THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 8, 1995 TAG: 9508080362
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
The breeze that greeted us hereabouts when we stepped outside Monday morning was a cooling hand on a feverish brow.
Instead of talking hot, people all day were thinking cool.
In Virginia Beach, a friend cut off the air conditioning, opened doors and every window, and let the wind sweep through the house, which seemed about to lift off as if it were a box kite, he said.
In early light, people were outdoors stirring about, luxuriating.
Far off, around the bend of the road, two young women, walking a golden retriever, were talking. Their voices carried in the clean, thin morning air as the throbbing of doves mourning.
The Labrador retriever let me know, prancing, he would chase the ball as long as I would throw it.
Of late, in the humid heat, he would retrieve three or four times, and then, at the far end of the pursuit, lie down and look away from me as if fascinated at some far point in the scenery, unwilling to concede he was tiring.
When I took but a step his way, he would arise and come loping.
Now, though, he was tireless in the element for which his kind are designed.
A woman, power-walking along the road, moved her arms with a snap that had been missing Sunday. Joggers from the naval base seemed about to break into a sprint.
It brought back prizefighter Sugar Ray Robinson, whose supple body and fluid moves exemplified the ``sweet science,'' the phrase writers used when he fought.
On his last try at coming back in the mid-1960s, Sugar Ray, then 45, stopped in Norfolk and then Richmond for bouts, and I followed, asking if he'd let me jog with him. ``Sure,'' he said, ``but I don't run. I walk six blocks in the afternoon.''
Punching the bag, sparring, he stayed, more or less, in condition.
Ray refrained from running, as if husbanding his last ounce of energy for the bout, during which you could see, a younger, lither Robinson striving to spring out, liberated.
I swore then never again even to think of jogging.
Such is human perversity that the cool evoked thoughts of sweaters and biting cold and the debate over which is harder, summer or winter.
Some can't withstand either. And there is, forever, the inner weather, withering heat at remembrance of things done wrong and, even harder to bear, chilling winds howling at the corners of the mind over things undone, promises unkept, especially to the young.
Robert Frost put it right:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. by CNB