In praise of mechanical types, and AC

In case you haven't looked at my short and somewhat muddled reflections on air conditioning, I recommend you go there and read the comments. Christen in Mass. mentions how wonderful it is to have a mechanic nearby and the eternal optimist provides an interesting trip into the past to look at the origins of AC. Must confess I hadn't wondered who invented it, which I can only blame on heat and lack of AC. Once again, I find myself admiring mechanical types, whose minds seem to work in ways that others (mine, at least) don't. Eternal optimist made a good point, that has me almost swayed to the AC side of the argument: you can tell, even talking on the phone, that a person is not in a cooled-down room. On further reflection, I was in a coffee shop yesterday that had AC and the waitress was as sour-faced as they come. Clearly, AC is not the answer to all our problems.

She probably had sore feet, and that is a whole different topic, but not one I'm too likely to write about. I used to accompany my poor mother to the podiatrist, which was enough to scare me off careers in such fields as fashion model or beauty queen (high heels - no!), hooker (same problem), waitress (sensible shoes but for too long), ballerina (ouch, the toes, the arches!). Fortunately, my natural calling didn't seem to lie in any of these directions.

One of the smartest things I did was to marry a man who grew up in Africa, who spent his childhood barefoot. Shoes are rarely worn in our house. My mother-in-law, age 81, visited a doctor last year who exclaimed that he rarely saw a woman her age with such great feet. She explained that she'd spent her adult life mostly barefoot in Africa and he nodded at the wisdom of that approach to life. She is still sailing along in pleasure at that compliment.

I got sidetracked and am trying to work out how to get back to praising mechanical people, for I have come across three this week and am reminded of how ingenious they can be, and how special that it - and how easily the rest of us overlook this.

How often have you seen a mechanical type who was NOT wearing sensible shoes?