Dog Day Morning in Lower Alabama

August 16, 2007

It's just one of those almost-unbearably-hot days that August brings to Fairhope every year. Too hot to be alive, the locals say. But we're alive anyway, kept moving by air conditioning and gasoline (fueling the air conditioned cars), and, although productivity is low, everything else is moving along.

It's too hot to sell a house because nobody is buying houses. The heat has something to do with it, and if you have a little oddball house like mine on a wonderful lot but without the Viking Range in the kitchen and even without a second bathroom, the market would be slow in the best of times. The right buyer has yet to have a look at it. In fact, the house has been on the market for over a month and only two people have looked at it. The first proclaimed the rooms too small and the second wasn't really ready to move at all.

To say nothing of the stock market, real estate mortgages, the War in Iraq and all the other reasons that people are staying in their air conditioned houses waiting for a better climate to walk out the door. Our TVs inform us that hurricanes have indeed begun to churn up in the Gulf. All this and Elvis is still dead.

Then there's the Imus thing. He got a settlement from CBS who broke its contract with him, and now he's being sued by one of those basketball players who says she wants her life back. I wish I could sue somebody to get my life back too. I'm sorry to say the litigation-happy lady (woman? girl?) is the same Kia Vaughn who did so well the first time around in this little charade, saying "Unless there's a new definition for the word 'ho' then that's not who I am." Now she says having been called that -- even once, even by a man who has apologized publicly and privately, over and over -- has ruined her life and a little monetary compensation is in order.

I've been wishing Imus could get his life back too, and be back on morning tv putting the screws to the politicians courageous enough to appear on his show, and working on his ranch for children with cancer and his fund-raising for the S.I.D.S. Foundation and for autism. He may indeed get back on the radio, but those days of that edgy and often offensive wake-up show are gone for good.

Well, let's all take our power back. A little hot weather won't hurt us. We can survive a little drop in our investment portfolio; a little less tv and more personal creativity might be good for us. And even though Elvis is still dead, at least Johnny Depp is still alive.

Unlike the people in Mark Twain's day ("Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it), we can do something about the weather. We have seen the worst of hurricanes and survived. We can find fair hope that we shall again. And that all of this shall pass, leaving us to reminisce about warm weather and the lazy days of summer.