A long way from home

I grew up in New England.

The summers, especially the "Dog Days of August" were sultry; the fall was crisp and delicious, and then the "frost was on the pumpkin" and the rains came and then the howling "Nor' Easter" storms that closed all schools, we heard the good news on the radio in the morning. Serious businessmen like my father trekked through the drifts to work anyway, never missed a day.

Boston as always thought the best of itself and everyone said that the vigorating seasons were what made people alert and industrious, compared, for example, to Mexico, where everyone slept away the day, and Havana, God knows what they did down there. But then you'd think about that, whatever they did do down there, maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all, the warm wind on the Malecon and the bar lights twinkling and one night when I finally went there to see what was going on I went into one the bars and there was a juke box playing Nat King Cole and a couple of girls sitting at the bar and...well that's another story. The funny thing is, my father, the serious businessman, once had a Cuban girlfriend. But this was the tropics, people ran away to places like that, it was hot and sticky and sweating far into the night, the weather just did things to you. Made you irresponsible.

But getting back to Boston, as soon as the days that my mother called the "dog days of August" were over, bright and sparkling September came along and I walked to school kicking the yellow and orange maple leaves. I loved that weather, the smell of those leaves burning in the fall. Halloween was just around the corner, and then soon enough the "frost would be on the pumpkin."

But all of that was half century ago at latitude 42, and aside from my nightly film festival of dreams of those sparkling times and those Kodachrome neighborhoods, my days now, and probably all my future days, will be at a very different latitude, latitude 13. Think Djibouti, or Cape Verde, or the Marshall Islands, or who knows where in Africa.




Now I live a long way from home.

Think heat.

Think humidity.

Or think Bangkok, Thailand, where I am writing this entry, waiting for the sun to go down, then I'm going out into this traffic you see here, and do some things I'll discuss later in this blog.

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Last year the makers of "Old Spice" deodorant for men published the results of a study of the "sweat rankings" of American cities. The winner was Phoenix Arizona but Texas cities like Dallas and Houston and several Florida cities were right up there and since I've always had a bad memory of Houston I'm going to use that place as a kind of bench mark, to compare Boston and Bangkok.




Take a look at the "march of temperature" through the seasons in three cities: Boston, which had a famous heat wave the first few days in August, 2006 (pink circle), a hundred thirty six people died including one woman sitting inthe bleachers at Fenway Park; Houston, which as I said seemed to me to be really awful, and Bangkok, awfuller yet. The red points are the highest temperature of the day, the green the highest dew point temperature of the day (more on that later). When the temperture is more than 30, you will begin to sweat, even if you are just sitting looking at this blog.

As you can see, that's most afternoons in Bangkok (the daily high is usually at about three o'clock).

You might say that Boston heat wave got up as high as Bangkok, but even thoughthey were passing out cold water on the half deserted Boston streets you could still sweat pretty effectively there because the dew point temperature was low, down around 24. In Bangkok, in contrast, the dew point hardly gets below 26 most of the year, so all that sweat just soaks your shirt and hardly cools a body at all.