Talk About the Weather (Pt. II)

It's 87 degrees in Dallas now. Down from 91. Windy and humid. Overcast with a 50% chance of rain. Someone nearby is setting off fireworks. Someone else is grilling what smells like cardboard boxes and plastic bottles. I'm sitting out here on my porch sweating through my shirt. I have a glass of Spindrift grapefruit sparkling water on the table next to me. It's sweating too. Made in Massachusetts with real grapefruit juice. "Real Fruit Tastes Better" the copy on the can informs me. A phrase, I notice, that they've gone through the trouble of copyrighting. In the future, if anyone would like to talk about the fact that real fruit tastes better, they'll need express written permission from the Spindrift Sparkling Water corporation.

Anyway. I recently learned that, in a weather report, the chance of rain refers to the amount of an area that will be affected, not the probability that it will rain. A 50% chance of rain in Dallas means that 50% of Dallas has a 100% chance of getting rained on. The result for any one person, of course, is the same. My chance of getting rain is 50%. The rain, though, is guaranteed. That was news to me, but I guess everybody else knew that already. When I told my sister-in-law at the hospital yesterday, she said, "Yeah, actually, I knew that already." So then I told my mother-in-law, and she said she knew it already too. "Well," I said. "Sounds like we all knew that already. Cool cool cool."

We've been at the hospital a lot lately while my father-in-law recovers from a stroke he had on Mother's Day. At first they told us it was a massive stroke. Then they told us it wasn't massive, exactly, but it was still pretty big. The kind of stroke that paralyzes the right side of your body and lets your brain think of every word except the one it really needs. When my father-in-law speaks now, he can get to everything but the point. "I think we should..." he'll say and then drift off. "I think it's time to..." "The thing about it is..." At the hospital yesterday, I found a 3-ring binder on the shelf next to his bed. It was full of pictures of all the things in his life. His dogs. His kids. His house. And me. I was in there too. It said, "Mike. Son-in-Law. Married to J." I thought about how weird it is to spend seventy years building a life for yourself, only to forget all of it by the end. How weird and cruel. When I told that to J later, she said that was an interesting thought, very literary and whatnot, but totally wrong. The binder was so that he could show the nurses his family without needing to speak. He hadn't forgotten anything. So ignore me. I have no idea what's going on here.

I'm glad to be passing these letters back and forth again, just as summer is starting here in Texas, just as things are beginning to get unbearable. My Spindrift is already warm. I think it's starting to rain.

***

Greetings from Orlando, 9am on a Friday at the park playground, before the sun gets too close. I'm under a canopy with picnic tables. Premiere shade. The boys, six and four now, run up and down the slides and passageways, pretending to be things. I'd tell you what they're pretending to be, but it keeps changing. Before it was pirates, before that it was truck drivers, and before then was a fight for who got to be Mario. Now I've tuned it all out so I can type on this tablet I brought. It’s hot, but I feel like it should be hotter. I usually hate the weather more in mid-June. But in the car, the thermometer said 93. Either less humidity than usual or I am getting used to burning. Expectation management. Still, I could go for a crisp Spindrift right now. Some of that real fruit. I am willing to play ball legally to express myself.

Sometimes I look up things I’m scared about to see if there are more ways to be afraid of them. Strokes sound like your brain just attacks itself, except it's not a metaphor. This is the third one I’ve heard about in less than a month. The other two people were just our age. I don't know why we all have to wait around on Earth all the time wondering when something bad is going to happen to us or someone we love and then sure enough it does or it will. I don't know what would be harder to lose: memory or language. Amy and I assume that one day I will die of a heart attack, or at least suffer one—a theme in the family line—and I'm not careful enough even with that in mind. This machine runs on stress. This machine will ultimately attack itself, unless something else beats it to the first move. One day, before that happens, I hope to read back years and years of these messages to each other. Or after, if I'm alive and able. Language and memory, I suppose, is all we are doing here.

We're also doing swim lessons. The kids are, I mean. From here, in the distance, I can see the public pool. We have an appointment later. Isn’t it strange that we evolved out of the water as a species and then upon individual birth in this form we must learn how to not die in it? My kids are really scared to die in it. That's why Amy and I have waited this long to have them learn. Though we recognize that their fear of drowning, our fear of them drowning, should have pushed us to do it earlier, to protect them from practical matters like death rather than their own emotions. Every time my oldest has gone under water for more than two seconds (we're halfway through the lesson package), he comes up hysterical. We put on happy voices and clap "you did it!" He begs for it to never happen again. It's awful. And there's not a cloud in the sky.

*** 

It's raining again in Dallas, which isn't a coincidence exactly. Rain puts me in a letter-writing mood. Rain makes me want to correspond. Sometimes J and I talk about moving to the Pacific Northwest. It rains there all the time. Imagine all the letters I would write! Imagine how my relationships would improve! I often find myself telling people things in letters and emails that I probably wouldn't tell them in real life. So the people I write letters and emails to usually end up knowing things about me that my in-person friends never will. I'm not sure that means they know me better. They just know me differently. There are a lot of different ways to know a person, I think. Here in my mid-30s – my not quite forties, as you call it – I'm realizing that the way I know most people is what you might call casually. I see them a few times a year. At a birthday party or a Christmas party or some other casual get-together hosted by anyone but me. As more years go on, I start to think I know these people well just because I've known them for so long. But the truth is that I don't actually know them well. I don't know them well at all. For example, I haven't been to their house. For example, I don't know the names of their kids. If you haven't been to somebody's house and don't know the names of their kids, do you really know them? What do you have to know about someone to really know them? Who are all these people that I've known for so long but know nothing about? Is it too late to find out?

I went to a friend’s 40th birthday on Saturday. It was 96 degrees outside. Heat index of 108.

"So it's not actually 108?" I asked Jason.

"No," he said. "It only feels like it's 108."

Jason is one of these guys I've known for nearly twenty years but still sometimes wonder if I know at all. Every year we go on a group ski trip together and end up sharing a room. We stay up late, laying in twin beds, talking until early in the morning. Then we don't see or speak to each other for six to nine months, sometimes an entire year. We don't text or call or grab lunch. We just run into each other sometimes is all. He's the first person I told, out loud, that I was an alcoholic. I told him about some problems I was having with my family that I couldn't talk about with anyone else. He told me all kinds of crap too. Stuff I probably shouldn't repeat. But I've never been to his house. I've never met his family. I don't know anything about him, really, even though he might be one of my best friends. I don't know if that's sad or not. Yes I do.

I'm jealous that it's not too hot over there in Florida yet. It's already the kind of hot here where every time I step outside I say, out loud, "Okay." It's the kind of hot where my glasses fog up when I get the mail. The kind of hot where the air conditioner runs constantly just to keep our place below 80. The kind of hot where my phone warns me against going outside. "Are you sure?" it says when I think about going outside. Then it says: "Are you super sure?" There's nothing redeeming about the heat, the way that snow is treacherous but beautiful, or rain is inconvenient but soothing. Heat is invisible, inaudible, but so unignorable that I can feel it even when I'm inside. It's a vibe, is what it is, and it's bad one. It starts in June and it doesn't end until October. Sometimes not until November.

"So it won't last forever?" I ask J to remind me every year.

"No," she says. "It will only feel like it lasts forever."

In the meantime, we've got six new cases of Spindrift to put in the fridge. We're running out of room for them. Two entire shelves in the fridge and half of the fridge door. Extras in the garage. 3 exciting new flavors. Lime. Grapefruit. And – the wild card – raspberry lime, which as I've been writing this letter has been sitting here next to me, sweating through the glass.

***

The day after I last wrote to you, the temp went up to 100 by 2pm. Every day now it pours between 3pm - 5pm. We got some this morning at the park, too. I didn't mind the rain because by then I was ready to go. I was thinking about writing this back. I was looking forward to a Spindrift. I like the letters because they continue, they proceed. I've recorded maybe 90-something interviews with 90-something people and, typically, they end when they end. But for an hour, it felt like we were friends. It's kind of nice: I know so many people differently. I don't have to know the other ways to know them. They seem great. You have that line in Duplex: Do you want to like people? Or do you want to get to know them? Yep.

I'm writing this, by the way, from a new couch. Funny, because I just finished that great "chapter" on couches in your new manuscript. Our new one is blue. The old one was orange. While less than $500, the new couch feels important or pivotal. It's less comfortable but it fits better in our living room, the cat hasn't scratched the shit out of it, and we needed some kind of new marker of time. Oh, that was right before we got the blue couch. Oh, that happened a few months after we got the couch. When we dragged the orange couch to the curb, the boys said they were going to miss it a lot. I understood. Change is hard. They'd spent their whole lives sitting comfortably on it. While we waited for the city to come and crush the couch in the back of their big truck, the boys would ask where it would go when it was gone. Who would take it? Would it be destroyed? Why? Then we got the new one, and they haven't asked about it since. 

Then our neighbor died. He was only seventy. Third heart attack. THREE. He was the kind of neighbor you see outside at least five times a week and have a thirty-minute-to-one-hour conversation once or twice a month. In fact, Amy had just talked with him the week before he died and he had mentioned his meds had been changed and he was a little worried about it. But what can you do? he said. Well, he was very kind to the kids, my family, all the neighbors. I didn't know him well—in fact some things I did know scared me a little bit—but I liked him and I wanted him to stay alive and enjoy his days outside cleaning up his lawn and whatever else it was he did when he was inside his house. I had been in there once actually. I didn't make it past the living room, but they had a TV just like ours.

We didn't plan to tell the boys about the neighbor until they asked where he had gone or why they didn't see him anymore. He had multiple times in our driveway helped cheer up one of the kids while they were crying about going to school. But we ended up telling them within 24 hours of us finding out. It's, obviously, brought up a lot of questions. The usual ones. They keep asking. We keep telling them we don't know the answers, or we make up something simple and nice. Throw Heaven out there occasionally. My youngest asked me if our cat Henrietta was going to die one day, and when I told him the answer, he asked me when she was going to die, and "I don't know" wasn't a good enough answer, so he kept asking. Eventually we would just land on "not for a very long time," or "like 20 years." Last night, Amy put him to bed, and afterward she told me he was asking about our future death and his future death. She was able to make it abstract enough to fall asleep. Then, in the morning, he was petting the cat. It's easier for him to make it about her. I've just been saying: "I don't know when or why, but I know it means we have to make it as nice for each other as we can while we're all here." It's a message for myself. I cried a little this morning staring out a window drinking coffee. I'm learning to be grateful. It’s the only other option than anger to process the sadness.

Since the last time I wrote to you, there have been two big tropical storm warnings on the weather apps and channels, one of which was a predicted hurricane if it stayed on track, and then, thankfully, neither came.

***

Since Janessa and I moved into this neighborhood two years ago, I've gotten in the habit of walking around it every day. There's a walking path that follows a creek into Bob Woodruff Park, past some horse stables and some mansions. One day I saw a woman from one of the mansions putting up a "Beware of Dog" sign on her fence, but I've never seen a dog there, so I think it's a bluff. I've never seen any horses either, come to think of it, although on hot days like these I can smell them.

Lately it's too hot to walk, though, so I've been playing a video game called Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. In the game, you walk around a giant fantasy world trying to fix everybody's problems. The people in the water world have a water problem. The people in the mountain world have a mountain problem. You show up and they tell you what's wrong. Eventually you end up in some sort of temple, solving basic puzzles, sword fighting with robots. There's weather in the game, too, and sometimes you have to wait for storms to pass before you can get to where you need to go. It's hard to climb in the rain. Your metal gear attracts lightning. It's dangerous to be out there when the weather isn't nice. Last night, I stayed up until midnight stuck inside a volcano, unable to get where I needed to go because the temperatures in the game were too high for my character to survive. Here I was playing a game to get out of the heat, and all I found inside was more heat.

I saw a news story recently that said the hottest day ever had just been recorded. Then I saw the same news story the next day. And then I saw it again two days after that. Three of the hottest days ever recorded in a four day span. At some point it stops being newsworthy. At some point this just becomes normal life.

Like most Texans, I take pride in my ability to simply survive another year of this shit. When you first move here, the locals tell you not to worry, that it gets better, that your blood thins out, that you acclimate. If I'm doing my math right, this is my thirtieth summer here in Texas. I'm still waiting for that acclimation they were going on about.

I'm writing this to you on a Saturday evening in July. I'm sitting out here on my porch again, listening to the new Boygenius album, and marveling again at the book cover you texted me this afternoon for Home Movies. It's perfect. It doesn't try too hard, which gives it this undeniable swagger. Your writing is like that too. It's more interested in connecting with the reader than trying to impress them with little whiz-bang literary tricks. It's a virtue I've been trying to learn for ten years, but I still find myself wanting to tap dance for people. Still, after all these years, hoping that I can make people like me by making them laugh. But here we are in our mid-thirties, starting to put out some real work now, and I find myself wanting to strip all that stuff away and just say something honest and real. I think I heard Mike Birbiglia say on a podcast once, and can't stop thinking about it: "If we're not telling secrets, what are we doing?"

***

There’s also a Cormac McCarthy thing I read on Wikipedia once, which I've been thinking about again because he died. Not that his death makes me feel anything other than my own mortality a little more. I didn't know him. But I think he had said that he didn't understand the silly things most other contemporary writers wrote about in their novels and stories because if the book isn't about death, it's not about anything. It's trivial. Something like that. I get what he was saying, and to be honest I think I agree with it, but want to know a secret? 

All literature is about death. This exchange is about death. My job is about death. My house is about death. My marriage is about death. My kids are about death. My parents and grandparents and ancestors and brothers and nieces and nephews and all my teachers and all my friends and all my pets and the farthest imaginable strangers and creatures on the globe: they are all about death. My car is about death. My TV, my computer. My sofa. My shoes. My Rumba vacuum. My breakfast, lunch, and dinner: is there anything more about death than a meal? 

It's interesting to think about what was going on this time last year. I don't remember much. My son had had those recurring illnesses and the tonsil and adnoid surgery. My god, that seemed like hell for him. There was so much screaming-in-pain for a week. I hope to never forget the force and fear with which I held him. Now he's never been healthier.

I'm writing this to you on a Tuesday around noon. It's one of the two days I’m on campus this summer. I’m sitting at the desk in front of this computer instead of teaching the students in front of me. On my drive here I decided I'd call it an "in-class work day" so I can type this. The class period is almost over. Soon I'll pack up the things on the desk, which most definitely is also about death, and when I open the door, the heat will thicken up under my cotton sleeves and denim jeans. My glasses will slide down my nose, and I'll trudge the parking lot.

It hasn't even gotten as hot as it's going to get.

Mike Nagel lives in Plano, Texas. His first book, Duplex, is available from Autofocus Books. Find selected nonsense at michaelscottnagel.com.

Michael Wheaton lives in Orlando, Florida. His essay, Home Movies, will be available from Bunny Presse in February 2024. He publishes Autofocus Books.