The Icebox Brigade

Right now, our refrigerator is full. I've been reading about food waste lately and while I grew up with the ironclad rule that food should never be wasted or thrown out, I know that these days I do contribute to the food waste stream. We have fresh produce delivered from a farm to the house every Wednesday and sometimes don't eat it all before it goes bad. Some weeks we even avail ourselves of one of those meal-prep delivery services which makes me feel like an actual cook but sometimes doesn't turn out to our liking.

So the fridge is full, and what a blessing that is. I've known this appliance by many names --- the icebox, the frigidaire, the fridge, the refrigerator. Over the years I've had quite a few. Remembering them today, as I contemplated where to stuff the leftovers from lunch, I realized that they trace the trajectory of my fluctuating economic circumstances.

Things started out ok. When I was 18 and newly married, we rented a furnished apartment specifically set up for servicemembers from the nearby Navy base. That was where I started learning my way around the kitchen, though my husband did most of the cooking. He had a talent for it.

When he got out of service and we started college, money was tight. All our furniture and appliances were second-hand,  as was our series of beater cars.  After a couple of years, I moved out on my own for awhile to live in a student boarding house, the first time I shared a kitchen with 6 other women. It was a never-ending effort to keep tabs on my own food. The fridge, with its limited space, was the hardest to control.

After Andrew was born and his dad and I separated for good, I went on welfare and food stamps to keep life together while I finished college and looked for a job. My upstairs apartment had a small fridge with an undependable thermostat and a freezer just big enough for ice cube trays. I learned to shop every couple of days and was very grateful that breast milk was always at the ready and at the perfect temperature.

Next, I threw resources in with my sister and we rented a small, tattered house together. Garage sales provided appliances, including a stove with 2 working burners and a refrigerator that had to be roped shut. Inconvenient, but at least it worked. Somehow, she forgave me for suddenly packing up to move to California, leaving her to unload all our fine furnishings. 

My second place in San Francisco was another shared space with 5 housemates. We instituted the use of small colored stickers to differentiate refrigerator food for each of the roomies. It sort of worked. Sometimes.

Zig-zagging back to Chicago for awhile, I had a garden apartment with no refrigerator at all, and no hope of affording one. Andrew and I slept on a single floor mattress and ate off of a round cocktail table with 2 metal chairs. That was all of our furniture. But the kitchen had hot water and a stove, so I stopped at the market every day to buy cold things for the styrofoam cooler and somehow we got by.

Moving in with my parents in the Azores gave me all the comforts of home: washer and dryer, a working stove and fridge, and a grandmotherly, Portugese, housekeeper/babysitter who took good care of things --- and of Andrew. 

It actually took until I was well into my forties for me to get a brand new refrigerator for the first time. Same thing with a car. Fifties before I owned a house. You would think, after all this history, that I would never take anything for granted, but that doesn't seem to be the way things go. We live in a country in which poor people having a refrigerator calls their legitimacy into question. It's complicated. What exactly is a luxury and what would be a necessity?  

Jill and I have a fifteen-year-old fridge that is still pumping away for the time being. It's ample for us, even without the bells and whistles I see in Home Depot on the new models. I hope it lasts awhile longer, but I also am pretty sure that when it gives up the ghost we'll be able to go pick out a new one, not shop the second-hand stores. We may not be rolling in dough, but we also don't have to tie the door shut with a rope to keep the cold in. 

And that's the lesson, isn't it? Not everyone is so fortunate.

I remember.

Carrying on, A.D.

Nancy and Lester Bundy

                                                                                         


Fourteen years ago today, my father died of Alzheimer's Disease. He was an accomplished musician and I grew up in a swirl of classical music and jazz while playing underneath the baby grand piano with my sisters and brother. It was the soundtrack of my childhood.

It's now more than two years since my mother died of the same disease, a sad follow-up eleven years later.  Both were teachers and lovers of theater, music, art, and literature. All four of us apples did not fall far from the parental tree.

Now they're gone and it still surprises me. There is an enormous difference between the intellectual understanding that death is

inevitable and the reality of being an orphan. These two people live on dramatically in my memory and my own expression of life. My personal playlist still revolves around Chopin and Bach, Coltrane and Ellington, and every lyric of every Broadway recording I listened to on the old record player in the living room. Now I listen in my car to a CD of Dad playing Scott Joplin ragtime.

Lately, I've had several friends whose parents have passed into beyond. It is a truism that we are able to turn our own difficult experiences into a force for good with other people in need. That's happened repeatedly in the past couple of years. I am able to pass along what others gave to me and what I've gained from my own experience. 

It's also true that you don't know what it's like until it happens. I suppose that's true of most everything. Not everyone feels a profound loss at the death of a parent or parental figure. Most of my friends going through this are, as I am, veterans of caregiving. We're not kids anymore in need of regular meals or tuition money. Still, the loss of parents is the loss of generational knowledge and continuity.

At Grandma and Grandpa's house

I'm left with boxes of papers, photos, books, and recordings made or compiled by people who no longer exist. Because I had direct interactions with them, I carry sensory memories, intimate recollections that are still alive to me. Soon enough though, I'll be gone as well and fewer people will have any idea of who the people were who came before. We all, if we are remembered by anyone, become reduced to the few tangible mementos and artifacts that survive.

It doesn't seem like 14 years since my father died. My brother and I were at his bedside that day, holding his hands and talking to him. Mom was right here in the front room when her end came, surrounded by family, people who love her still. Alzheimer's had robbed them both of not just their vitality and expression, but any consciousness of self.  In each instance, at the very end of AD, only a shell remained.

Anyone who hangs around the planet long enough will lose someone to death. And it doesn't have to be a person; the death of a beloved animal companion can be devastating as well. As life continues after a death, it can feel incomplete, unnatural, as though the world has fundamentally altered. And while that acute sense of loss eventually diminishes, some of it seems to linger.

It's a new stage of life, I guess. I'm not sure where the memories live. And what do I do with the leftovers?

Everything you know --- right or wrong?

Once upon a time, I would lie on the floor with my head between the speakers listening to the Firesign Theater album "Everything You Know is Wrong" for hours. It seeped into my brain; some stray phrases still surface from time to time. Those were the good ol' days, when America was Great. 

Forty-five years later I have the feeling that everything I know is wrong, and getting wronger by the minute. Not only is the "phone" I carry in my pocket way too smart for me, the world I thought I knew is becoming unrecognizable.

Now I might be able to blame that on the fact that I was lied to. Earnestly and repeatedly lied to, by every authority figure in my small, sheltered world. That's what they did back then when America was Great. Some people called it child-rearing. Others, education.

#1  The guys in the white hats are good, the ones in black hats are bad, and girls are buxom and dumb. 
#2  The United States of America was, and always has been, savior of the world, ever since the noble Founding Fathers invented liberty and justice for all. 
#3  Good people are rewarded and bad people are punished because that's the way God wants it.
#4  Pity the poor, the sick, the old, and the infirm. They can't help it if they're not as healthy and happy as we are. And don't stare.
#5  Just be good and nothing bad will ever happen to you, and if it does that means you've done something wrong.

Now that America is not Great anymore and I'm waaaaaay older than I was back then, the scales fall from my eyes and WHOA! What happened to my pretty places? It's strange to think that even though I've now lived nearly 7 decades and have been through hard times and seen my fortunes ebb and flow, there are still illusions to be shattered. 

I have managed to hold on to a shred of belief that things do keep getting better for humanity. That's involved a lot of squinting, reframing, and sometimes plugging up my ears, but I have never quite lost hope that humans continue to evolve. When cynicism begins to overtake me, I look to history and see where we've been compared to now. It requires taking a very long view, but we have made progress, even in terms of overall warring and killing. Plus we have smart phones now.

Making America Great Again seems to mean a return to black and white thinking, in every sense of the phrase. There's no room for me in a black and white world.
#6  There's one soulmate (opposite sex, of course) for everyone and finding The One brings ultimate happiness.
#7  Don't you worry honey, I'll take care of you.

Did you know that gay people weren't even invented until 1969? And that the push for the ERA and Civil Rights broke America's Greatness forever? Until now in the 21st Century, when we can start getting it back again.

#8  War is terrible but absolutely necessary to preserve Democracy and Greatness.
#9  The Poor will be with us always.
#10  God helps those who help themselves. Hard work and ambition are the keys to the American Dream.

Of course, the hardest work gets the highest pay and if you do unpaid work, like "homemaking" it's not really work at all or you'd be getting paid. If you do manual labor it's honorable even if you can't afford to live on it, because work is redemptive in itself. And if you work even harder, the American Dream of Success will undoubtedly be yours. Just keep trying!

#11  Every American Citizen has the right and the sacred duty to vote. Free and open elections are the foundation of the American Democracy. That's what makes America Great and every other country should be like America.
#12  When you get old, you will be taken care of by your family and your community because we Americans respect and honor families and our elders. They fought in wars and worked hard to Make America Great, and deserve rest, relaxation, and good healthcare at the end of life.
#13  And everyone lived happily ever after.

P.S. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It's probably George Tirebiter.