Listen to the children of the night, how sweet is their music
When we last left our hero, he was naked and sweltering in his upstairs room, occasionally sleeping half naked on sofa pillows in the living room, near a monstrous air conditioner.
Earlier, I alluded to our female neighbor, Mrs. Overstreet. One summer evening, daddy verbally sparred with her in front of our house until well after sunset. Women weren’t born to argue with him, especially about politics. So, the upshot was the whole neighborhood knew he was a huge asshole. Kinda like This:
So, they never spoke after that. Two intolerant, entrenched dinosaurs.
Because of my hay fever, I got an air conditioner in my window. Talk about spelling relief. Often it ran all day, making my room tolerable. I gave up soft summer breezes in exchange for not stewing in my own perspiration. The soothing pleasure of rain on the roof remained. The side effect was that I became addicted to white noise for sleep, which continues to this day.
The Overstreets had an old fashioned ‘lantern’ on a six foot pole where the walkway met the sidewalk. It glowed all night. After I got my air conditioner, a mockingbird decided to serenade the lantern………at 5 AM! Now daddy was really stuck. He couldn’t ask her to turn off the light; she wouldn’t even ask him the time of day. My mom was off all summer, so even if she lost sleep, she could make it up.
It was at least two weeks of daddy complaining and seething with anger, gobs of white spit in the corners of his mouth.. So, he had to pry open his wallet and buy an air conditioner for his bedroom.
As a footnote, the mockingbird would migrate every fall and not return until late spring. I suspect daddy thought Mrs. Overstreet formed a satanic pact with the damned thing.
By the time they moved, all of us were hopelessly hooked on air conditioning. Welcome to the seventies.