“Did I leave the door open?”,  I asked the dog.   He’d have been the reason that I would have left the door open, so I figured he owed me some indication of an answer. 

 He just wagged his tail, and remained stretched out diagonally, filling the office floor.

I could hear the air conditioner running, but it was getting hot in here, even for five in the afternoon.  Leaving the door open, letting all the cold air escape and the desert heat enter, was the only explanation I could think of for the rising temperature.

I got up to check, squeezing around the dog, making sure I didn’t step on the long hairs of his tail each time he flopped it on the floor. 

The door wasn’t open.

There are a number of cute ways Tucsonans use to describe the desert heat… ‘it’s a dry heat’, ‘anything below 70 degrees is sweater weather’, ‘when it hits 100 the ice on the Santa Cruz River finally melts’… but, straight up, when  it is monsoon season, which it is right now, it’s HOT and HUMID.  

It had been hitting 104 for daytime highs for weeks now, but that’s do-able if you stay inside during the hottest part of the day. And blazing temperatures all day hold the promise of big, rainy thunderstorms in the evening, which I like.

I turned around and bumped into the dog, who had gotten up to follow me, and went into the hallway to look at the thermostat. It read 84 degrees. I had set it to hold on 79.

I pushed the spot on the touchpad that changed he ‘hold’ temperature, and made it read 79 degrees.  It complied, but only for a moment, then it flashed back to 84.

I repeated the process, and got the same results.  I tried it one more time, just in case.

There’s a saying about doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, but I’d probably go insane trying to remember it….

I turned the air conditioner off.  I waited twenty minutes.  I turned it back on.  I repeated my previous process, with the same danged results.

The air conditioner would run, but it was definitely not making “cold”, and kept insisting that the temperature I wanted was 84.

I called my husband at work.

“Honey, I hate to tell you this, but I think the air conditioner is broken.”

If I had been the least little bit clever, I might have given him the news by saying, “Hey, honey, your wife is really HOT,” but then I would have had to disappoint him with the real news anyway.

When he got home, he checked fuses and compressors and did all the manly electronic things I wouldn’t dare.  He  didn’t  keep pressing the touchpad thermostat as I had done.

He called and arranged for a repairman.

My next step would have been to call the repairman, too, just so you know.

We spent the evening moving around as little as possible, glad that we at least had fans, and the TV to watch.

I slept last night with a wet cloth, moving it from arms to legs to forehead, letting the breeze from the fan evaporate the water, keeping me just cool enough to sleep. I used to do that when I was a little girl, before central air conditioning was the norm, when sleeping porches were the luxury.

Around midnight, the curtains began to billow, and the blinds clunked against the window frame. The wet cloth was almost dry, but it got momentarily cold in the wind, and then I heard the first good rain of the monsoon rushing against the skylight.

The repairman will be here in about an hour, he said.  It really is starting to get quite hot in the house. The thermostat in the hallway reads 92. The dog has moved from behind me in the office to lying diagonally across hallway on the cool tile. The door is open, and the desert heat is coming in.

Leslie

I dumped the change jar on the kitchen counter and started to organize the nickels into four stacks of five coins each.

“I’m going to take some of this change to the bank for deposit,” I told my husband. 

 “Cool,” he said, refraining from asking why I had decided to do that today, at six thirty in the morning.

I wouldn’t have had an answer for a “why” question, other than I had tried to add one thin dime to the top of the container and it kept sliding off, taking a cascade of other coins with it, making it seem like the appropriate time to clean out the coinage.

I could have taken the mass to one of those “count it yourself” coin machines at the grocery store, but they charge almost 10% to do the automated counting, which is usurious in my book, and anyway, I like playing with coins, especially dimes.

It used to be more fun to play with coins. Pennies were ‘wheat ear’, and if you always checked your small change, like your coin collector Grandfather said, “you might find an S-VDB one day”.  Nickels had pictures of Indians and buffaloes, and would transport me to the wild west.  ‘Mercury’ dimes were dainty and made a silvery sound, and Quarters were big and made great pretend doubloons when I ran them through my fingers as if they were pirate treasure.

Coins did have other importance for me, other than tactile.

They were power.

I would walk down dusty Randolph Avenue, what seemed like a mile, but was only one tenth of that, carrying in my pocket what seemed like my small fortune, but was only a tenth of a dollar, to the Dairy Queen, hoping that the man who owned the place had made chocolate instead of just vanilla, and would be able to trade one silvery dime for an entire dixie cup of ice cream that I could never make last all the way back home.

In the middle of a hot summer day, if the Good Humor man happened by, jingling the bells that sounded like dimes and quarters in your pocket, I didn’t have to ask for money, but could wave him to a stop with my very powerful dime, mouth-watering for a Fudgecicle.

One quarter and a dime would give me a ride on the public service bus from in front of my house to “uptown”, where an additional one quarter and one dime would be admission to the movies and a box of nonpareils that I could never make last all the way through the cartoons and the movie.

But mostly I liked the sound. It was Captain Kidd’s treasure or Scheherazade’s necklaces or the tintinnabulation of fairy voices.

“Holy smokes! Guess how much change was in that jar?” I asked, as I scraped the last of the coin stacks into a big plastic bag destined for the Bank.

My husband was outside watering the bonsai trees when I finished counting, so he didn’t answer.

I grabbed my coffee cup and went outside in the morning sun to watch him.

“One hundred and one dollars in change in that jar,” I said.

“No way,” he said.

“Yes, way,” I said.

“This is the time of year to really keep an eye on the change you get,” I said. “Kids are home for the summer, and they’ll be filching the family coin collections to buy ice cream. Might even find some silver.”

 I almost said ‘aarrgghh’, like a pirate, but didn’t.

Leslie

PS  I trundled the bag of change to the Bank today, and was told that they won’t take it in deposit if it isn’t in rolls. Guess what I did this afternoon? Aaaarrrggghhhh…