My oldest daughter’s family is currently without a working air conditioning unit. The temperatures outside are sweltering. The humidity is thick. The walls of their house are groaning under the heat. So is everyone who lives inside those walls.

I feel for them. What used to be the norm has become the unacceptable. Take away the power of a man’s thermostat and his nerves begin to come unraveled. The children are sweating. The dog is panting and drooling. The house feels like they’re living inside a convection oven.

When I was a kid, I never thought much about air conditioning. We had screens in all the windows. Screen doors front and back. Concrete floors covered in linoleum tile squares. When the house was “open” there was always a good chance that a breeze would flow through the house.

We had one portable fan in the house. Mama had an ottoman fan that she would move from room to room during the day. Sometimes it was in the kitchen. Sometimes in the den. Most of the time she kept it in her sewing room.

The ottoman fan looked exactly like what the name suggests, a round ottoman. It wasn’t upholstered. It wasn’t made to sit on, though I did sit on it a lot. It was made of metal. Low profile. A flat top. A chrome wire cage under the top where the air could escape, with tapered fins that went around the lower half.

It was painted like a car, slick and glossy. It was a two-tone green that made me think of a 1957 Buick Riviera that I had seen in Griffin one time. The top was dark green. The fins were painted a lighter green. It was as close as we had to what one might call a room air conditioner.

The fan stood up on short little legs, no more than maybe 3 or 4 inches off the floor. A small toggle switch on one of the legs turned it on. It only had one speed. Fast.

For the uninitiated, here’s how it worked. The motor was mounted in the bottom of the fan housing. The shaft with the fan blades on it pointed up toward the lid of the fan. The bottom side of the lid was shaped like a cone, the tip of which was pointed downward toward the blades.

When the fan was running, all the air was being blown upwards into that upside down cone. This forced the air out through the grate in all directions, 360 degrees around the room. There was nowhere you could sit and not feel the breeze from that fan.

Oscillating fans are nice. Box fans do the job. Ceiling fans come close. But nothing I’ve ever experienced matched the cooling effect of that ottoman fan.

On a hot summer day when I would come in from cutting the grass, my first move was to lay on the floor beside that fan. The floor in the den was a painted concrete floor. No tile. No rugs. And because it was always cool to the touch, I benefited from the feel of my wet clothes against the floor and the breeze coming from that fan.

This is why, almost a year ago, when Marion and I were on the trail of the World’s Longest Yard Sale, I almost jumped out of my skin when I saw an ottoman fan for sale. Even though I live with the modern convenience of air conditioning, I wanted that fan. I had to have that fan. And I bought it.

Mine is a little smaller than the one Mama had. It’s brown, not green. But the basics are the same, except mine has a three-speed motor. The only thing missing was the knob on the switch. I took a pair of pliers and turned it on. Slow, medium, and fast. And it all worked.

A few miles down the road we found a fella under a tent selling junk. He had shoe boxes of old knobs from radios, car dashes, toasters, TVs, whatever you could think of. I found one that fit, and it matched the 1950’s look of the fan. I was in heaven.

Now, all I needed was a small screw to attach the knob to the switch shaft. For months I used the knob without the screw. I just had to be careful not to let it fall off. I didn’t want to lose it.

Finally, this last spring I took the fan to the local hardware store in Pine Mountain. I walked through the front door carrying my baby.

“What are you looking for today?”

“I need a screw to hold this knob onto the switch.”

A young fella offered to walk me back to the fastener aisle. We looked through the shelves and boxes for a while. We tried maybe 10 or 12 screws that looked like they might fit. I finally laid the fan on the floor on its side so we could try one more that we thought would work.

The young man scratched his head. “I gotta ask. What is that thing, anyway?”

I humored him with the story I just told you about my mama’s fan. He was intrigued.

“I’ve never seen one of those,” he said.

No kidding.

My fan now lives out on my back porch right by the couch where I can be found taking a nap from time to time on a warm summer day. It’s not air conditioned out there, but the fan hums quietly and the breeze reminds me of a time long ago when I lived without the knowledge of compressed freon.

I’m not saying that the old days were better days. I’m not saying that we were tougher back then. And I’m certainly not saying that I’m thinking about getting rid of my air conditioning. Dehumidified cool air inside a house is a good thing. I’m sure I’d complain if I didn’t have it.

I’m just saying that I get amused sometimes at how comfortable we have become with certain standards of living that we expect, and how hard it is when we don’t have them. We took long road trips in our 65’ Falcon with no air conditioning. We didn’t know any different and we survived.

For the longest time, I thought that Kroger and Sears Roebuck were the only places on earth that had air conditioning. Hampton Elementary didn’t have it. Berea Christian Church didn’t have it. My dorm room at college didn’t have it. Summers were hot and that’s the way it was.

Part of the reason we survived at home was that the slab was cool. The walls were eight-inch-thick bricks. The house was covered in the shade of huge pecan trees. And the attic fan ran at night to draw in the cool night air.

Life was simple.

I hate the idea of Laura, Eric and the kids suffering in the heat. There’s no shade to speak of. The house is baking. The walls are holding the day’s heat well into the night. It has to be miserable.

But if they ask…

They can’t have my ottoman fan.