HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Just before I went on my mini book tour earlier this month, our refrigerator broke. It just…broke. I came home from an event, and opened the door, and the light was off. Oh, no. The light was off.
But, sometimes that happens, (or it has to us, at least,) and all we have to do is go to the basement and flip the breaker thing. So we flipped the breaker thing. But nothing happened
And you know how it is in old houses, and with old refrigerators, sometimes you have to flip the breaker thing a couple of times. Since the breaker thing is probably old, too.
Which we did, but that didn’t matter. At all. It didn’t work. And it wasn’t gonna.
Luckily, we have another refrigerator, and I scooped up all of the super perishables and frozen things and lugged them upstairs (MY BOOK WAS DUE!!) and crammed them into the other fridge willy-nilly, knowing that as I did it, I would never be able to find anything again, not ever ever ever, but at least nothing nothing would spoil.
Then I called the repair guy. He came, really fast! And took stuff apart, and put it back, and shook his head.
Your fridge, he said, is 30 years old. It is dead.
Then I called my guy at the appliance place, he’s a real gem, and said, Jimmy! We need a fridge! It has to be a certain size, and it has to fit into a certain place. Too long to describe to you, but you know what I mean.
What color do you want? he asked. White, I said.
Of course afterward, I thought do I really want white? But yes, I do. Our kitchen is white. The refrigerator should be white. Luckily for me, because that’s the only color they had.
Anyway, the fridge arrives, and the old one is taken away.
So I thanked it, as it was carted away, it had done so much for us, and I felt kind of sad about it.
I also had to take off all of the things from the front of it, as we have discussed here, previously, and I took a picture to ensure that I could put things up exactly the same way on the new fridge.
But I couldn’t do it. The clean white of the new fridge was so pretty. I just couldn’t invade that space with clippings and pictures and magnets and folderol. So I just magneted everything to the sides of the refrigerator so you don’t see it from the front :-)
Much of the food I took out of the old fridge is still up in the second fridge, and someday,. I will bring it down again. But it was really fun to have a snazzy new fridge with perfectly pristine shelves, where I could absolutely start over.
Thank you, dear fridge. We had been through a lot together, and I appreciated you every day.
Anybody have any appliance stories?
