Back Story: The blogger's broken refrigerator diet

I feel lost. Maybe not as lost as when the power goes off during a storm; or when we had the kitchen redone and we were without appliances for a couple days; or the time the drain pipe from the kitchen sink sprung a leak inside the wall and flooded one of the downstairs bedrooms, the day before Thanksgiving, and we crossed our fingers and prayed the plumber would be able to fix it in time for us to prepare our holiday dinner. Think about it. You can’t roast a turkey without a kitchen sink.

When they are working as designed, we hardly notice these conveniences. Lose one or more, and I start thinking about what it must have been like in pioneer days. I would tell the kids when they were younger, “Pretend we are camping out!” The reply was always, “But there is nothing to do.”

In 2000, just weeks after we had moved to Ohio from New York, we were narrowly missed by a tornado. We didn’t even know it. All we knew was that the air smelled strange and felt charged with electricity. Then came the storm. I scrambled, unsuccessfully, to shut down my computer before we lost power. I had just started baking salmon in the oven. After awhile when the electric didn’t come back on, I started up the grill on the patio. The rain had stopped, so it seemed strange that it was taking so long to restore the power. After dinner and just before dark, we hunted down a cheap transistor radio we had stashed away in a box in the garage and tuned in the news. We learned that we had been missed by a tornado that had passed but a quarter mile from our house. It tore a diagonal path of destruction across Xenia, killing one person and miraculously injuring very few. All that was left of one supermarket was a pile of splinters.

Incidentally, there was no tornado siren, because that was the very first thing that was wiped out when the tornado arrived in town.

I thanked my stars that we were so lucky, the kids carped about no TV and Amy was ready to start packing for a move back to New York. I forget how long it was before we had power, but on that day it seemed like a minor inconvenience.

But, today, I am lost - lost without the refrigerator that had been overstuffed with a certain compulsive shopper’s idea of being ready for anything. Anything but the failure of the very refrigerator that was holding all that stuff. And, no doubt, it was that extra large load that brought about the failure in the first place.

Here’s how I got the news. I returned home in the early evening from a faculty reading at the Writers’ Workshop. I opened the door and was greeted with, “I’ve got some bad news for you.” By the way, this is always the way that the last thing I want to hear is delivered. I wish she could be more creative.

“What is it?” I moaned.

“Your ice cream melted,” she said.

“What are you trying to tell me – that the refrigerator is broken?”

“Someone turned the freezer knob down.”

“Oh. Did you turn it back?”

“Of course I did.”

I dropped my stuff and went to check it out. I fooled with the knobs for both the freezer and the refrigerator compartments. I wasn’t hearing a motor kick in even when I turned it to maximum cool. Refrigerators are a strange bird to me. I never did understand them. Give it time, I thought. Let’s see what happens.

A couple hours later, it seemed painfully clear that nothing was happening. The ice cubes were coated with a film of water and the food in the freezer compartment was getting soft.

“Try unplugging it and plugging it back in,” Amy suggested.

We pulled the big side-by-side box out from the wall and she reached behind it and pulled the plug. When she plugged it back in, a motor somewhere deep in the bowels of the great silver monolith started to whir softly. In my head, played strains of “Thus Sprach Zarathustra.”

“That did it,” she said.

“Maybe,” I replied. “Let’s give it some time.

A half-hour later we were getting bathroom towels to put on the floor to sop up the water that was leaking in a stream from the icemaker down the front door of the refrigerator and pooling on the kitchen floor.

It was late. We were past our bedtime, scooping out ice cubes and moving some of the more costly frozen food items to the already over-stuffed downstairs freezer.

I lay awake all night wondering what kind of ruination would await me in the morning. But actually, it wasn’t too bad. The towels we had placed at the foot of the fridge were more than up to the task. I fished out the few remaining ice cubes and put them into our large cooler. Later, I picked up a couple of bags of ice from the Speedway station in town and put one in the fresh food section and the other in the cooler and moved some of our more recent purchases, such as a couple pounds of cold cuts, to safety. Almost everything left in the freezer was junk, so we tossed it out.

So here I am. I finished up the last of the orange juice with my vitamins. It was barely cold. That doesn’t bode well for the more than half-gallon of milk on the shelf on the door. I was going to pick up a couple of blocks of cheese while I was out later in the morning, but I scrapped that idea. No cold soda pop with my lunchtime sandwich; no cold beer later tonight while I’m watching reruns on the boob tube. This is beginning to feel like a diet.