Too darn hot.(hot weather)(Column)

ON the indoor-outdoor thermometer attached to our bedroom window, the "outdoor" column is climbing up through the high 90s at 10 A.M. In the street there is no sign of life. Even the usual landscaping crews have apparently taken the day off. Front lawns bake under the kind of sky novelists call "brassy." The thermometer's "indoor" column registers a pleasant 77 degrees, thanks--heartfelt thanks--to a central-air-conditioning system, our family budget-buster the year before last. My tame, pampered children refuse to step outside except to go to a pool. We don't have one (that may be the year after next's budget-buster), and neither of the two neighboring families that does have a pool is at home. Only the dog shows any enthusiasm for outdoors: He whines for his daily walk.

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Dutifully I fetch the leash and we set off. The dog is a long-haired variety and due for a grooming. I wonder how he will bear up in the heat. Our normal walk is a mile and three-quarters. Reminding myself of that continental quip about the "three indifferences" of the English (to food, sex, and the weather), I determine to cover the whole customary distance, defying the heat. As a precaution on the dog's behalf, I take a bottle of water to splash on him if he seems to be in distress.

In the event, the mutt copes better than I do. That mechanism for shedding body heat via a large, wet tongue must be wonderfully efficient. Half a mile out I am squirting the water on my own head, while my shaggy companion occupies himself with sniffing, marking, and evacuating in a manner not perceptibly different from normal. Back home, I discard sweat-soaked clothes and take my second shower of the day. It's still only 11 A.M., and "outdoor" reads 100 degrees. My daughter is busy with her latest enthusiasm, knitting. My son is watching a movie on TV--an early James Bond movie, borderline acceptable. I head for my attic study, the one part of the house not encompassed by the central-air system. It is hot as only an attic can be. I fire up the window a/c and try to settle to some work, sweating again already. E-mail from my son's football league: Tonight's practice has been canceled on account of the heat. I should think so.

I am not a hot-weather person--am, in fact, strongly sympathetic to the folk-anthropological notion that vigorous civilization cannot arise in a seriously hot climate. How did people in hot places get anything done before air conditioning came in? Heat is another country: They do things differently there. Or rather, if they have any sense, they do nothing at all.

There is a slight inconsistency in our expectations of human life under conditions of great heat. On one hand, we reflexively associate heat with passion, for reasons not too difficult to fathom. When Peggy Lee's recording of "Fever" was rising in the British pop charts 50 years ago, it was thought indecently suggestive, and there were calls for it to be banned from BBC Radio:

 
  Now you've listened to my story 
  Here's the point that I have made: 
  Cats were born to give ...