When things get heated, it’s best to keep cool
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- July 13, 2024
- 715
Let’s start with a logic puzzle: If I told you there are 87 steps to the top of the Lincoln Memorial, could you tell me why?
Go ahead and cogitate … we’ll get back to that in a few minutes.
A high school friend of mine is heading back home this week, leaving behind the furnace that is Arizona, specifically Tucson.
He’s lived out there since Moses was a pup and has always been rather phlegmatic whenever the subject of its cruel heat comes up.
“It’s worse than you can imagine,” he says, “and don’t believe any of that ‘dry heat’ nonsense. This place’ll kill you just for fun.”
“Sounds a lot like the ocean,” I said. “I try to tell people, but ... ”
“They just won’t listen,” he said, finishing my thought for me.
“On the plus side,” I said, “it only takes like 90 seconds to drown.”
He saw where the conversation was going and added, “It takes several days to die from heat exposure. You’d suffer a long time.”
We were both quiet for a few seconds, pondering our mortality.
When you approach the threshold of leaving your 60s behind and begin to appreciate the fact there will soon be a “7” as the first digit in your age, something subtle shifts in your existential axis.
Maybe you own the Simon and Garfunkel album titled “Bookends.” Released in 1968, it was most famous for the single “Mrs. Robinson” but also featured “America,” “Fakin’ It,” “A Hazy Shade of Winter” and, as if it needed another hit, “At the Zoo.”
It’s hard to explain the world we were lucky enough to inhabit.
But in the midst of all that brilliant songwriting, Paul Simon included what might have seemed like a throwaway line then, but one that becomes more and more prescient with each passing year.
It’s from “Old Friends” and includes these six haunting words:
“How terribly strange to be 70.”
He was 25 when he wrote that song, maybe 26. Just a young man.
A couple of years later, Neil Young penned a tune called “Old Man” and touched a lot of hearts when he sang in his off-key yet always engagingly edgy tenor, words that still carry a lot of weight:
“Old man, take a look at my life,
I’m a lot like you were.”
It’s sadly ironic that at a time when so many gifted artists were dying so young — Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, et cetera — that so many songwriters looked down the road.
Leave it to Dylan to sum it up — “May you stay forever young.”
I was talking with a friend the other day — a fellow music freak — and he was excited about seeing a band called Raspberry Smoke.
“Are they new?” I asked, trying not to sound too stupid and failing.
“Dude,” he said. “Been around since 2000 … but they’re touring again. Got tickets to see ’em in Nashville … at the Ryman.”
“That,” I said, “is the first word you’ve said that I understand.”
The Ryman, of course, housed the original Grand Ole Opry.
How terribly strange to be (almost) 70 and still learning.
Which brings us back, circuitously enough, to the beginning of this essay — specifically, the 87 steps one must climb to get to the top of the Lincoln Memorial. By now you may have solved the puzzle.
Eighty-seven is — wait for it — four score and seven, the very same four words that begin Lincoln’s immortal “Gettysburg Address.”
It still amazes me it’s only 272 words long and took less than two minutes to deliver. By comparison this piece has 611 words.
And I’m still not finished …
The last time I was in Washington was the summer of 1990, and if anyone is planning a similar visit, please delay it until the fall.
No place on the face of the Earth gets hotter than D.C. in August.
I remember trudging up and down the Mall with my fiancée, my brother and his family and feeling a bit light-headed in the midday oven. The whole place is concrete and steps, not a lot of shade to be had and precious little in the way of water fountains, though we did come across a guy who was offering free bottles of Snapple.
“No thanks,” my brother said, explaining it had to be a scam and was probably illegal and that we’d be better off paying for it.
Months later he blamed the heat.
“What were we?” he asked with a sigh. “A mile from the sun?”
With that unanswerable question in mind, I’ll bring this weekly sermonette to its conclusion … go forth and remain cool.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where tales of hot summers past are always welcome.