April 7th, 2011 / 4:16 am
Random

Sometimes You Don’t Recognize What’s In Front of You Until A Writer Makes It Clear for You

When I was a child, my father worked in air conditioning. I never thought that was a particularly high calling, even though we lived in Florida, in the heat, and even though I seldom felt the heat when I was indoors, since the default indoor condition of everything in Florida was cool, comfortable air, or sometimes air that was uncomfortable because it was too cold. I never figured out the value of what my father did until I read Arthur Miller’s essay “Before Air Conditioning.” Here is a representative paragraph:

“Given the heat, people smelled, of course, but some smelled a lot worse than others. One cutter in my father’s shop was a horse in this respect, and my father, who normally had no sense of smell — no one understood why — claimed that he could smell this man and would address him only from a distance.”

5 Comments

  1. PeterLandau

      I edit a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) trade magazine. Will be thinking of your post and looking up Miller’s essay as I toil today. Thanks!

  2. PeterLandau

      I edit a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) trade magazine. Will be thinking of your post and looking up Miller’s essay as I toil today. Thanks!

  3. Kyle Minor

      Peter, If you’ll send me your address by email — kyle@kyleminor.com — I’ll send you a photocopy.

  4. Donald

      Oh, this is interesting. Actually, there’s a second layer of interest, for me, in that I can identify with his father, ha. I normally have no sense of smell — no one understands why — but at the times when some scent or another does make it through the olfactory fog it’s usually one of the offensive ones.

  5. Donald

      It’d be mildly depressing if I weren’t such a Chill Ass Dude.

      Also, I don’t understand that American thing of turning the air conditioning up so high that it becomes uncomfortably cold. Especially in supermarkets and big stores in the suburbs. You [as a unified national mass] seem to love it. Why? Why take a problem and fix it so profoundly that you turn it into a different problem?