It's cold here in Phoenix today. October's not the time to turn the furnace on so while the outside temperature tells me it's 54 the inside holds at 60 and I must admit to adding layers rather than paying the power company extra for warmth. And yet there's something somewhere in my memories that reminds me no matter what the weatherman here in Phoenix claims this isn't really cold the way I once knew cold...
A friend of mine once told me about spending a Wisconsin winter sleeping on his front porch in hopes of one day getting on the game show "I've Got A Secret". I suspect his real motive was to meet Betsy Palmer but we all had dreams of meeting our Goddess of movies and/or television in those days of raging hormones and that journey from pre to post puberty. For me it mattered little whether Annette Funicello was wearing mouseketeer ears or a bikini as long as she and I were together, gazing into each other's eyes and singing. I had no clue as to what might come after that but then again it didn't matter as long as she was there beside me. But that wasn't New York, "I've Got A Secret" and Betsy Palmer.
The day came when for reasons that were never explained I was given my own bedroom. No longer would my sister and I share the same room, the room where one night I lay awake listening as my mother yelled at my father and finally asked, "Do you want a divorce? Is that what you want?", and perhaps for the first time in my life wondered what the morning would bring.
A bed was fit into what could only be described as an over-sized closet. The thing I remember most about that bed was the worn out mattress, the kind that no matter where I placed myself I inevitably ended up in the middle, caught within a gravity well that drew me in like a black hole which would form every evening in my bed and hold me prisoner until sometime just after sunrise when I would somehow find the strength to break free from its' powerful cosmic grip once more only because it was demanded of me by a mother yelling that breakfast was ready. And so I would once again climb out of the comfort and security of a place that I came to realize later in life to be a second womb.
The room had no heat and air conditioning was unknown in the 50's in that little town in Wisconsin and so during the summer a fan was placed in the window, cardboard sealed the sides, and air was drawn through to facilitate some sort of airflow. In later years one would likely call it "white noise" but for me the sound of that fan running through the night was as much a constant as the sound of crickets and bullfrogs and as comforting. And though it was a valiant attempt to ward off the effects of a Wisconsin summer of high temperatures and even higher humidity I remember waking up in a bed soaked through from a night of sweating. I also want to remember that every new night there were freshly washed and line dried sheets on my bed.
And then there was winter in that unheated room of mine. To this day I have no remembrance of where mom might have kept all those blankets during the summer but come winter they would be found on my bed with me stuffed somewhere far beneath in a cave that created its' heat from what my body generated. The weight of those blankets once I'd wrestled with and overcome the layers upon layers would hold me in place through the night. I was pinned to the mattress by shear mass of material. In a very real sense I was the meat in the middle of a sandwich comprised on either side by mattress and blankets.
There would be frost on the inside of the window and once I'd stick my head out from under those blankets I could see my breath. On those mornings only an act of God or my mother could get me out from inside my self-made cocoon warmed to something just below one hundred degrees thanks solely to my body heat. And on those mornings when first toes would peak out from beneath the covers and then finally in a burst of adolescent energy, with a dash of survival instinct thrown in, an entire body was propelled on a dash for the warmth on the other side of that pseudo bedroom door and there truly was nothing else in the world that mattered in that moment.
It's likely that folks here in Phoenix wore parkas and gloves to work this morning thinking it was cold. When you're climbing out of your bed, barefooted and losing feeling in your toes you might say you know cold. When you're sleeping on your front porch through the whole of a winter in Wisconsin thinking of little more than being on "I've Got A Secret" and a chance to meet Betsy Palmer you might be said to know something more - a dream and a will to see it come true.
