1-9-03
My Hot Water Box

It was always the norm for me to fear the cold. Having been brought up in a basement with cold stone floors, my feet generally ache with just the forecast of temperatures of less than fifty-five degrees. This winter it got cold early in New Orleans and I was loathe to feel the yearly throbbing of my hands and feet with the onset of the cooler weather that turns my walls and floor from blocks of brick and mortar to blocks of ice. The effect of this architecture is also that it remains far colder inside my abode than it often is outside, after the sun makes its journey through our skies. I would awake for work or from my weekend rest and bundle up to go outside after my morning routine, only to find it feeling like a brisk spring day. But when it really was cooler outside, then no amount of bundling would do me well.

The early onset of cold this year however was met with a new sensation, not mentally, which was the same dread, but physically. I noticed many weeks into the cooler weather that, although the at times the highs were only in the fifties, a veritable tundra to my Gulf Coastal frame, I was often wearing only my flannel jacket and nothing more to thwart the cold, and was quite comfortable. Upon noticing this I began to reflect on why this change would have come about. I had believed my poor circulation would only get worse with age and they would find the body suffocated under a one ton mountain of blankets and still blue. But the change this year had me wondering . . .

Along the same time I had been reading William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience where in he sets out to determine, by scientific methods (namely psychology), whether or not the religious experience of people are useful and valid. The answer he gives need not be told here and you may be thankful– I fell asleep more than once trying myself to glean it. But in his method he, self admittedly, gives example from the extreme to make his point. He goes into great detail on the ascetic lifestyle. One of his examples is a man named M. Vianney, a country priest in France, who was “very sensitive to cold but would never take means to protect himself against it. During a very severe winter, one of his missionaries contrived a false door under the confessional and placed a metal container of hot water beneath. The trick succeeded, the saint was deceived: ‘God is very good,’ he said with emotion. ‘This year through all the cold my feet have always been warm.’” I knew the old man’s pain, there is little to compare to the numb ache of cold feet unprotected against an ice floor and the absence of it would lead you to praise of the all mighty despite James’ wink and nod at the foolishness of such actions.

Fancying myself the ascetic type, when I noticed that I was not bundling as much as I used to, I wondered myself if some thanksgiving were due. I began to think that soon I could be just like Father Ferapont in The Brothers Karamazov sitting outside his small rotting cell dressed in the coarsest cloths contemplating whether the elm tree would take the form of Christ and sweep him away in the night. I too could rudely exclaim to the monk from Obdorsk, “you are a senseless lot at Sylvesters’s! How do you keep the fast?”

I began to notice, on the way to work, the workmen in many layers of coats and knit hats by the fire they light in a drum every morning. They work at the dilapidated tire shop just at the end of the Louis Armstrong International runway, as the jumbo jets come in within what seems like mere feet over the sagging roof. The building obviously has no heat, it’s doubtful that it even has electricity. As I zoom by in my car, shelled from the outside world, I think to myself, “when I’m the great ascetic I’ll have no problem standing out there with them in naught but a thin coarse robe. I’m on my way now, given that I only wear a flannel, right?” Apparently my idea of an ascetic seem to entail the quite untraditional view that there be no pain involved.

I got in my car the other forty-eight degree morning in my usual apparel, started it up and turned on the heat. I was turning onto River Road when I let out a guttural groan because the engine hadn’t warmed up in the past minute and a half of driving, the consequence of which was cool air spewing from the vents. I then realized quite instantaneously that I had slipped the hot water box under my own feet and fooled myself. In truth I had only been wearing my light apparel to and from work– not when I was hanging out outside, like New Years even, when I was wrapped like an arctic traveler on expedition. The only thing different about this year that affected my dress was that it was the first time I had a car that had a real heater in it. I paid fifteen hundred, cash, for it last year– the most I ever paid for a car. Given that it only takes me a few minutes to get from the warm blankets to the car in the morning, and work is already well heated by the time I get there, who needs to bundle up? I came to the knowledge that it is not that I’m a great ascetic, as much as I would have liked it, but that, unlike the men outside the rotting tire shop, I ‘m rich!

Phillip G.

Literature