Heatwave

/ Jeff Cann

Whenever I’m with him
Somethin’ inside
Starts to burnin’
And I’m filled with desire
Could it be a devil in me?
Or is this the way love’s supposed to be?
It’s like a heatwave

   — Lyrics: (Love is Like a) Heatwave by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas

Heatwave is on repeat in my brain since I woke up. I fired up my laptop, CNN, my default browser window headlines: “Heat Dome Descends on US.” A dawn photo of a thermometer billboard, 107 decrees, backlit with a hazy orange sky. “Red sky in morning…” Gonna be a rough day.

1990, July, 95F. I left work in Crystal City, Virginia and drove across the Potomac River onto the Washington Mall in D.C. Stripped down to soccer shorts, running shoes and a ball cap, I ran my miles. Six? Eight? My standard afterwork distance. I repeated this scene a dozen times each summer. My Mediterranean blood impervious to the heat.

2007, August, 97F, downtown Baltimore music festival. Eli in a backpack, limp like a cloth doll, Susan and Sophie trudging along, faces bright red. Their Northern Ukraine blood boiling in their veins. We found a medic tent. Ice packs and popsicles. They all cooled enough to make it back to the car.

That song. It makes a heatwave sound fun. It makes a heatwave sound cruel. But it does nothing to capture the oppressive weight of sustained baking. The headaches, the lethargy, short-fused arguments, a desire to hang out in WalMart because your air conditioner is broken.

2019, June, 37C, Paris. The four of us huddled in a single room in our Airbnb, lights out, drinking warm tap water. A portable air conditioning unit does it’s best to expel hot air from the room through a four-inch tube out the open window. The rest of the window frame stuffed with sofa pillows. Outdoor air leaks through the gaps. We succeed in lowering the temperature by a couple degrees. “Let’s go to a movie.” Yes, that’s how we spent our last day in France.

My heat tolerance dissipated as I aged. I’m just like the rest of my family. We fire up the AC when the house hits 80F.

Whenever he calls my name
Soft, low, sweet and plain
Right then, right there, I feel that burning flame
Has high blood pressure got a hold on me?
Or is this the way love’s supposed to be?
It’s like a heatwave

We’re expecting 97F this week. I plan to cycle from my air-conditioned house to my air-conditioned car to my air-conditioned workplace. When I want to exercise, I’ll go to my air-conditioned fitness center. I’ll spend as little time as possible outside, even while knowing that 97F is on the low side of what many Americans will be dealing with this week, many homeless or without air-conditioned homes.

At the end of the week, we’ll read news reports about the hundreds of people who succumbed to heat. While I love the song Heatwave, both the version by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas that I danced to at middle-school mixers in the seventies, and the version by the Jam, that I rocked-out to as a young adult in the early eighties, I still don’t understand how the fun, shocked-by-a-new-love-affair lyrics somehow channels a week or ten days baking in lethal temperatures.

Listen to Heatwave:

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Image by Mabel Amber from Pixabay

20 thoughts on “Heatwave”

  6. I’m most comfortable when the temperature is between 15℃ and 22℃ (60℉ – 72℉), which until recently covered daytime temperatures most of the year except July/August when it was colder, and January/February when it was hotter. Anything above 25℃ is too hot for me but the wife relishes temperatures up to around 30℃ (86℉). It’s definitely getting hotter year by year – we didn’t experience a frost last year and it’s likely we won’t see one this year either. And this year for the first time ever, the wife agreed to turn on the heat-pump on a few days in January and February when the indoor temperature climbed to 32℃ (90℉) and outside neared 35℃ (95℉) with relative humidity at around 95%. I can’t imagine what it feels like in temperatures around 40℃ (104℉). Perhaps you might not experience the levels of humidity that we do? On the other hand, my brother lives in a northern part of Australia, and he reported that this year they had a whole week when the temperature didn’t drop below 40℉ (104℉), even overnight! That’s incomprehensible.

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    • I’d call it moderately humid in PA. We definitely have our 100% days though. I Spent my first 40 years in DC, and that place is super humid. Those were back in the days when we still wore suits to work. Miserable.

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    • That’s fantastic weather, where in the world can one experience that year round?

      I recently saw a list of cities that have the best “summer weather” and they said that that’s between 60 and 80. 60 to 72 is better still 🙂

      Like Jane Austen once wrote “What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.” I feel very inelegant now 🙂

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  8. I love the Jam!

    I don’t do well in heat or cold. Heat is worse since with cold I can add more layers😂 I definitely can’t handle humid hot.

    We’ve been ridiculously lucky this year and last year too. Our weather had been great. We’re only hitting mid 80s and that’s just the past week or so. Thank goodness since our electricity is higher than most of the country.

    Stay cool, dude! 😎

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    • I Sort of forgot about the Jam for 20 years. They are heavily back in rotation in my music shuffle now. Such an honest band. Straight R&R. Fortunately, it’s not very humid here and it’s still getting into the 60s overnight. I find it hard to respect a heatwave that doesn’t get into the 100s. But it’s def. hot and only getting hotter for the weekend.

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    • I’m with you on cold over heat, and pretty much for the same reasons … I remember once being on vacation in a hot and humid spot and right after exiting the shower I wasn’t even sure if I showered at all: it was that humid… ugh!

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  9. Thanks, I’ll take some of your heat. It’s 8C, feeling like 6C here at the moment. That’s up from 6C feeling like 4C two hours ago! I don’t want to think about how I’ll get through July.

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    • Yes, I feel that way when I read you Aussie bloggers in January. My daughter in Montana has actually been having weather like yours. Although it’s supposed to suddenly go up to 33C today.

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