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Box fans make me think of high school. I went to school in Mississippi, back in the day before we had air conditioning. We had box fans. Some were more industrial than others, but mostly they were plain old box fans. Usually one in the front of the classroom and one in the back. It was 95 degrees with 90 percent humidity and can I just add that WE WERE NOT ALLOWED TO WEAR SHORTS. I suffered through it in jeans that were entirely too tight and had to literally be peeled off my legs when I arrived home. So that's what box fans mean to me.
But box fans represent something else to Chip: White Noise. He put that box fan right next to his head on his side of the bed and turned it on high at bedtime. It sounded like this: VVRRRROOOOOOOMMM. Like trying to sleep inside an airplane hangar. Chip loved it. He was snoring inside of a minute. I learned to live with it. I used to not be able to go to sleep without the tv on — I need something to concentrate on, otherwise my brain continually writes. Constant writing writing writing in my head. I found that if I concentrated on the fan it worked like listening to tv. Anyway, listening to tv was out given the AIRPLANE PROPELLERS SPINNING IN MY BEDROOM.
One day I took the box fan out to the second-floor landing in our house. I hoped to use it to circulate the warm air that rises from downstairs and hangs over the loft, right by the thermostat, keeping the upstairs heat from ever running. The box fan actually helped quite a bit. At night, Chip would bring it back in next to the bed.
Then one day he came home with another fan. He didn't come right out and say it, but this action had a very obvious meaning: "That is MY fan. Here is your fan. You can have this one. Don't take MINE."
For a while we ran both fans — the one on the landing and the one in the bedroom — until life got a bit stressful for Chip recently. Worried about health care reform or the jobless rate or something, who knows. I've never known him to get as worked up as he has been lately. You wouldn't know it to look at him. But now he's got BOTH FANS next to the bed. If it was like sleeping in an airplane hangar before, this is like sleeping next to the space shuttle. If it were run by propellers.
UPDATE, March 18, 2010 — So this is really weird. Tonight my brother-in-law from New York was in town, and Chip and I were sitting up at Starbucks having coffee with him. And we're talking about stress and jobs and job loss and STRESS and not being able to sleep at night and Chip is telling his brother about the two box fans. And wouldn't you know it? HIS BROTHER SLEEPS WITH FANS TOO. So it turns out I may have judged my husband too harshly. This fan thing is obviously genetic and he had no defense against it.
5 comments:
You didn't tell him "hands off my fan!"?
Now you know why people end up in separate bedrooms -- it's all those noisy box fans.
This is so funny! My husband needs the TV to sleep and I cant stand it. He also snores on top of all the tv noise. The SECOND I sneak the tv off, he bolts up from his snore-fest, wanting to know why I turned off the tv. GAH!
After Katrina I found myself with FOUR of those damn things. We stored them in the garage, unused, until I caught Alton Brown's episode of making beef jerky using box fans and air filters on the Food Network. My kids LOVED doing it and the jerky tasted wonderful. I wonder what Chip would think about you making beef jerky on his box fan? :)
Ha. This made me laugh. A couple of years ago I bought this machine called the "Sleepmate 980" off the internet. It is also sold as the "Soundscreen 980' to therapists and counselors offices. What it does is create white noise of the most wonderful variety. Unlike those sound scape machines at walgreens that play recorded nature sounds on a loop, the SM 980 actually has its own little machine that creates the noise. This is crucial for a true connoisseur of white noise because once you have used the sound machines with the recorded sounds for any length of time, your mind starts to "hear" the loop. if you are like me you will start to obsess over the end of the loop and predict when it is going to come. These sorts of obsessive thoughts lead to the same insomnia that you had when your mind was obsessing about the very noise that you were getting the sleep machine to block out in the first place. This machine is the most important invention of the last century, IMHO. I was a box fan person. But you can't take your box fan to the in-laws for Christmas or to a hotel. This little guy is small and portable and pretty much indestructable. I don't know how I ever lived without it. I call mine Jack and sometimes, when John is snoring really badly, I reach over and put jack in between our two heads on the bed. It creats a "wall of sound" that his snoring can barely penetrate. Its awesome. Really.
Lori GM
My first year at Green Acres my daddy decided that he should bring our box fan into my classroom, just to "help out." It was a HUGE turquoise-colored fan. At the end of the year, he would pick it up from the school, just to return it the following "fall." (Which truly doesn't exist on the coast - at least not at the start of the school year, right Kalisa?) That thing followed me for years. Come to think of it, I never thanked my daddy for doing that. I'd better call him first thing in the morning!
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