An Ode to Nature’s Air Conditioning

By Jim Dodson

 

Some years ago, we moved into a historic house loaded with charm and only one thing missing – air conditioning.

To be fair, the old place actually came with an antiquated air conditioning system that shorted out the first hot night I attempted to switch it on.

A “climate control” technician arrived the next day to replace a malfunctioning compressor motor and several parts in the outside unit, then climbed up into the cobwebbed attic to have a look at the indoor compressor whose job it was to convey chilled air through second floor ceiling vents, in theory cooling the place from top to bottom.

The elegant old house was a dowager from America’s Gilded Age whose elderly owners in Pennsylvania hoped my wife and I might take off their hands and restore.

“Wow,” the tech said as we stood together in the dim, hot, cloistered air beneath the rafters, “this system is older than I am.”

He dated it from 1969, the year of Woodstock and the moon walk, then glanced around the dusty attic and pointed to a disassembled attic fan leaning against a wall near the peak vent. “I’ll bet that thing sucked a ton of hot air straight out of this place back in the old days. Those guys knew what they were doing when they built this house. That was nature’s air conditioning.”

“I wouldn’t mind having those old days back – or at least that attic fan,” I said, explaining how I’d grown up before air conditioning was commonplace and my family relied upon an attic fan to draw fresh air from the yard and adjacent woods into the house all night long, cooling things down and soothing fevered dreams.

“Bet it was nice, huh?” he said. “I’ve never slept in anything but air conditioning.”

“It’s nice to have,” I agreed. “But sometimes I feel like I’m sleeping in a beer cooler.”

He laughed. “I’ll bet you won’t say that come July and August.”

Following his repairs and check-over, he cranked up the jerry-rigged system, producing a few faint cool breaths of air from the upstairs ceiling vents. “I’m afraid 77 degrees is about the coolest it will ever get,” he reported a bit sheepishly, taking a final reading. “And it may be lucky to break eighty when August gets here.”

I thanked him for his efforts, switched off the system, and promptly drove to Lowe’s to purchase a couple large pedestal fans.

If it’s true what poets and child psychologists say – namely that our world views are shaped by the first ten years of life – then perhaps I’m simply a product of a distant, slower and un-air-conditioned world.

The first air conditioned building I can recall was a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in the small South Carolina town where we lived for one year after my father lost his newspaper in Mississippi. That was the summer of 1959. I was six.

By the store’s entrance a cute penguin on the window who looked like Chilly Willy of cartoon fame invited patrons to “Come inside where it’s cooooooool! Enjoy our lovely air conditioning! It’s free!”

This clearly made a big impression. For the first thing I did in the store when my mother disappeared around the end of the aisle was unhook my sandals and walk barefoot over the cool tiled floor.

I wound up in the baking aisle where I cleverly fashioned several large sacks of Martha White Self-Rising Flour into a place where I could sit and enjoy the the air conditioning and the cool tile floor. My brother and I had done this before, calling them “king seats.”

There I sat, pondering life and soaking up the refrigerated coolness when my mother wheeled around the corner with her cart and came to a stop.

She was clearly not pleased.

“What do you think you are doing?” she said.

I replied that I’d made myself a king seat and was enjoying the air-conditioning. I even quoted Chilly Willy.

“It’s free!”

She demanded to know where I’d left my sandals.

I couldn’t tell her.

“In that case, your highness, I think you should get your royal hiney off other people’s flour and go find those sandals and put them on as fast as you can.”

To this day, I can’t pass stacks of flour in the store without remembering my first encounter with air-conditioning. Marcel Proust, methinks, would understand completely.

Most Southerners of my generation experienced their first air-conditioning at a movie house or public building around 1960, but according to the comprehensive Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, air conditioning first appeared in the South at a cotton mill in Belmont, North Carolina, in 1906. By 1920, the device was being used to cool fabric mills, tobacco stemming rooms, and bakeries across the South.

Use in department stores, cafes, libraries and private homes, however, didn’t broadly develop until after World War II, at which point “air conditioning became an immutable part of Southern life,” according to the bible of Southern culture. “In varying degrees,” the authors note, “virtually all southerners have been affected, directly or indirectly, by the technology of climate control. Air conditioning has influenced everything from architecture to sleeping habits and has contributed to the erosion of several traditions, most notably cultural isolation, agrarianism, romanticism, poverty, neighborliness, a strong sense of place, and a relatively slow pace of life.”

Mississippi writer Eudora Welty was once asked by a northern journalist why the South produced so many excellent writers. “Porches,” she gave a famous one-word reply. In an age before mechanical air conditioning, she explained, porches were where Southerners gathered to cool off and spin tales after a long hot summer day.

My own view, shaped by a childhood cooled by a lazily turning fan blade of some sort, is that there’s no finer sleep to be found than by an open window with a fan pulling the smell of the outdoors into your bedroom – the mingling scents of newly mown grass and August honeysuckle in bloom or simply the cool musk of the nearby woods.

Sleeping by an open window permits a body to feel connected to the natural world rather than sealed inside a climate-controlled box. Some of my happiest summer nights were spent lying in my bed listening to approaching thunderstorms and feeling the rising wind of the approaching storm through a gently rippling screen.

The year I went off to college in 1971 with a suitcase and portable fan in hand, my parents installed central air conditioning in their home, rendering obsolete the attic fan that cooled the nighttime house during my teenage years.

My old bedroom was never quite the same, save for those nights when I shut my bedroom door, closed the air conditioning vents, and cranked open the windows to feel nature’s air conditioning. It was about that time I noticed that fewer and fewer people, including my parents, sat on the porch to catch the evening breeze and talk.

“The unnecessary refrigeration of America has become a chronic disease,” political pundit Joe Klein, obviously a kindred spirit, wrote in Time Magazine a few summers ago, noting how as summers grow warmer many Americans have simply grown accustomed to keeping their houses cooler in summer than in winter, using up more British Thermal Units annually than the total energy consumption of all but 21 countries.

Quoting an energy expert who claims Americans could save four percent in energy costs for every degree warmer they set their central air thermostats, Klein proposed that we all set our air conditioning units at 75-degrees – “a comfortable, if slightly chilly number to my mind” – and thereby do the right thing to preserve energy and stay cool on the hottest summer day.

Several years ago when my wife and I were house hunting in Greensboro, every house we checked out came with state-of-the-art central air conditioning.

One, however, also had an attic fan the size of an airplane engine.

“Does that fan still work?” I asked the sales agent with excitement.

“I believe it does,” she answered.

I turned it on and grinned like a kid on a king seat. It works magnificently.

We purchased the house a few days later. I won’t tell you the attic fan was the primary reason. But it certainly was a cool factor in our decision.

Given the growing intensity of Carolina summers, to be honest, I’m often grateful to have an air conditioned house to return to at the end of a long, hot day.

But let the evening temperatures dip below 70 degrees and I become a different creature, flinging open windows like a kid who’s ditched his sandals, cranking up the attic fan to bring nature’s glorious air conditioning into the house.

Some things never change, I suppose.

Besides, it’s still free.

 

 

This Simple Life originally appeared in O.Henry in August 2013.

Life on Earth

This story by Jim Dodson originally appeared in O.Henry magazine in March 2017.

 

Sunday morning in the kitchen, two hours before sunrise.

A deep silence fills the house. At this hour, I often hear a still, small voice that possibly belongs to the Almighty but – more often than not — is just Boo Radley the cat demanding to be let in and fed after his nighttime prowl through the neighborhood.

I am a butler to a roaming tomcat.

On the plus side, though, when I step outside, Sunday morning still lies like a starry quilt over the world, with a thin quarter moon hanging on the western horizon like a theatrical prop in a school play. Somewhere, miles away, a train rumbles by, reminder of a world that is always going somewhere without me. Happily, I am going nowhere except the end of the driveway to fetch the morning newspaper I probably won’t get to for days, a Sunday man beneath a gorgeous hooked moon. As I pick it up, the first bird raises its voice, a beautiful threnody to fellow early-risers. Within minutes, birdsong emanates across the neighborhood.

Back inside, I sit for a spell with my first coffee, putting the Sunday paper aside to read my Sunday Essentials, favorite books that run the gamut from the sonnets of Shakespeare to the essays of Wendell Berry, with a dash of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver for proper spiritual seasoning.

This particular Sunday is a book long out of print, a memoir of spiritual rejuvenation first published the year I was born, the story of a successful big-city writer who was forced by reasons of health and age to return to the small Wisconsin town of his birth. There he built a big house on family land but initially struggled to find his place on ancestral earth.

“A man, faced with the peculiar loneliness of where he doesn’t want to be,” writes Edward Harris Heth in My Life on Earth, “is apt to find himself driving along the narrow, twisting country roads, day or night, alone, brooding about the tricks life can play.”

Life, he discovers, is lived by degrees and open eyes. Little by little, the author’s lonely drives yield a remarkable transformation of the angry city man. Heth gets to know – and admire — the eccentric carpenter who is building his house, fussing over every detail, and the astrologer who picks and prunes her apple orchard by the light of the moon.

He drops by a church supper and meets his neighbors, including the quirky Litten sisters “who play a mean game of canasta and have an Old Testament talent for disaster.” The ancient Litten girls both feed and inspire Heth to broader exploration.

His closest neighbor, Bud Devere, is a genial young farmer who always shows up uninvited just to chat about the most mundane topics – weather, farm prices, a new hat — boring the author to tears, though it is he who invites the author for a drive along Willow Road.

“I did not want to see what Bud saw. But the reluctance began fading away in me that first time we went down the Willow Road. It covers scarcely more than a mile, but in that mile you can cover a thousand miles.” Along it the author sees spring wildflowers in bloom, undisturbed forests, a charming farmhouse riotous with narcissus and hyacinth. He feels his own pulse begin to slow down and something akin to pleasure take root.

“Bud kept silent. He wanted me to open my own eyes…Since then, I’ve learned how many country people know and enjoy this art of the small scene and event, the birth of a calf, a remembered spot, the tumultuous labor and excitement of feeding the threshers, who come like locusts and swarm for a day over your farm and disappear again at night, the annual Welsh singing competition in the village – these are the great and proper events of a lifetime.”

Funny thing is, I haven’t the foggiest idea how this gem of a little book came into my possession, a surprise bestseller when it first appeared in 1953. But somehow it got on my book shelf and found its way into my soul.

Now the sun is up and so are the dogs. I am a butler to them, too. They eat like hounds after the chase, gulping their food in anticipation of the early morning walk.

The neighborhood is old, with massive hardwoods that soar like cathedral arches overhead. When the light of dawn or end of day reaches them, no manmade structure on earth can rival their majesty. Down the block, a man in his bathrobe steps out and shuffles hurriedly to the end of his sidewalk to fetch his Sunday morning paper. He gives a perfunctory wave, bobs his head and hurries back inside with a gentle slam of the door, eager to read what calamities have fallen overnight.

The news of the world can wait. For it never really changes, a story as old as cabbages and kings. Besides, we are briefly off the clock on Sundays, free to wander as we please and footloose upon the earth, not taking phone calls, officially out of range, in search of a more private divinity.

Truthfully, I sometimes feel the heaviness of midsummer. I am a winter’s boy, you see, though my wife is an endless summer girl who dreams of white lilacs in bloom.

“What is divinity?” asked Wallace Steven in his poem Sunday Morning,

“If it can come only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.”

 

By the time Lady Summer Bough and Lord Winter Branch reach the park, the strengthening sun has filled the trees with even more birdsong. Across the way stands the site of a spectacular ancient oak I must have peddled by a half a million times as a kid on his way to the ball field; it looked like a lighted candelabra, a sentinel of the passing seasons limned with golden light at the edges of the day.

Sad how I needed to live sixty summers before I noticed what a magnificent creature it was.

Only deepening the grief I felt upon discovering that the city, for no clear reason, cut it down.

 

It is middle Sunday morning at church, our usual pew, back right. The young preacher is named Greg. Not long ago we attended his ordination as a priest. My cheeky wife thinks Greg is almost too good looking to be a priest. Lots of women in the parish seem to share this view.

The gist of his Sunday sermon is the need to look with fresh eyes upon Matthew’s Beatitudes. But the true strength of his Sunday morning message lies in the suggestion that we all should aspire to become our truest selves and possibly Christian mystics. “Don’t be scared by that word mystic,” he urges. “It simply means someone who has gone from an intellectual belief system to actual inner experience.” The journey from head to the heart, he says, means we are all called to be mystics.

Back home, Sunday afternoon passes quietly in the garden, pulling weeds and praying for rain. Having pulled down an old pergola and cleaned out a handsome brick planter long overgrown by English ivy, I lose complete track of time transplanting Blue Angel hostas and a pair of broadleaf hydrangeas, repairing a much-loved birdfeeder, hanging anniversary chimes high in an ancient white oak and watering the ostrich ferns. If one is closer to God’s heart in a garden, then perhaps I am a backyard mystic with dirty hands after all.

By Sunday sundown, my knees are aching but the healing is real. Renewed for a week of cabbages and kings, we settle down for a quiet supper and to catch our current British import on Netflix before bed, though I tend to doze off half way through the program, still thinking about the mystery book that found its way to me.

Happy to report that Edward Heth finally found his place on earth. It took a new neighbor named Jane who relocated from Chicago to the country, a widowed city woman who learned to see the simple pleasures of life in the slow lanes through his eyes. They decide to marry. “Then, in time,” he writes, “our last days together will be as rich as our youth. We can do helpful things, quiet a fear, sustain an illusion, sit by each other’s sickbeds, hunt each other’s lost cows. And what more can any man ask than to know he will not die alone?”

Sunday ends as Boo Radley goes out for another night on the town and the dogs follow us to bed. For some reason I can’t quite explain, I seem to sleep so well on Sunday nights.

At Greensboro’s United House Of Prayer for All People, the Madison Heavenly Sounds Trombone Shout band lifts the spirit and feeds the soul

This story originally appeared in O.Henry magazine in March 2016.

By Grant Britt • Photography By Sam Froelich

 

The music hits you with a punch to the heart. Like a gospel freight train thrumming down the rails, it makes everything in the surrounding area vibrate with the brassy rhythm. Band members and audience alike bounce to the beat. You can’t keep still — the sound permeates your body as it vibrates up your breastbone, tickling your spine. As trombone slides reach for the heavens, Greensboro’s United House of Prayer for All People swells to the strains of the Madison Heavenly Sounds Trombone Shout band, and all heaven is breaking loose.

Under the leadership of House Of Prayer founder Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace, switching out the organ in church services for brass instruments first came into vogue in the late 1920s. The Cape Verde native, whose first church was founded in Charlotte in 1926, had a lone trombonist with him at first. But as Grace sought a way to attract people to his services, he added brass bands. These were originally driven through town on a flatbed truck to attract crowds to hear Grace’s message

The bands also created another House of Prayer tradition: The kitchens found in every HOP today. “Daddy Grace started this because in the ’20s people didn’t have jobs or food; there was no welfare, no food stamps, no Social Security, so he started a
food program,” says Apostle H.M. Swaringer, who presides over the Greensboro church. “He would have soup kitchens, and people would line up and come in and get their bowl of soup and their bread. His ideology was a hungry man doesn’t want to hear about the word of God. Feed a man’s belly and you can talk to his soul.”

At a recent HOP service, there did seem to be a lot of well-fed souls in attendance. The spirit was being heard, and it moved your heart, your soul and your feet. There’s no mystery as to why they call these horn-wielding praise bearers a shout band. When this music starts to swell, it lifts you up, encouraging you to shout and dance.

Leader Andrew Kittrell fronts this brass furnace, blasting high-pitched praise to the heavens. As the band swells behind him, the congregation is buoyed up on pulsating waves of worship. The band currently has as many as seventeen members. I witnessed seven ’bones, a tuba, sousaphone and two drummers, snare and a kick making a joyful noise no one could ignore. You feel the floor vibrating beneath your feet as the band takes it up a notch. Kittrell hollers “Thank you, Daddy,” as the spirit moves him, and many members of the congregation at the Cathedral on Dudley Street join him, dancing and shouting in the spirit.

The service is truly an all-ages event. Even the smallest kids in the congregation are fully engaged in the proceedings, many already in training for future musical service. The church takes a unique approach to getting children interested in the music with what they call fist bands. The children emulate the instruments with their hands, arms and lips. “They ball up one fist, and since we use tubas and trombones, they turn their arm up over their head as the bass horn, and that’s how they learn how to play their instrument,” Swaringer says.

Children as young as 3 blow into their fists at first, making the sounds of the horn while pumping an arm like a trombone slide or pressing imaginary tuba keys. As they get older, kids are given a mouthpiece from a ’bone or tuba to practice on before graduating to an actual instrument. “They hear the sounds, and that sound is embedded in them, until by the time they are seven or eight they can play an instrument as good as a person who has been taking music all their lives,” Swaringer adds. Reading music is not a requirement, and few band members do, playing entirely by ear. “Reading music is phenomenal,” Kittrell says, “but to have the gift of playing by ear is unbelievable. It’s a gift from God.”

“Run man” Khari Mincey, who also plays an important role in the band, doesn’t read music either. “It’s an extension of your voice,” he says of his instrument. “My dad used to tell me all the time, ‘If you can sing a note, you can play a note.’” Born and raised in the church, Mincey started playing when he was age 4. “When you play, you’re projecting yourself,” Mincey says. “That’s you, through an instrument.” His “run man” duties include playing three- or four-part harmony, being in the background and keeping everything under control. Swaringer, who played in New York City’s HOP shout band, says the run man’s main duty is to keep the band moving as the bass element.

“The bass does all the turning,” Swaringer says. “Bass — he calls, and he carries ’em into it, and the rest follow . . . and that’s the way it is.” The band is a family tradition for many members. Kittrell’s grandfather, Preston Kittrell, was told by Daddy Grace to come back from Virginia to Greensboro to start a band. “When he was told to go back to Greensboro in the ’30s to start a band, he came back as one trombone player,” Swaringer says. “And out of that one birth of trombone they got a band.”

It’s a unique sound. Swaringer says some folks compare it to New Orleans brass bands, but he says HOP has a more upscale, African beat. Crescent City brass bands make you want to strut, the shout bands have a swooping glide, the horns slithering around underneath the melody with a slippery rhythm dominated by bass and drums that makes you jump and shout. The leader and most of the players play the trombone like a trumpet, like an entire choir of Fred Wesleys, James Brown’s former bandleader who pioneered high-pitched funk trombone. It’s for edification, jubilation, for people to respond, and it lifts a burden off them,” the Apostle says. “It’s a spiritual thing that lifts you up rather than puts you down.”

And because the members play by ear, there’s no sheet music to go by, so no performance is ever the same. They can’t play the same thing twice because they’re taught it’s not about what you hear, it’s about what you feel. Swaringer contends that aspect confounded some of the greats of jazz who saw the bands perform.

The Apollo Theater was right across 125th Street in Harlem from the House of Prayer Swaringer attended, and he says it wasn’t unusual for performers to stop in and listen to the band after their gigs at the famed venue. Swaringer claims the band even impressed the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. “They would try to write down what they were hearing, but they could never get it,” he recalls. “And they would talk about it: ‘How do you guys do that? And they would come back the next night, and the band would play, and they wouldn’t play nothing they had played the night before, and they’d be going, ‘Where did that come from?’”

The Apostle says it was more than the music that drew them: “One reason they would come to the House of Prayer was that they couldn’t eat in the places they were playing,” Swaringer says. “The HOP had food, and they would come up there to eat their dinners cause the HOP’s service wouldn’t get out till 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.”

But at the House of Prayer, both belly and soul are catered to equally. “The band in the church plays the most important part,”
Swaringer says. “They’re in the beginning of the service, the middle, at the end. If the choir sings a song, when they finish, to enhance that, they are the sugar in the coffee, they are the sweetness in the tea, they enhance the meal. I’ve given them the bread, now here comes the dessert, the music that comes afterward.”

But the Apostle wants folks to know the band is much more than musical caterers. “The philosophy and the doctrine of this church is to save our young men. We use our musicians to teach our kids, and as a way of keeping our children out of harm’s way,” he says. “When you have a band, twenty or thirty young black men and they are serving God, that shows people in the community that all our black men are not thugs and gangstas.”

Although the band’s venue is in the sanctuary, they do occasionally play in public, as well. The shout band Swaringer was a member of in New York toured the world, playing Spain, Belgium and the Opera House in Sydney, Australia. “Those people had never heard of gospel, period,” he says of the aria-loving Aussie audience. “They’d never heard anything like that. We turned that place out. We just took ’em to church.”

The New York–based shout band also played the White House, The Smithsonian and Kennedy Center. His dad’s shout band played Carnegie Hall.

The Madison Heavenly Sounds have played out-of-town gigs at other churches as well as the local Festival of Lights, and are in negotiations to join the lineup for both The National Folk Festival and 17Days. Anyone is welcome to attend the Sunday morning services, but if you want a taste of what the shouting is all about in a more casual setting, the Apostle has a surprise in store — for the band as well as the public.

“They don’t know they’re doing rehearsals on Fridays, yet,” the pastor says slyly, as Kittrell and Mincey receive this new blessing, heads bowed. “When the weather breaks, they’re going to be across the street [in the church parking lot] doing barbecues.” Meanwhile, the band will host some open-air rehearsals. That way those who come will not only be entertained, “They’ll also get the barbecue and the fish.” Now that’s truly a blessing worth shouting about.

 

In a future edition of O.Henry, writer Grant Britt will recall his own days of reaching for the heavens with his horn in the Key West Funeral Band. In the meantime, he rumbles about music from his memento-crammed Greensboro abode, tooting his own horn for various and sundry publications.