Heatwave

1943

by Eleanor Lippman

I was just a little kid, not even four years old. What did I know about things?!  All I remember about that day is that it must have been a murderously miserable heat wave in Philadelphia that summer.

My older brother Milton and I woke up expecting to get dressed, have breakfast, and go outside to play, just what little kids did all summer long. We expected it to be another typical day in Philadelphia. After enough neighborhood kids showed up we organized games like Rover, Red Rover. If someone had a length of old clothesline rope, we jumped rope until we were bored. With the appearance of a pink rubber ball, we moved to the apartments at the end of the block to play ball against the wall and when that got boring, we attached roller skates to our Buster Brown shoes and raced around the block on wheels, wearing the skate key on a shoelace around our necks. Around lunch time, all of the neighborhood kids disappeared into their houses for lunch and reappeared later to regroup and find new things to keep us occupied.

On really hot summer days, if Harry Small, the plumber, was around, he’d use his big wrench to open the fire hydrant, thereby attracting even more children trying to keep cool in the delicious flood of cold water.

The sound of the ice cream truck was one reliable bright highlight of the day, and we raced home for nickels to buy creamsicles or ice cream sandwiches or fudgsicles or ice pops and hope they wouldn’t melt before they were gone. Hot, sweaty, and sticky, the afternoons faded into early evening and as fathers began returning home from work, we heard our names called out, and one by one our play group got smaller and smaller. Even those kids whose names weren’t called, reluctantly headed for home until the streets were once again empty.

After dinner, the streets once again filled with noisy, curious, busy children looking for friends, for something to do until bedtime. Sometimes as the sun began to set, we just sat on the stairs leading up to our houses and talked and told stories to each other. By that time, we were tired, no energy left for more games and we appreciated the possible coolness of evening. If we were lucky, black clouds would appear and a summer thunder storm would arrive, sending us scattering back home before it started pouring rain.

On soft summer nights when it slowly became dark, the fireflies showed up. We sat and watched for them, first one or two, and then as the street lights came on, the world became magically dark with hundreds of them dancing in the night, glowing their lights on, lights off. I am ashamed to say we caught them and with a fingernail, separated the glowing part of their torso from the rest and watched as the tiny speck of fluorescent light slowly disappeared.

But one morning, I remember when I was approaching four years old and my brother was five and a half, after we got up and out of bed, we were told not to get dressed, just to stay in our underwear. When we came downstairs for breakfast, the house was dark with the venetian blinds tightly drawn to keep out the light. We were told it was too hot to go outside, that we had to stay inside to play. Somehow, we managed to keep busy, and I don’t remember being affected by the heat at all. It was just another day to me, although strange to play in our darkened living room. I watched my mother spend the day at her treadle sewing machine, and I can still hear the cluck, cluck, cluck of it if I imagine hard enough. Our woolen floor rugs spent the summer in our basement, and on the floor was a coarse-textured covering that took nearly all summer for the bottoms of our bare feet to get used to. How clearly I remember all that.

My dad, to avoid the military, was still working extra shifts at Cramp’s ship yard welding World War II Liberty Ships, so it was just the three of us at home that day.

As dinner time approached, I suppose it was too hot for my mother even to consider cooking a proper meal for us. Instead, she improvised. When I think back to my childhood, I try to remember what we ate. I remember cream of tomato soup by Campbell and grilled cheese sandwiches, but I am sure there was much more variety. But the one meal I remember was the dinner my mother prepared for us the night of the great heatwave. It was the only thing she could think of making without using the stove and making the kitchen even hotter.

She made waffles! Waffle sandwiches to be exact. Between two steaming hot waffles, she scooped vanilla ice cream, a wonderful marriage of hot and cold. It was the most wonderful thing I tasted. Dessert for dinner! What an amazing meal to have during a heat wave.

I never have had waffles and ice cream for dinner again. At the New York World’s Fair in 1964, I enjoyed Belgian waffles, a deep pocket waffle with strawberries and whipped cream and have had Belgian waffles many times since. Yum. When I prepare waffles, I serve them with unsweetened applesauce and honey, my favorite. But never plain waffles topped with vanilla ice cream because I don’t want to damage that delicious memory from my childhood.