Cold facts: Things always in a state of change
Arefrigerator must be able to perform three important tasks. It needs to keep opened bottles of wine preserved and at proper serving temperature. It should also maintain unopened bottles of wine at proper stand-by temperature, and it should keep the rest of our food and beverages at a temperature that won’t give us life-threatening food poisoning. In that order.
This summer our refrigerator started to slack off on its duties. Apparently 18 years of service was enough and it was no longer interested in keeping things cold — Chardonnay be damned. We’d had it repaired sometime in the pre-pandemic era, but the concept of time has become blurred, so that could have been seven months or seven years ago. Either way, we’d gotten everything out of it that it was going to give. It was time to buy a new refrigerator.
When I find something I like and that works, I stick with it, whether it’s cookie recipes, Internet passwords, or husbands. It’s not that I’m against change; it’s just that I like things to stay the same. Its current duty-shirking notwithstanding, our old refrigerator had been a good one. So I chose to replace it with the same make and model, except this time I decided not to get the ice dispenser in the door. That amount of excitement should hold me over for the rest of the year.
When delivery day arrived, I pulled out every cooler I could get my hands on and began emptying the contents of our refrigerator. And that’s when I discovered that refrigerators serve another important function: they hide things. I already knew I’d find leftovers shoved to the back of a lower shelf and showing promise as artisanal mold farms. But uncovering seven opened jars of salsa was enough to make me want to run for the border. And I wasn’t sure what it said about us that the number of containers of capers in our refrigerator exceeded the number of people who use the refrigerator.
Up to that point, I’d had no idea we had a condiment compulsion. As I filled the coolers with bottles of pomegranate molasses, harissa, and gojuchang sauce, each with about a teaspoon missing from its contents, I was relieved we’d bought the same refrigerator. I wouldn’t have to make a decision about what to keep because I’d be able to fit everything back inside. And, when I shut the door, our lives would remain unchanged.
But this is 2020, so things weren’t going to go smoothly. After everything was unloaded into coolers, we got the bad news that our new refrigerator was still in New Jersey and wouldn’t be delivered that day. I considered our failing refrigerator and wondered if I could get away with leaving everything in coolers. But with the new delivery date three weeks away, I’d soon have a Chardonnay crisis on my hands. As I put stuff back in the refrigerator, I became determined to whittle down the number of odds and ends so the task wouldn’t be so big next time. Even if that meant dinner would be soy sauce and mustard on the leftover heels from four loaves of sandwich bread.
When the new refrigerator arrived it was the same, but different. For one thing, there was a lot more light. Whether it’s to help me find the aioli hiding behind the tapenade or whether it’s to discourage a penicillin farm from setting up shop on the third shelf, I can’t say for sure.
And there were a lot more shelves with lots of options for where to put them. At first, I thought this would make it easy to organize everything so I’d never have to hunt for the piri-piri sauce. Not that I’ve ever hunted for piri-piri sauce before, but it was good to have that peace of mind. There may have been a lot of options as to where to place the shelves, but each one was wrong. I arranged and rearranged for hours, but each placement was always a hair too short or too tall for something. If this was some sort of Common Core logic problem, I now have additional insight as to why last spring’s at-home learning did not go well.
I guess the real lesson is that, no matter how hard we try, we can’t keep things the same. The key is to learn to adapt to changes. At least that’s what I tell myself every time I bang my glass against the refrigerator door expecting to get ice.