It Had Been a Hip Refrigerator but It Was No Longer Cool

I had been outside attempting to fence in the mosquitoes.

I made a noble effort, but it didn’t work. What it did do was work up a thirst for both me and the mosquitoes – the former for water and the latter for blood. I needed a cold drink of water. I strolled to the kitchen, where I opened the refrigerator door and grabbed a jug of water. It felt sun-warmed, as if it had just gotten out of a tanning booth.

The fridge had made a career change and turned itself into the ultimate frost-free unit. It was no longer chilling. It had suffered a sudden climate change. That was confirmed when I heard the sad trombone sound. You’ve all heard it going, “Wah-wah-waaah.”

Perhaps it had become a refrigerator’s version of a geezer and I hadn’t noticed? You can’t be a geezer if you don’t know how to geeze. I don’t doubt the appliance had aches and pains, but it should have said something. A nap might have helped.

I have the refrigerator repair skills of a bonobo. I did what I could. I pointed a left-handed screwdriver at the fridge for a few minutes, asking it repeatedly, “When did you get worse than you were?” but it didn’t answer. It had never been interactive.

My wife and I salvaged what food we could and ate the next couple of meals from the wreckage. Each meal was a make-a-roni.

Maybe it was just a phase the fridge was going through?

It proved not to be a phase. Our old fridge had given up the ghost and become an oven, laying waste to all the cool things inside.

That’s not a colossal calamity on the grand scale of calamities, but it’s not worthy of a parade either.

A sleep doctor, who had stayed awake during my entire appointment, told me his parents had recently celebrated the 52nd birthday of their freezer. Our refrigerator hadn’t aged enough to become wobbly or creaky, as it had either bitten the dust or the dust bunnies under it after a short but useful life, one in which it never produced a single ice cube. Its coworker, our range, is down a burner, but the others glow like the sun. The kitchen stove is nine years old. The refrigerator was younger. It had peaked too early.

Flannery O’Connor might have been writing about refrigerators when she penned, “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”

She wasn’t writing about refrigerators, but we needed to get away from the fridge and find one willing to work.

We had refrigerators while I was growing up, to keep our butter, milk, cheese and other perishable food items safe. I recall the brand names – Kelvinator, Frigidaire and Norge. Some were quiet appliances, while others hummed loudly or issued low-volume screams. Each had a well-used metal ice cube tray and a secret compartment to hide things nobody should eat. They had manual defrosting, requiring that the unit be turned off, which allowed the accumulated ice to melt. By the time we took ownership of a secondhand refrigerator, it had become one with three temperature zones—freezing solid, cooling and warming.

I couldn’t open the door of a previously owned refrigerator without thinking of all the starving children in China. “Think of all the starving children in China” was a common expression used by adults to encourage children to clean their plates. It prompted gratitude for having food and consideration for those who were less fortunate.

When we’d polished off the must-go meals and the fridge had been emptied of food, we visited the Waseca Fire Department’s onion ring stand at the Waseca County Fair. The rings are scrumptious.

I’d accepted the fact that the fridge was gone. We all grieve in our own way. Those onion rings are my way to weep and wail whenever I lose a kitchen appliance during the time the Waseca County Fair is running.

One day, two men brought a shiny new refrigerator, and then they became two pallbearers hauling the old one away.

So long, icebox, we hardly knew ye.