"The Chill Factor"

Numbers are real.  You can calibrate them on thermometers.  When the number is high, then you know it is warm.  When the thermometer’s frozen, you are living in Buffalo.

The only place that brings frigid Torontonians a smile.

“Well at least it’s not Buffalo, eh?”  

Let me assert here in Paragraph Four that numbers are not real. 

Numbers are relative.

(Anger Alert:  Be prepared to yell “Wimp!” at your computer.)

Last night, I walked ten minutes to a restaurant, meeting a friend for our bi-weekly dinner.

The outside temperature was fifty-one degrees. 

And I was freezing.

Even wearing a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, a leather jacket, a hat and a scarf.

Okay, let’s have it.

“W--p!“

Thank you.

I can’t help it.  I was cold.

Something has happened to my body.  Back home?  Fifty-one in December?

A true Christmas miracle!

Yet here I was walking down Fourth Street, feeling the same way I felt standing at Bathurst and Eglinton, waiting for a bus.

Frozen, frustrated and mad!

And yet – dare I say it again without receiving a tightly packed snowball flying straight through my screen –

It was fifty-one degrees!

What does an L.A. “Popsicle” do in such Ice Age conditions?

We take off for Hawaii.

Where it’s – don’t hurt me – eighty-two degrees.

And sunny.

And balmy.

The warm air wafting fragrant “Essence of Plumeria” into our noses.

Okay, I’ll stop.

Realizing the effect.

We are staying in a hotel we once stayed in about twenty-five years ago, since last year, when we stayed in the hotel we have stayed in forever, we got robbed. 

Things have changed in our lives.  Twenty-five years ago, there were just four of us, which some nostalgically call “The Original Four” – Dr. M., Earlo, Rachel and Anna.  

Now we are nine.

When my old agent heard I was taking nine people to Hawaii, he brayed, “Nobody takes nine people to Hawaii unless they make four hundred thousand dollars a year!”

(I was amazed that he knew the exact number.  Like it is written in a book.)

Our annual income is not at that level.

But we are still going to Hawaii.

It is our annual splurge. 

We are done for the year.

But at least we have tans.

During our last visit, “The Original Four” rented a hotel-owned condo, close to the beach.  We checked the price for that condo today.  See my appropriate post:

“The Super Rich Are Ruining Things For The Wealthy.”

We can no longer afford that condo.

My strongest memory of that experience was that while being escorted to that condo we heard,

“You people are lucky.  Charlie Sheen trashed it last week, and we’ve put in all new furniture.”

So we’re off to Hawaii, swapping bone-chilling fifty-one for tropical eighty-two.

But, just in case there’s a “cold snap” and it drops down to the high seventies,

I am taking a sweater.