A recurrent question in the highbrow marital discourse of our household is, “Why don’t you marry it?” As in, “So, if you like X, Y or Z so much, why don’t you marry it?” “It” typically is a foodstuff or an inanimate object. Less frequently the subject is a person, such as an actor who’s the opposite sex of the potential bride or groom. In those cases, “him” or “her” takes the place of “it.”
There’s witty domestic repartee of the type featured in old Hollywood movies, and then there’s the juvenile trash we talk. You may not be shocked to learn that the betrothal question tends to be followed by zingers like, “I would, but I’m already married” or “By God, I think I will!”
So it has been that many times in recent months, during pillow talk before lights out, I’ve fretted to Lynn about the gap since my last post to this blog, and have wondered aloud what the hell I should write about next. We are lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling fan, and Lynn’s thoroughly unhelpful response without fail, is “Why don’t you write about the fan, since you want to marry it.”
Some context. When Lynn goads me to write about those whirling blades that produce breeze, she isn’t specifically referencing our ceiling fan. What she is suggesting I pay tribute to in prose are all the fans in my life. Of which there are several. (Electronic, I mean. Flesh-and-bone, as in “fans of this blog,” perhaps fewer.) In fact, a small box fan is blowing air across my body from its perch on a bookcase to my right at this moment. This is the same fan that typically sits atop a table in our sunroom, delighting and soothing me with its gentle breeze and low white-noise hum while I watch TV on the La-Z Boy chair or read the newspaper on the sofa.
Downstairs, a small oscillating fan—generally set to remain stationary—also pulls two-room duty. That level of our house is a full basement that isn’t air-conditioned. It doesn’t get brutally hot down there, but it’s warm and stuffy in the summer. Thus, my downstairs fan serves as the coolest of friends when I’m pedaling on the stationary bike, or doing crunches, or catching up on my reading in the, um, “library,” let’s say.
At work, too, I have a tiny desk fan I turn on and point toward myself when the sun warms the room but air conditioning isn’t quite necessary. I bought it for, like, $5.99 during an end-of-season sidewalk sale at our neighborhood hardware store. So outsized is the pleasure this diminutive machine brings me—bathing my face in breeze and taking the edge off the aural distractions of the workplace—that I panicked several months ago at the thought of its mortality and ordered a couple of backups online.
Part of my fan-dom stems from the fact that I’ve always been what my parents call a “hotbox.” The etymology of this term is unclear to me, but given the nonsensical image it suggests—of a human being reduced or perhaps melted by heat into a square-shaped mass—and also the fact that my now-elderly parents are the only people I’ve ever heard say the word, I’m prone to think it dates to the era of that silly Mairzy Doats song. Which Google tells me was a big radio hit in 1944. People kept food cold in iceboxes back then, so maybe humans who simply could not be kept cool were known as hotboxes. Who knows? Anyway, what my parents meant, and what I was and still am, is a guy who’s quick to feel overly warm. (Except in the winter, when I’m a real coolbox. But let’s not get off track.) So, one of the two big attractions fans always have held for me is the real, physical comfort they provide.
The other big attraction is that sound. The whir. The steady hum that softens ambient noises and can serve as an enveloping, downy blanket. It’s lulling. It’s peaceful. It can be nearly magical. The sound of a whirring fan takes the heat off me, too, but in a different way than the blowing air does.
Take right now, for example. I like writing this blog, but it’s always a bit stressful trying to string together words that are going to be read and critically assessed by others—even an audience of friends. Yet, with the my fan beside me as I write, cooling my body with its rotating blades and my psyche with its gentle drone, the task seems somehow easier.
Also, sitting on the desk in front of me at this moment is today’s Washington Post. The lead headline is “U.S. Rating Downgraded for the First Time,” a reference to credit, borrowing and the economic mess this country is in. A sidebar heralds a “Minor Bright Spot,” which is that “modest job growth” means “a bit less dread for the economy.” Other front-page stories discuss the implications of financial ruin on President Obama’s reelection, and the fact that his political friends now see the man the Right has caricatured with some success as a Socialist as being, rather, a big wuss and a hapless enabler of the Tea Party.
Furthermore, I know from having read the entire paper earlier today that inside the “A” section are equally cheery articles on the impending Republican presidential candidacy of the astoundingly Neanderthal Texas Governor Rick Perry, the massacre of anti-government protesters in Syria, the near-apocalyptic European debt crisis, and the continued tanking of the Washington Post Co. itself.
It’s a cliché that everything one reads in the news these days is depressing, but it’s pretty much true. In fact, as I see it, the glass that is the planet Earth is way more than half-empty. There may be a less than a mouthful left in there, given the vast number of problems and the dearth of any solutions more visionary than adding apps to SmartPhones to better enable charitable giving to the likes of Greenpeace and Oxfam.
But, you know something? Sitting here in my darkened house—with my sleeping dog in the next room, with cool breeze on my face, and with no sound save the rhapsodic whir of the box fan—everything that’s going on in the world outside my window seems a little less immediate, a bit less frightening.
So, how about that—now I really have written about my love of the fan. I hope Lynn will be happy. But I must confess that, were she and I not already betrothed—and despite my guilt over wasting electric power at a time when energy conservation never was more important—I would be sorely tempted to marry this marvelous bringer of such peace.
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