the urban heat island effect

There is a parking lot next to a large red-bricked church that I used to play in. The church’s red brick is a thorough red, even and fair—more like the church is painted red. Someone once told me that the red brick was like the red of Jesus’ blood. I always thought it looked more like the redder parts of clay that you found digging too-deep holes in front yards.

The red stops though in one area—the wall the church shares with its parking lot. A different brick was used for the wall, brick that looks like it was salvaged from a fire. I always felt bad for that wall, that I was looking at something I wasn’t supposed to. The wall's neo-gothic windows are its only glory— looking into the church’s main sanctuary. During nights I used to stand alone in the parking lot and listen to an orchestra practicing or a baritone belting and remember placing myself in one of the wall’s stretched yellow shadows and thought of sailing across a black ocean in a boat made of light on the winds of a symphony.

The parking lot was the meeting spot for the neighborhood kids. We commonly knew that it was a place of our own, a place that enticed wild behavior. We played catch with anything, from footballs to sticks and rocks, making parking an “at your own risk” endeavor. The parking lot had a sort of lawlessness about it that frightened the adults. It might have been the black of the asphalt. They say that the heat generated from black-top surfaces in the city contribute to global warming, a phenomenon known as “the urban heat island effect”. The heat the lot generated made the air thinner and so harder to breathe, entrancing you until you began to float and feel otherworldly. Its heat enables the imagination. We chased cars that innocently tried to park for meetings and services because they were intrusive wild beasts entering our domain, played off-the wall, pelting innocent girls with tennis ball, and rode the one bicycle the more fortunate one of us owned around the perimeter of the lot until standing up was impossible.

That black island—with its yellow lines, dirt-smudged grinning faces, its pebbles stuck to bottoms of sweaty bare feet, its knee scabs and sticky fingers, with its music, its basketball rhythms and Sunday school melodies, with its heat and its faith and magic—had an effect on me.