Heat Men

Once upon a time, in my pre-reading days, I was sitting at home, and I was very cold. Specifically my legs were very cold. Being rather young and not too self sufficient i decided to respond to my discomfort by whining. My dad suggested that I could not just sit and whine and remain cold, but rather remedy the situation by putting on a jacket. I knew this was a dumb idea for two reasons:

1) My jacket was hanging in a closet in the cold house, and therefore also cold. Putting this cold jacket on would only serve to make my arms as cold as my legs.

2) A jacket would not cover my legs, which, as you may recall, was the part of me that was freezing.

Therefore, I concluded there was nothing to do but sit and suffer, rather loudly, from hypothermia. Although I am fairly certain hypothermia was not yet a part of my vocabulary I'm sure I was thinking some juvenile synonym of hypothermia which currently escapes me.

My dad explained to me that a jacket was a perfect solution to my impeding death by cold because of the heat men. Heat men are the little men that live inside of your body that keep it warm. But the heat men do not simply sit inside your body contentedly keeping it at a pleasant and comfortable temperature. Heat men want to escape and live in the air. They rush around your body looking for avenues of departure. My dad explained to me that if I put on a jacket the heat men that were trying to escape through my arms would get stuck thereby making the jacket warm. Problem 1 solved. He further explained that those heat men would send out the message to other heat men that the arm escape route had been cut off. The rest of the heat men would rush down to my legs looking for an alternate route, and in no time my legs would be nice and toasty. And thus I would not freeze to death. This made sense to me, and I put on a jacket.

My dad insists that he does not remember this conversation, but to this day every time I put on a jacket I imagine little heat men, who look remarkably like little green army men, rushing around my body trying to escape.