The Story of the Green Fan

We don't exactly remember where this fan came from. It was a large green box fan, and without A/C, we needed it desperately to cool down the bedroom shared by Sheila, Karleen and myself.

When we first plugged in this fan, we noticed was that it was loud. Painfully loud. Abnormally loud. Something was clearly wrong with this fan. But we were hot. We left the fan on.

That first night, the fan was so loud that it actually kept us awake. But we had a choice--be so hot that we can't sleep, or be cool and relaxed, but kept awake by the noise. We opted for cool and relaxed.

After a week, we began to sleep through the noise. After a month, we couldn't sleep without its "white noise." I think it was actually more like "magenta noise." In an apartment of five girls, several with boyfriends, someone was always coming or going or talking on the phone in the middle of the night (more on the talking on the phone to come). That fan was the background noise that covered all other noises. We were completely addicted.

We wrote a poem in honor of the fan. Unfortunately, the only existing copy of the poem was scrawled on a sheet of notebook paper and posted in our grimy bathroom (more on the grimy bathroom to come, as well). None of us knows what happened to that paper, and we can't remember much of the poem. We remember the opening stanza and the refrain, which I will post here:

"Ode to a Green Fan"

Like a screaming jet engine,
Like a jackhammer, LOUD
Such is the whirring of our green fan.

.....

Oh green fan, how we love thee.
May God thy steel refine.
There is no fan above thee,
And we're so glad you're mine.

Yes, I know that the last clause makes no grammatical sense whatsoever. We all knew it. But hey, it rhymed, and it amused us, and that's really all that mattered at the time. Funny that I went on to teach English, huh?