If I Only Had the Courage

We’re in the midst of an incredible heat wave right now. I’m headed up to Maine on business tomorrow, where I hope I’ll encounter a cooler clime, but Bob and I were stuck today with the question, “Where do we go to beat the heat?” We don’t have central air conditioning (another oddity I often ponder. The summers here are relatively short, but during their two month or so duration, it can be brutally hot with a brutal humidity to accompany the high temperatures. Yet so many of the pre-21st-century-non-McMansions that house most of us common folk don’t have air conditioning. In the South, where I grew up, the winters are relatively short but can get bone-chillingly cold with a bone-chilling dampness to accommodate the low temperatures, you’d be hard-pressed to find a house that doesn’t have central heat). We could go to a movie for about a two-hour-long reprieve, or we could go spend hours inside a nice air-conditioned museum.

I opted for my all-time favorite, The American Museum of Natural History. We’d been meaning to “complete” the Darwin exhibit, which we’d started back in January when my brother was visiting (you don’t really want to be a poor soul dragged to a museum by Bob and me. Any exhibit that a guide estimates will take about an hour will take us about five). And I was interested in their Imax movie on cave exploration. They also have a new lizards and snakes exhibit. I’m weird. I love reptiles, particularly frogs, but if I can’t have frogs, lizards are a fine substitute.

Whenever I visit this museum, I always wish I’d become a zoologist. This, because I loved animals, and loved to visit zoos, and was fascinated with every episode of Wild Kingdom was what I wanted to be when I was eleven years old. Unfortunately, so many people made fun of me, I dropped the idea. I just wasn’t brave enough to withstand all that ridicule (besides, one boy completely convinced me that “girls can’t do that.”)

Thinking of this, though, made me realize I might have pursued many career paths if it weren’t for the chicken factor. Public ridicule is the least of my worries when I consider these other cool but “bravery-needed-in-spades” careers. Here’s a sampling:

CAREER: Divemaster and Scuba Instructor
Why: Are you kidding? Scuba diving all day. Need I say more?
Chicken factor: Dealing with out-of-shape, drinking-a-beer-just-before-the-dive, cowboy-wannabe tourists who decide they want to leave the underwater tour and dive down to 150 feet, just like they “used to do when they were Navy Seals.”

CAREER: Arctic Explorer
Why: I love the cold. I love snow and ice. Pictures of the Arctic have always mesmerized me. Plus, I’d never have to worry about how I looked going to work. Who can tell underneath all those layers?
Chicken factor: I’m quite attached to all twenty of my fingers and toes and don’t particularly want to lose any of them to frostbite. And then there’s Into Thin Air…

CAREER: Detective
Why: Well, I’ve read enough mysteries and seen enough on television to get awfully cocky while sitting in my armchair, thinking “That idiot detective should have done this, not that,” and “It’s so obvious. What’s taking her so damn long to figure it out?”
Chicken factor: I can’t even bring myself to hold a gun, let alone shoot one, if needed.

CAREER: Ice Skater
Why: Have you ever seen anything more magical than a pro on ice? And I want to be paired with one of those Russian men in tights, who has one of those adorable accents, who would lift me like that.
Chicken factor: I can’t even walk without tripping, I’m so uncoordinated. Besides, I’d have to constantly worry about every detail of how I looked going to work.

If this is what a visit to The Museum of Natural History will do to me, it’s a good thing I didn’t go see Superman Returns to beat the heat.