Whining at a higher level

 Whining at a higher level

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is the Dog Days.

You wake up in the morning and it is almost 80 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Last year at this time I was fortunate enough to be on vacation in Scotland with my beloved wife.  It has the climate for which my Anglo-Saxon ancestors were evolved. One day we rode the Hogwarts express from Kyle of Lochalsh to Fort William.  The 20-something young lady complained about the heat: “It’s just hotter here than other places.”

It was almost 70 degrees.

Jean and I remained silent, but we shared a pregnant glance.

We silently conspired not to tell her about the Dog Days. 

Humans are adaptable.  We can adapt from an animal that whines at a high of 70 degrees who whines at a low of 80 degrees. We are a species of whiners.

Whining is the constant.

I grew up in third world conditions.  So did just about everyone in my community. We had two channels on the television set. During the summer one of those channels mainly broadcast snow. Oddly enough, this didn’t make us feel any cooler.

We had a swamp cooler. To refresh your memory, a swamp cooler is a means of cooling off the house that cools air by the evaporation of water.  This makes the assumption that the air is not already saturated with humidity.  They work quite well in the high desert, not much in rural Oklahoma.  There the name is a reminder that your living room is cooler than a swamp...maybe.

Before it got to the time of year when we closed our doors and turned on the swamp cooler, we sat with our doors open. If the one channel of television wasn’t sufficient, we could entertain ourselves with the variety of insects that make their way in despite the screens.

I say variety. It was mainly junebugs.

While I am not an entomologist, I can say with certainty that junebugs do not eat meat.  If they did, my family would’ve been skeletalized before the Fourth of July during any given year.

And I whined.  Not with the expertise that I have now, but I did whine.  As tool-using animals, we make use of technology to help us whine better.  The thermometer was a God-send for this purpose.  We can look at it to see how much whining is appropriate.

When I went off to study mathematics at grad school, I used the time and temperature number to keep track.  I developed the mathematical theory that it wasn’t really hot until it was at least 93 degrees.  In Stillwater, Oklahoma, it would frequently get really hot.

It is odd. Although there is nothing to this other than the pronouncement of a self-important 20-something, this stuck with me.  I made decisions with it.  Ninety-three degrees became the critical temperature for me.  Above ninety-three, I would yield to the heat. Below ninety-three, heat did not provide an excuse to cease activity.

Then one Tuesday afternoon I came home with the idea of mowing. I checked the temperature: It was 91 degrees: Okay to work. I changed into my work clothes; I picked up fallen branches in the yard.  I rolled up the garden hose.

I was then greeted by my daughter: “Are you planning to mow?”

There was an inflection on this that indicated it was more than a question.  There was judgement both on my intelligence and my sanity implied.

She’d that from her mother.

I said little or nothing. I certainly didn’t say what I was thinking. I learned THAT from her mother.

Technology has now progressed, it seems.  We’ve gone beyond the thermometer to the heat index. We have another number to tell us how miserable we ought to be, another number to help us whine.

I put off my mowing until Friday morning at seven.  By eight, I’d sweated through my t-shirt completely, but the lawn was done.  

Now we are under an extreme heat warning. To my mind, it is still not too bad. Maybe that’s because I’ve got a house that we can air-condition down to 75 degrees, with doors and windows tight enough to keep the junebugs at bay, and with more entertainment coming through the Internet than I could ever possibly watch.

But, it is the Dog Days. Keep cool; be safe.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.