My appliances seem to have it in for me
My relationship with household appliances has always been on-again, off-again. Stressful.
My most recent faux pas was at work where one morning I deposited my sack lunch in our big side-by-side fridgefreezer and was surprised at noon to find the pressed ham in my sandwich crunchy and the RC Cola slushy.
Well, I thought, that happens sometimes when there’s not much in a big fridge. I’d noticed there was plenty of room in there for a change, nothing, as there sometimes is, to get Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout excited about.
Nope, no bacon rinds or chicken bones, or “drippy ends of ice cream cones, prune pits, peach pits, orange peel, gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal, pizza crusts and withered greens, soggy beans and tangerines, crusts of black burned buttered toast, and gristly bits of beefy roasts.”
Cringe away, but don’t tell me that Shel Silverstein’s 1970s classic poem/song doesn’t come to mind sometimes when you peer into the fridge where you work (or at home): “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out.”
Hey, the night editor sends out emails when it gets too bad, nighttime being the right time for the uneaten undead to take exorcise — ghosts of sack lunches lost, phantoms of pizza parties past — right under the nose of the sports department.
Where was I? My wearied mind tends to wander. Oh, yes, standing in front of the big side-by-side at work where, proving that point, it turns out I had tucked my sandwich and RC into a corner of the freezer, not the fridge, despite knowing full well how to use a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer since at least 1973.
The sad realization came only a few days later when I went to retrieve the Yoohoo chocolate drink meant to supplement the RC and found it not crunchy, not slushy, but frozen solid as a brick because, ha ha, silly me, I’d had my head on backward.
I know better. Lord knows, I should know better after personally handling something like 83,000 refrigerator boxes while working on a line for a year in hell the summer of 1987 at a Whirlpool factory at peak production in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Maybe my momentary lack of gumption was a throwback to early night terrors caused by the first side-by-side refrigerator-freezer I ever knew personally, the one my folks got from the same Whirlpool factory a dozen years or so before.
It had an ice-maker. Fancy! And when that thing automatically refilled in the middle of the night, the sound of water running echoing across the big open rooms of that woodframe farmhouse out in the quiet country — it sounded like someone getting a glass of water from the kitchen faucet.
!!! I’mInBed! MamaAndDaddyAreInBed! I pray the Lord my soul to take! MyBrother’sInBed! If I should die before I wake! There’s-A-Stranger-InThe-House! I pray the Lord my soul to take!
What? No, Ricky, it’s just that fancy new icebox. !!! OK. Amen.
Terror was never far away in the kitchen. It was there I murdered by first teddy bear, Bobo the First. (Pronounced bah-boh). I have no recollection of this. I must have been 4 or 5.
Mama told me that everyone woke up to a smoky house one morning because I had managed to locate a roasting pan, tuck Bobo in there, put the lid on, stick it in the oven, turn the oven on and await that roasty, toasty, teddy bear-y goodness.
His poor little plastic eyes.
My big brother and I tried to terrorize Mama in the same kitchen several years later with a pair of blowup plastic human legs ordered from the back of a comic book.
We slid a pair of my jeans on them, stuck on a pair of boots and leaned them into the open clothes dryer. Mama was not amused.
A few years after that, at a family reunion at our house, I happened to see a little cousin who had clambered into the dryer unnoticed. I like to’ve jumped out of my boots.
We are so lucky he didn’t get shut up in there, in an out-of-theway place, with loud family reunioning going on. He’d have been found too late. At that, I learned why Mama was not amused.
There’s just too much tension in the kitchen and laundry room.
That’s why I’m ready for a little outdoor living — and by that I mean a lawn chair, my trusty Weber kettle grill, good ol’ Kingsford charcoal briquettes, and keep the lighter fluid, I’ll take my time.
These fancy outdoor kitchens? Keep ‘em. The last thing I want is a bunch of contraptions following me outside. My relationship with household appliances is stressful. I need my space.