Heat Wave

The newest Bear owes most of his body to my four and a half hour “sit-in” at my local, air-conditioned Barnes and Noble store. I live in a mobile home, the long, singlewide kind with metal siding that pretends to be an oven during a heat wave. It began to do that at ten yesterday morning and by eleven I decided to run away.

Local news had reported the opening of designated “cooling centers” in the area, but I prefer the Mall. Community centers and senior centers attract people who want to talk about the hot weather and all I want to do is knit. And think. And read.

I like this particular Mall. It usually is quiet and eventless. But I remember last year’s hot spell when people sat on the ground, along walls, everywhere they could find an empty spot, and so I came early yesterday, planning to occupy an overstuffed chair inside the bookstore for most of the afternoon. My plan worked. I bought the newest Time Magazine, lined up water bottle and knitting bag in front of me, preparing for the long haul. I was the third person arriving in the sitting area. The other two were young men, one engrossed in a pictorial novel, the other in a book of cartoons.

Eventually the place filled with overheated shoppers and the Barnes and Noble reading police interrupted her bookcase dusting duties to make her obligatory rounds.

“Excuse me Sir, are you o.k.?”

The young man lifted a sleepy head from his Manga novel and nodded, “Yes.”

“We don’t allow sleeping in the store,” she explained.

This caused me to make some noise turning the page of my Time Magazine. Just in case knitting isn’t allowed either. In my mind I prepared a defense speech that would include the dollar amount of my yearly book purchases at Barnes and Noble and a calculated look of indignation. I am an old person, I would tell her, and doesn’t that give me the right to air-conditioning? I might faint, you know, if you chase me into the hot outdoor afternoon. But the young woman picked up books that other sitters had left behind and then returned to her dusting without paying attention to me.

I don’t even sit that long on an airplane without stretching, without getting up to go to the restroom. But then, on an airplane nobody would plop down in my seat as soon as I got out of it. I saw a few shoppers eyeing us, waiting for an empty spot. Two young girls were sitting on the floor. The Manga reader closed his eyes again. An older woman made a few groaning sounds and sank deeper into her overstuffed chair. The young woman next to me, sitting on a hard wooden chair, shifted her weight and rubbed her back. My Bear was growing while I read Time Magazine from beginning to end.

Though I am not done with the storytellers yet, I had decided to begin the next group of Bears. The Rainbow Parade. I had brought small, neatly rolled balls of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple and used the colors at random. When I was almost at the end of the last leg – it was almost four o’clock - I decided it was time to stick my face into the Safeway freezer for a while, maybe get some ice cream. For a moment I wondered if my legs were still working. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if I got up and sagged to the floor like an empty sack? I stashed my belongings into my knitting bag and edged forward in the chair. A man with a big stack of books in his arms watched from a few feet away. As soon as I stood up he moved closer. By the time I reached the door and looked back he had made himself comfortable in the chair and had begun to read.

Later, at home, I tried to finish the Bear, but the stitches would not come off my bamboo needles. And so I turned my fan on full blast, aimed it at the computer and played solitaire until it was time for the news on TV. Now it is after midnight and it is still too hot to knit. I guess tomorrow I will go to a “cooling center” until it is time to join the other knitters at the Green Planet Yarn Shop.