The Hottest Day of the Year

It was August, and it had to be the hottest day of the year - if not the hottest day ever - so why on earth we decided it was such a brilliant idea to cook this humongous multi-course meal in the kitchen of this apartment that had no air conditioning is anyone's guess.

I had been hanging around with an ex-boyfriend's former roommate. Secretly, I had a crush on him, but it was just that at the time - a secret. We'd actually been on a date a few months before that, which had gone okay, but wasn't terribly stellar and we both appeared to have fairly lost interest in each other after that. Which, on my part, was a bunch of hooey because I was still kind of sweet on him.

But we had bumped into one another a couple of months later and all of a sudden were hanging out together a lot again, so when he knocked on my door one afternoon and suggested I come over to the apartment he was renting at the time and we'd fix dinner - well, I said sure. I was going to drop by the grocery store and pick up stuff for the meal, and would be over about mid-afternoon.

Once I got there, he and his roommate were so completely wasted, neither could hardly detach themselves from the couch and chair - which really wasn't that much a surprise - so obviously, right off I knew I was cooking by myself. To the kitchen I went, bags of groceries in hand.

My grandmother would have been proud. I cooked a feast fit for probably a dozen people, even though there were only three of us, a banquet fit for any Southern dining table. Fried green tomatoes. Squash. Green beans. Country fried steak. Baked potatoes. Cornbread. Biscuits. And much, much more.

The cooking went on for hours and the kitchen - no surprise, since there wasn't any air conditioning - was getting hotter by the minute. Heck, the whole house was.

The boys were (no surprise again) even more trashed by the time it was time to eat, and set upon the feast like they hadn't eaten in weeks. I was starving by then as well, so I ate my fair share, and the only cold drinks in the house were - you guessed it - beer, so I had several. We ate until we were all just about sick.

By the time dinner was over, the temperature in the house felt like 120 degrees, even though the sun had gone down and we were well into night by then. Everybody took a couch or chair, and we all talked about taking a nap -

But who could nap? It was a hundred million degrees in there. I was half sitting, half lying on a faux leather couch and just dripping rivulets, lying practically in a pool of sweat. And drinking more beer, as if that was going to really help.

The stereo had been going all day and night, and Jimi Hendrix's "Castles Made of Sand" was playing about the time I was thinking I had never been so hot and sweaty in my life, thinking I was going to pass out at any moment, whether it was from the godawful heat or the (by now overabundance of) beer.

Not too long after that, the fellow in question and I were a couple, and a few months later were moving down to Memphis together, having decided we couldn't live without each other after he'd moved to East Tennessee and we spent a few months a couple of hundred miles apart. Seven or so years later, it didn't end well, and every once in a while I think back to that unbelievably hot August day and wish I hadn't answered the knock on the door that afternoon. Then again, I would have missed a lot of positive things that happened as well, so I suppose it's all relative, but sometimes I still wonder how things all might have been different.