Op-Ed: Growing up in the California heat — and learning to love it (via latimesopinion)
We are good at this — the handling of extreme heat in California, weeks when the temperature rises to 108, 109, 111, even 114, for four days, five, 10. We were children of the hottest late-summer days, and now we are parents of children and grandchildren whose foreheads sparkle with beads of sweat like sequins pasted there for decoration.
It was so hot some summer days in the late 1990s — when my wooden bungalow in Riverside still had no air conditioning — that big, green fig beetles died flying in the air, and golden baby lizards slipped under the screen door of my 100-year-old house to sleep in shoes deep in our old-fashioned closets that had their own windows.
But I was born to this heat, too. In the 1970s, my siblings and I ran barefoot on the blistering sidewalks of Riverside with neighbor kids, goading each other until the soles of our feet felt nothing, the calluses and dirt on them as thick as though they were the black rubber treads of sandals. We panted in the shade of granite boulders and stumbled past rattlesnake dens where even the reptiles were stunned and quiet. We drank hot water from old, green, rubber hoses.
We sweated bullets, as my father-in-law said. After the reception, Dwayne Sims, my new husband, and I got in a borrowed Cadillac, with my maid of honor, Laureen Morita, and our best man, Dwayne’s brother General, and we were driven around Fairmount Park’s still, silver lake.
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