twice as long as in Chicago. The Georgia natives and lifelong transplants thought this northerner would melt in their sunshine like an ice cube on a barbecue, but I showed them. I had learned to weather the weather. I could sweat it out with the best of them, and none of my detractors was among the best. They would last fifteen, maybe twenty minutes on an early August mid-afternoon as I rolled tape on the auto dealership inventory lot, while I toiled with angle after angle, shot after shot, and they shrank to the climate-controlled sanctuary of the showroom.

And my car had the factory installed 4-55 air conditioning system: four windows rolled down at 55 miles per hour. This didn't have as much to do with the fact that the A.C. compressor had croaked two years after I had bought the car and couldn't afford to get it fixed as it did with my disdain for its existence under my hood.

And I endured. I stuck it out. I stood my ground.

Until last year.

Mrs. Farrago and I decided that it was best for us and the future value of our 100-plus year old home to have central air conditioning installed. The summers haven't gotten any cooler, the fans don't work any better, and the Cubs... well, let's face it. They're still the Cubs. So for two weeks in November one diminutive man sawed holes in our floors and ceilings, built a half-mile of ductwork through our basement and our attic, and parked two huge condensers outside our back wall. They loomed there silently through the cold, beneath the snow, stoic in their patience, waiting for their day to shine.

And to my delight, Mrs. Farrago put off firing up the system, ritually closing the east windows and shades in the morning, and then reversing them in the afternoon. But then last week, the first string of 70-degree days alit upon us, and the indoor temperature reached the limit at which we had set the thermostat, and the beast came to life.

And from that moment I have felt my tolerance ebbing. Perspiration, once a welcome sign of my veracity, is now becoming - dare I say it - uncomfortable. In the car I'm even keeping the windows closed and turning on the A.C., aerodynamics and fuel economy my pathetic excuse.

Air conditioning is a drug, an addictive substance that pulls one indoors and renders him pale and meek and pathetic. And it is I who becomes addicted. It is I who feels the rest of his life coming at him, nestled comfortably in air conditioned splendor insulated from the reality of the world.

But, hey. At least the beer stays cold longer!