A few tips for marital bliss. If your spouse's eyes have a feverish vacancy, if her skin is dewy -- but not in a good way -- and her frustration level is way past 11 when she declares, "It's hot as an oven in here," she's in no mood for blazing repartee.

Don't suggest that it's more like a Crock-Pot.

Don't tell her the beads of sweat on her forehead shimmer like diamonds.

And don't even think about mentioning the economic and environmental benefits of a broken air conditioner.

All she wants is a man of action; the only words she wants to hear are, "I'll handle it."

Yeah, right!

And so I ventured into that dark June night, certain of my own incompetence and filled with trepidation -- rabbits and raccoons and opossums, oh my!

I found the unit. Hooray. It was silent as a church mouse. I patted my hand along the back of the unit, sure that electrocution was my fate: He died for his family.

I found the reset button. I pushed it. Nothing. Then again, and again. Instead of the whirring hum of relief, the night air was filled with the deadly sounds of rustling leaves -- what was that?

Having exhausted my knowledge of refrigeration systems and overcome by visions of rabid beasts, I retreated to my baking abode. A modern man. A helpless man.

Snuggling was definitely out, and sleep was only a dream. As I lay on my soggy sheets, I railed against the injustice of it all, which was quite satisfying. Then Mark Twain's quip raced through my fevered brain: "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

I was living proof of the first half of his proposition. As the temperatures have hovered near 100 across the Triangle, the record-breaking heat has been topic one. I've complained about it in the morning in our air-conditioned offices, over midday lunches at air-conditioned restaurants and at night while sipping cocktails under the porch fan.

Why we feel the heat

I'm so unaccustomed to the heat that the short walk to my air-conditioned car seems like one of the labors of Hercules. Driving past people who work outside, I shake my head in awed wonder, like an anthropologist glimpsing remnants of an ancient culture.

Sweating in my bed on that long, hot night I wondered: How did people live like this?

I haven't a clue because Twain was only half right: Not only have we done something about the weather -- we've conquered it.

When the author was 67, in 1902, Willis Carrier invented the first modern air conditioner for a printing company bedeviled by runny ink during hot, humid summers. In 1922, he devised a way to make small, powerful units. Movie palaces were early adopters, promising patrons cool entertainment. A St. Petersburg, Fla., theater bragged in 1926 that it "had the temperature down so low that ladies in evening dresses almost froze!"

Other businesses and governments quickly adopted Carrier's invention though it wasn't until after World War II that homeowners embraced it. In 1948 Americans purchased about 74,000 window units; five years later sales had increased 14-fold, to more than 1 million.

Not everyone liked it

This revolution has been felt most profoundly in the South and Southwest. Offering relief from oppressive heat and humidity, it helped kindle the massive postwar migration to the Sun Belt.

Describing its effects on the South's traditional culture, the historian Raymond Arsenault observed, "General Electric has proved a more devastating invader than Gen. Sherman."

Not every Southerner welcomed this transformation. William Faulkner refused to allow air conditioning in his steamy Oxford, Miss., home, rejecting this modern effort to "do away with the weather."

The day after his funeral in 1962, his wife, Estelle, installed a unit. Today almost every new home has central air, according to the National Homebuilders Association.

As a result the weather, like so many other aspects of modern life, is becoming an abstraction. It's as much an idea as it is a physical reality. The weatherperson may tell us it's going to be 95 tomorrow, but the reality is that for most of us it's 72 degrees every day of the year.

In this age of global climate change, this development suggests an interesting paradox. The technological advances that have allowed us to escape the weather may be making it go haywire. The breakthroughs that keep us cool, may be making the world hotter. This raises the question: If we don't feel the heat, will we be inspired to do something about it?

I fear that our disconnection from the natural world is crippling our efforts to recognize and confront our environmental changes.

Cool rescue

On the other hand, there's no going back. Living in a climate-controlled world has many drawbacks, but it sure beats braving the elements.

Those few days we spent without the blessings of air conditioning were like hell on earth. My heart would break when I called my wife from my frigid office -- why do they keep it so cold? -- to find out how she and the kids were faring. The nights were long, my friends, and uneventful.

When the repairmen finished their work, we breathed a cool sigh of relief as we returned to life in the 21st century. When I told my wife her cheeks were rosy, she laughed.

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