Whenever I’m with him
Somethin’ inside
Starts to burnin’
And I’m filled with desire
Could it be a devil in me?
Or is this the way love’s supposed to be?
It’s like a heatwave
— Lyrics: (Love is Like a) Heatwave by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
1990, July, 95F. I left work in Crystal City, Virginia and drove across the Potomac River onto the Washington Mall in D.C. Stripped down to soccer shorts, running shoes and a ball cap, I ran my miles. Six? Eight? My standard afterwork distance. I repeated this scene a dozen times each summer. My Mediterranean blood impervious to the heat.
2007, August, 97F, downtown Baltimore music festival. My son Eli in a backpack, limp like a cloth doll, my wife Susan and daughter Sophie trudging along, faces bright red. Their Northern Ukraine blood boiling in their veins. We found a medic tent. Ice packs and popsicles. They all cooled enough to make it back to the car.
That song. It makes a heatwave sound fun. It makes a heatwave sound cruel. But it does nothing to capture the oppressive weight of sustained baking. The headaches, the lethargy, short-fused arguments, a desire to hang out in WalMart because your air conditioner is broken.
2019, June, 37C, Paris. The four of us huddled in a single room in our Airbnb, lights out, drinking warm tap water. A portable air conditioning unit does its best to expel hot air from the room through a four-inch tube out the open window. The rest of the window frame stuffed with sofa pillows. Outdoor air leaks through the gaps. We succeed in lowering the temperature by a couple degrees. “Let’s go to a movie.” Yes, that’s how we spent our last day in France.
My heat tolerance dissipated as I aged. I’m just like the rest of my family. We fire up the AC when the house hits 80F.
Whenever he calls my name
Soft, low, sweet and plain
Right then, right there, I feel that burning flame
Has high blood pressure got a hold on me?
Or is this the way love’s supposed to be?
It’s like a heatwave
We’re expecting 97F this week. I plan to cycle from my air-conditioned house to my air-conditioned car to my air-conditioned workplace. When I want to exercise, I’ll go to my air-conditioned fitness center. I’ll spend as little time as possible outside, even while knowing that 97F is on the low side of what many Americans will be dealing with this week, many homeless or without air-conditioned homes.
At the end of the week, we’ll read news reports about the hundreds of people who succumbed to heat. While I love the song Heatwave, both the version by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas that I danced to at middle-school mixers in the seventies, and the version by the Jam, that I rocked-out to as a young adult in the early eighties, I still don’t understand how the fun, shocked-by-a-new-love-affair lyrics somehow channels a week or ten days baking in lethal temperatures.
Listen to Heatwave:
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