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| From the free download chapter |
We are much inclined to think that air conditioning is a necessity, but I have to wonder these days whether this and much of the other technology said to be so wonderful is really important at all. One of the chapters in the book that was fun to write was my memories of those days old people in Boston used to call scorchers, though my mother preferred the ancient term dog days. On those canicules my grandmother would take me on the streetcar from her walk-up South Huntington Avenue in Jamaica Plain downtown to the Boston Common. I still enjoy looking at the details in this photo, the necktie, the newspaper. Was this man a bum? An unemployed veteran? If so, he made an effort to dress properly. Or was he just a lower paid adjuster from one of the insurance companies that dominated the skyline, lacking in those days even the first John Hancock building behind the Boston Common?
To this day nothing beats the shade appreciated by this fellow, even here, in the tropics. Were they elms, those great feathery trees? From this same place you could hear the shouts of boys splashing about roughly in the Frog Pond.
Many of these most vivid memories serve as backdrops for the wonderful dreams that entertain my sleep these days, three quarters of a century later. They would not exist if the "benefit" of aircon had existed in those times, the mid 1940s. Will they now be as satisfactorily replaced by memories of sitting in air conditioned "family rooms" watching TV?
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