I'll Have What She's Having Last Saturday, a living oak tree, of all things, gave out against the wind and crashed through the power lines on Cresta Drive, knocking out power to our neighborhood. I immediately went to the store to get ice. When I got there I thought that since the temperature hadn’t risen past 36 degrees all day, I could have probably just put the food from my refrigerator outside. I bought the ice anyway, because I wasn’t about to go through the refrigerator thing again. For a while there I had the sweetest smelling, cleanest refrigerator and freezer I ever had in my life. Every inch was disinfected and there was nothing in there that I didn’t recognize or need. It’s starting to get back to normal, which is somewhere in between squeaky clean and the state I found it in days after the power went out. For about five days I was too busy to get in there and start working on it, and I didn’t even want to open it to see what I would find. We had evacuated some items from it, but we had left a lot of meat in the freezer and leftovers in the refrigerator. On the Thursday after the fire started, the refrigerator began demanding my attention. Even though it was still sealed tight, it was managing to make its presence known. It was like it had gas or something. So while I still had a little daylight, I slipped on the old Playtex gloves, got a bucket of hot water and disinfectant and got to work. I started with the freezer—big mistake. When I opened that freezer, a smell like a morgue gone bad punched out with two big boxing gloves on and smacked me in the face. I gasped and ran to all of the windows and the front door and opened all of them wide. I’ll tell you, it will be a long time before I stock up on a lot of meat in my freezer. In fact, come to think of it, I’ve been passing the meat counter an awful lot lately, in favor of having the same meals as my vegetarian daughter. Maybe it has something to do with that refrigerator cleanout. You think? A lot of people were gone and didn’t know the power had gone out, and hadn’t been counting on that happening. Some were aware that Edison had plans to possibly cut off the power for a while, but many were hoping that it would just be going off for a little while. So a lot of people have refrigerator stories. A few people reported one problem that I had. The reason my refrigerator was passing gas is that like you and I, it might be airtight on the front and sides, but it isn’t airtight on the bottom. People, including me, tell this story: they clean out and disinfect the refrigerator, but the kitchen still smells terrible. They smell inside the freezer, then inside the refrigerator compartment, and then close them. That’s when they realize they forgot to empty the pan on the bottom, which is close to full of an unspeakably rancid, colorful brew that had leaked out of the freezer and refrigerator. That was probably the worst part for me. I’ve heard a lot of refrigerator stories lately. One woman in the market the other day told me she had been getting ready for an outage, but didn’t think it would last very long, so she put two big bags of ice in her freezer. Over the course of a few days, all of the water in those bags mixed with stuff like melted ice cream and leaked out of her refrigerator/freezer all over her kitchen floor—40 pounds of water mixed with other junk. Another refrigerator story is the “old” and “new” refrigerator, and I’ve heard this a lot. One woman in the store, buying frozen fish, asked, “We have tartar sauce to go with this, right?” Her husband answered, “No, that was in the old refrigerator.” So they went to the aisle with the tartar sauce. It’s not that they bought a new refrigerator—they’re referring to the contents of their refrigerator before the evacuation as being the “old” refrigerator. Now I’m saying it. One of the times I did buy meat last week was at the deli out of a great desire to have a roast beef sandwich. I got some fresh sheepherder’s bread, some roast beef and some Swiss cheese. All the way home I was dreaming about how I was going to slather about a quarter-inch of horseradish between the roast beef and cheese. When I got home and started making the sandwich, to my dismay, I realized that the horseradish had been in my “old” refrigerator. So I glumly sat there and ate the sandwich minus the third-most important thing (after roast beef and bread, of course) you have to have on it before you can really call it a roast beef sandwich. When I told my wife about the “old” and “new” stories, she asked, “Are you sure that’s what they mean?” Then she told me about a friend of hers who just threw her old refrigerator out and bought a new one. I’m glad my new refrigerator is getting to be more like my old refrigerator. They tend to grow on you after a while—literally. |
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