Dry Heat

I love my daughter but I’ll be damned if she don’t live on the surface of the Sun.

 

Once a year, before school starts up again, my beautiful wife and I take our granddaughter on a trip. Because she is the only person in our family who has not been out to visit her Aunt Maddie, we decided to fly out for a few days in

Phoenix.

 

When we told my daughter that we were coming, she was excited but warned us that it would be hot.

 

“We’ll be okay,” I said.

 

She laughed at my hubris.

 

We got on the plane in Atlanta on Thursday morning. It was 84 degrees. We got off the plane in Phoenix four hours later.

It was 115.

 

So, I was wrong. Maybe we wouldn’t be okay.

 

We quickly got into my daughter’s little white Jeep and before we could say our ‘happy to see ya’s’, all three of us screamed in unison, “TURN ON THE AIR CONDITIONER!”

 

It was already on.

 

“Then turn it down,” I said.

 

“It is down,” she said.

 

It was at this point that I knew we would die. Like the Donner party but with just a little less cannibalism.

 

We got to her house and I told my granddaughter that as soon as the door to the car was open, for her to run inside as fast as her little legs would take her.

 

I had promised her mom and dad that I would return her home in good condition. Not in powder form.

 

Safely ensconced inside the walls of my daughter’s house with the air conditioning turn down to 40 degrees, I settled on the couch and vowed to not go outside unless the house caught on fire. And even that would be iffy, considering the ambient air temperature was slightly less than the surface of the sun.

 

Enduring. a quick flash fire may be less painful.

 

Alas, my granddaughter wanted to go somewhere besides the living room, so we eventually had to step from the frying pan into the fire.

 

The eternity that I stood by my daughter’s car, waiting for her to unlock the doors may have been the worst 9-seconds of my life.

 

“Where do you want to go,” she asked.

 

My granddaughter suggested the park. I told her she had her whole life in front of her, why did she want to die so young?

 

Instead, we went swimming in a popular river north of town. The water temperature was 40. The air temperature was 116.

 

Needless to say, jumping in was such a shock that it caused me to loose the sight in my left eye and forget how to pronounce any word with more than two syllables.

 

Day Two was a little better. We went to the Grand Canyon. If my wife had not sworn on a stack of recipe books (I could not find a Bible) that the train was air conditioned, the only way I would have left the house was after a coroner’s inquest.

 

Today has been the worst so far.

 

We went to the Science Museum and learned all kind of sciency stuff like how wind works and why prairie dogs have eight nipples.

 

It was fun except for the three blocks we had to walk from where we parked the car. If there was a real life version of the game, ‘The Floor is Lava’, it would have been more enjoyable than that jaunty afternoon stroll.

 

Back in the car later that day, the little temperature readout in my daughter’s Jeep said that is was 119 degrees.

 

I’m pretty sure that is the same temperature they use to sterilize instruments before brain surgery.

 

And yet, there were people sitting outside at outdoor cafes seeming to enjoy themselves.

 

I’m not sure what the long-term effects of chronic heat stroke are, but brain death must be one of them and everyone in this town has a nasty case of it.

The kicker was when we came home and I went into the kitchen to wash my hands.

 

I turned on the faucet expecting a cooling rush of soothing cold water. What I got instead was a surge of scalding water and some nasty 3rd degree burns on my trigger finger.

 

Maybe the big C on the handle actually meant caliente, which is Spanish for hot.

 

Easy mistake.

 

So, I flipped on the knob with a big H.

 

My doctor says I can start my skin grafts next week.

 

I love my daughter and if she loves it out here in Phoenix, then I support her.

 

But before I come to visit again, especially in the middle of summer, I am going to need one of these good ‘ole boys out here with a four wheel drive truck to slap a tow strap onto to this place and pull it away from the Sun a little.

 

I would have a photo of me smoking a pipe to accompany this story but I am afraid if I tried to light a match, I would go up in flames like kerosene on a fat girls’ thighs.