“Believe in her, dad. Believe in Grandma Evie.” My daughter — just 5 years old — was pleading with me. Sounded like a line from a bad baseball movie. It was 86+ degrees in my mother’s house. After a rainstorm. A temperature she would dispute using complex physics and something about the silver in the China cabinet causing things to heat up by the thermostat. “That thing isn’t right,” she said. I had been complaining about how hot it was inside. Had walked over to the digital thermostat to read it. To prove that it was hot. Which would explain the sweat on my kid’s brow and why she was fanning herself. My mother doesn’t use her air conditioning. Thinks it’s a scourge. Calls once a quarter to tell me that I need to get used to life without it myself. Because the economy is crap, the energy is in crisis and soon we’ll all be AC-less. Her words not mine. She’s been saying it my whole life.