Shootin' the breeze

Air conditioning was invented in 1911 by a very hot man named Willis Carrier. My parents didn't tell us kids about that invention as we grew up, probably because they knew we'd demand a piece of Mr. Carrier's action.

And they continued to let us think air came only from windows when they built a new house in 1966, 55 years after Mr. Carrier decided enough was enough and by all that was good and holy, he would sweat no longer.

It was a four-bedroom house, inhabited by six sweaty people who, by the end of a sultry Kentucky summer, could not speak to each other without screaming, at the end of most every sentence, "I'm SORRY! But I'm so HOT!"

We didn't perspire. That's what rich people do, right before they take off for cooler climes, "climes" being a word I didn't learn until my teens because I was busy trying to make friends whose parents would pop for air conditioning. Perspire? That's what quasi-athletic people do, the kind of people who pay money to go to saunas and come out saying, "Wow. I really worked up a sweat."

No, on White Oak Pike we leaked like sieves. We poured. Sweat rolled off us by the bucketload in that house of heat-induced horrors, pooling in our undies as we sat around the TV or played Scrabble, swilling 16-ounce Cokes from glass bottles.

The only relief was in the basement, where one could breathe, if one didn't mind sleeping on a couch that mildewed years before Willis Carrier invented cold air and his siblings all became hookers in hotels where one could pay to be fanned.

We children didn't know about such high-falutin' stuff as the heat index. We just knew we were stinkin' hot, and that when you sit on a vinyl chair when you're that hot, the backs of your sweaty little legs make great, rude sounds.

At bedtime, it got worse. It got ugly. It got me to thinking, when I was about 11, that my parents couldn't possibly be my parents because no one who gave birth to a such a good little girl could sit back and sing "Cry Me a River" while that little girl's head melted.

Anyhoo, because they owned the joint, I guess, my mom and dad got the best breeze in the house, from an appliance fan which blasted out frigid air. My grandma and brother got mildly effective box fans for their rooms. My sister and I got a rattly, rusty-bladed old fan attached to a shaky pole, one I'm pretty sure Willis Carrier used to impale his parents when they tossed him a funeral-home fan and told him to get over it.

"I'm dying in here," I'd call out, night after night. "Seriously. This time I mean it. I'm a goner. Goodbye."

"Don't die until morning," shouted my mother, who in my head was eating truffles and wearing flannel jammies because it was 47 degrees in her room. "And make up the bed first."

"If she's dead, I want her fan," my brother yelled.

"ZZZZZZ," my father answered from beneath his ice-encrusted blankets. "ZZZZZZ."

My grandmother, too, snoozed on. She was born before Willis Carrier invented air conditioning. What did that old woman care?

Since leaving my old Kentucky home faster than you can say "Arrid Extra Dry for me, please," I have lived in several houses, most of which had air conditioning. I live in Florida now, enjoying ocean breezes and eating hot food, without crying, in the comfort of my dining room. I also lived for several years in Phoenix, where we were hot, but where the humidity is low and even dog houses have air conditioning.

Once, I called a real estate agent about an interesting ad.

"Does it have air conditioning?" I asked.

"No, it doesn't," she said. "But it has lots of windows."

"Will I have to share the fan with my sister?" I asked.

Years after we kids moved out of the family home and my parents weren't saddled with comic book and dentist and new-shoe bills, the folks had central air installed.

And 40 years after I threw my sister across the room for hogging the best dusty gusts from our fan, my mother is still trying to make up to us for our scorching childhood.

When I visit, if it's warmer than 70 degrees, she turns the air down to arctic.

The house isn't quite the same, without the sound of rattling fans and my father's ZZZZZs and my brother's rude-leg noises on vinyl chairs.

Yet, it's comforting to go home.

And, like always, my mother can't sleep without calling out from her room.

"Are you cold enough?" she asks. "Are you OK?"

"I can't feel my face," I answer, fumbling for a blanket and wondering what it will be like in the great and cool beyond, where I plan to kiss Mr. Willis Carrier full on the lips.

"I can't feel my legs. I'm a goner. Goodbye."