Our granddaughter was with us last week when we passed a prison.
She was really nervous going past the building and she had all kinds of questions.
She made Papa pull over so she could look at the sharp wire all along the walls. He told her that there were some people inside who were being punished and the wire kept them from crawling over the walls and running away. She didn’t like that they would run away, but she said she understood. She noticed that the building was all rock and this had her worried. She told us how she had burned her feet when she took her shoes off and walked on the sidewalk in front of the house. If the sidewalk got that hot, she was sure the people in the building would get hot. She wanted to know if they had air conditioning to keep them cool. Papa simply told her that of course, there is air conditioning in the jailhouse. The people inside couldn’t survive if they didn’t have air conditioning in the summer. They even had heating for the winter. He told her that the large machines on top of the building were the air conditioners and there were four furnaces in the basement. When she asked how he knew all that about the furnaces and the air conditioning, he proudly told her that he helped install the HVAC system. She wanted to know if he walked up on the wall like those men she saw. He laughed and said he was one of the HVAC technicians who installed all the HVAC equipment when the prison was first built.