A few years ago a friend who lives in Las Vegas posted a
photo of his car’s dash board, which displayed a temperature reading of close
to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. “Still nowhere near as bad as New York City subway
in the summer,” was his photo caption.
New York City survived its first major heat wave of 2019
this past weekend and survived is as good as it gets.
Public pools were kept open an extra hour, though one pool had to close during the heat wave. Large numbers of homes
lost power throughout Brooklyn and Queens during some of the hottest hours of
Sunday. In Times Square, where the heat index got as high as 110 degrees, my
colleagues from Ask A New Yorker began frying an egg on the sidewalk.
To endure a New York City summer is to taste the atmosphere
of Hades if Hades had fewer redeeming qualities. It was Sunday and the heat was
high early. I couldn’t avoid doing the grocery shopping and I’d be subjected to
consistent air conditioning, at least while I was indoors.
At the local supermarket, I got to the crowded parking lot
and found a space on the perimeter. The blacktop of the lot was a welcoming
carpet of black lava. I saw containers of recycled glass sitting by the can and
bottle redemption machines. Four large tubs were filled with the smashed
remains of recycled bottles. The image summarized the weekend’s heat wave.
There in all the gleaming punishment its jagged shards could dish out, penned
in for all to see, the shards seemed to taunt us. This is my time, the broken glass could boast to passers-by. I was born of a blast furnace and your
city’s asphalt is a cool breeze in the mountains to be. How fragile you must
be…
I stopped to take a photo of the glass. It was so simple yet
so brutal.
“What’s wrong with my glass?” a man asked me. I turned to
see a man in a blue jumpsuit with ear protection headphones on. He was
collecting the recycled glass and thought maybe I was taking a photo to
establish some kind of complaint. I explained it was unusual to see all the
glass out of the machines like that and made for a neat photo. This was true. I
decided that a parking lot in 100-degree weather was not the place to have a
discussion about the murderous indifference of nature and human kind’s being at
the mercy of the Earth despite our collective ability to damage it, especially
as this gentleman was spending his day working in the hot sun collecting the
industrial chum of the recycling machines.
The supermarket requires shoppers use a quarter to unlock a
shopping cart from another. It also employs a locking system that stops someone
from wheeling a shopping cart off its premises. Because I parked on the edge of
the parking lot, my shopping cart locked up once I got it to my van. I loaded
my groceries but now the wheels on the cart couldn’t move.
I was enraged and determined that I would get this quarter
back if it was the last thing I ever did. I dragged the shopping cart across
the parking lot to one of the docking stations where you can return cars
without walking all the way back to the store. All the carts at the station had
been self-locked and I would not be able to get my quarter back there. I
dragged the cart all the way back to the store where an army of locked carts stood
silently as I strained and cursed my way to redemption.
I managed to lock my shopping cart to another and retrieve
my quarter from its infernal lock. I celebrated this victory by taking a photo
of the quarter held aloft before the shopping cart in victory.
If I had looked closer at the photo before driving home I
would have noticed my glasses inside a case on the seat. I have not yet found
these glasses. Heat wave: 1, Matthew Sheahan: 0.
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