Do you remember the cold?

Today, it is a hundred degrees, quite literally and exactly.  And so I am holed up in my living room- the studio will be too hot, the ac there can never keep up with a top-floor, south-facing, insulation-free, 1,000 sq foot space- and so I work here, fairly cozily, during the summer.  Closer to the fridge.  I shall get fat with all the food breaks.  In my garden, the morning glory vines have become a wild, voracious, trembling green mass- they look like Dr Seuss characters and seem to grow a foot a day.  The heat has baked certain- crucial- bits of plastic off our bicycles, which we unwisely left outside in a sunny corner.  Yesterday, when we searched out a pool for swimming, the swim was quite delightful- but after a few lap of exertion, the water started to feel hot on my skin.  But evening walks in search of gelato are lovely....  

To slip into another time and another temperature, I offer up today's crop of photos, taken last winter.  These were taken in Flushing, at the site of the 1964 World's Fair.  Original photos of the fair show a grand, even grandiose, experience- one that spoke of a certain space-age optimism, a clear eyed gaze into a glorious future.... with just a touch of Jetsons aesthetic.  On the day we went it was appallingly cold- "perishing," as my English father would say- and the wind screamed across the broad fields of dead grass and right through our coats.  Everything was abandoned, and empty, and rusting away.  The only other people there were a young couple, seated at the very base of the giant globe- you can just see them in the photo below.  I didn't realize that they were trying to make out, and kept interrupting them as I circled the globe myself, awed by the massive thing looming over me.

Later, we headed over to downtown Flushing for a noodle bowl in a hot, steam-filled mall basement with very low ceilings.  Everyone shared space on rickety tables with vinyl table cloths, and was we ate we watched the chefs making the noodles from scratch, repeatedly slapping great loops of dough against the counters.  Outside, heading for the subway, I bought hot chestnuts off the street and we all shared them as we walked, getting too involved in the de-shelling process and crashing into rushing pedestrians.

Remember the cold?  Remember how it actually sucked at the time, and how wonderful hot things felt by contrast?  I am trying to remember that right now…