Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [110]
I’d make a great waiter. I can’t wait at all.
Hot Weather
I detest hot weather. That’s easy enough for me to say in the middle of a heat wave, but I’ll say the same thing on the coldest day of the year.
Somehow we don’t worry quite so much about the people subjected to relentless heat as we would if they had been through a flood or a hurricane. There are no pictures of it for television, and millions suffer silently.
Even though there are no pictures of heat and no one dies instantly as they might in a storm, in some ways heat may be worse than other natural disasters. In terms of physical damage to material things like houses and cars, the hurricane and the flood are worse, but when you’re talking about the human spirit, a heat wave is worse. People join together and work shoulder to shoulder with a great sense of camaraderie to fight the effects of a flood or a snowstorm, but in oppressive heat all effort is impossible.
Half a dozen memories of the worst heat I’ve ever experienced come to my mind when it gets hot.
My first month in the Army was spent at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in August. I will never forget having to stand at attention for hours on the red clay drill field on that one-hundred-degree day. The commanding colonel of our artillery battalion made a maddeningly slow inspection tour of the full field packs we had laid out on the ground, and our company was the one he came to last. Nine men fainted or decided to drop to the ground so they’d be carried off.
Later in World War II, I flew with the Eighth Air Force on bombing raids over Germany and I traveled across Europe with the First Army, but I never had that bad a day again.
When I go to bed at night, I often toss and turn without being able to go to sleep for as long as fifteen or twenty seconds. Insomnia has never been one of my problems. I can go to sleep when I’m worried, I can go to sleep with a headache and I can even go to sleep when I have one too few blankets over me on a cold night. There’s just one thing that keeps me awake, and that’s heat.
Late at night in those early Army days at Fort Bragg, I lay awake in the barracks thinking about ice water. One night I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up, waited for the guard on duty in the company street to pass, then I slipped out the door and crawled under the barracks. The barracks were built on stilts, and there was plenty of room to walk in a
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low crouch. Underneath, I made my way the length of the barracks to the next company street and waited silently again for the guard to pass. It was as though I was a German infiltrator about to blow up the base, but all I wanted was ice water.
I made my way under three barracks until I came to the post exchange. It was 2 a.m. by then and the PX had closed at nine. But there was something I knew. Every night as they cleaned up, they dumped all their ice on the ground outside the back door. I finally arrived, undetected, and there it was, just as I had hoped. Cakes of ice that had originally been so big that even in the heat they were still huge chunks glistened. I took two cakes so big I had to hold them braced on either hip. It was cold and wet but wonderful, as the icy water soaked through my pajamas.
It took me ten minutes to get back to the barracks and my friends were glad to see me. As a matter of fact, I do not recall a time in all my life when I was so great a hero to so many people.
We broke the ice into pieces, filled our canteen cups with them and then added water. For more than an hour, ten of us sat silently on our bunks in the sweltering heat, drinking that beautiful ice water.
I’m one of the privileged class who lives and works mostly in airconditioned buildings.