Sleeper II

The story of a refrigerator light.

This is the ancient refrigerator in my basement. We inherited it twenty-two years ago from the previous owner of the house. I believe it has been unplugged, very briefly, twice in that time. Otherwise, it never stops refrigerating. It is the Timex of refrigerator world.

In that time, we have bought two newfangled “real” refrigerators for the kitchen. The first required professional repair three times. And, over time, the entire water/ice dispenser thing became too dysfunctional to use. For the final five years or so of its time on this earth, we just covered that section with Press ‘n’ Seal so that people wouldn’t try to use it. The second is only a couple years old. It’s an LG. So far so good — and the design fits our needs very well. But, based on what I read online, I have very little confidence that it won’t need a major repair in the next five years. We’ll see. I already managed to dent the front by allowing the door to make minor contact with the oven handle. Not reassuring.

Then there is the war horse in the basement. It would have laughed at the incident with the oven handle, and told the upstairs fridge to get a pair. It just keeps on ticking. It also provides a great surface for a computer server, a router, an uninterruptible power supply, and other miscellaneous stuff. So there’s that. Sure, the outside collects a thin coating of mold every few years. Nothing that a bucket of bleach and a sponge won’t cure. It’s fine inside, reliably housing everything that we can’t fit in the upstairs fridge, mostly bought at price clubs… four or five pounds of butter, to service baking whims du jour… impossibly large containers of soy sauce… Greek yogurt bought in bulk… backup milk and eggs… leftovers that will rarely be consumed, but, hey, there’s always a chance… meat in the freezer when the supermarket does the buy-one-get-one thing on London broil… a big box of mozzarella sticks for picky kids on fish nights… jars of pickled peppers from the garden, which we tend to forget exist… Etc.

Could we live without Ol’ Bessie? Probably. We would find a way. But she makes our life better, and I am thankful that she does what she does and never complains. But you know what Bessie has never had, in the twenty two years she has been in our employ? Yes. A light. For a long time I just assumed that refrigerators of this seasoned vintage probably didn’t even come with lights. I didn’t give it a second thought. Then one day, a few months ago, while moving three gratuitous extra milk containers around to make room for a “why not” bowl of fresh chicken broth, I spied something in the back that I had never noticed. Could it be? Yes! It be: A long-dead appliance bulb nestled behind a panel of protective frosted glass.

Well.

“This changes everything,” I thought. A light in the downstairs fridge? Really? It doesn’t seem natural. Something is off.

It took a couple months to come to terms with this potential fissure in the fabric of spacetime. But a couple days ago I summoned the courage to see if this fantasy had legs. Being the quiet, passive hoarder of appliance bulbs that I am (c’mon, who among us doesn’t slip a pair of them in the cart while rushing down Aisle 1 of Home Depot, “just to have around”?), finding a bulb was certainly not a problem. I did fear that the long-dead bulb might have welded itself into the socket over the decades. But a few gentle, jerky twists put that angst to rest in short order.

And so it was time for the moment of truth. After so many decades of silence, would Ol’ Bessie’s circuits ring through a new bulb like Kate Smith belting out God Bless America at the old Spectrum in Philly, ca. 1974? Or would the years of inactivity, the layers of condensation and the utter neglect win the day? With some trepidation I gently screwed the new bulb into the socket. And, without delay, it was 1974 all over again. Or maybe a year earlier. Remember Sleeper? It was a 1973 Woody Allen movie (one that is actually funny). The main character, Miles Monroe, is cryogenically frozen in 1973 and defrosted 200 years later, where his misadventures… well, I won’t spoil it. It’s a worthy watch, at least if your sense of humor is as childish as mine.

Anyway, there’s a famous scene where Miles needs a car, and he comes upon a 200 year-old Volkswagen Beetle in a cave. So he gets in, turns the key, and it starts — the joke being that you can’t kill those cars. Well, I felt like Miles. You can’t kill these old refrigerators. Even the light sockets still work. May my light sockets still work as well in twenty five years.

It has been a couple days, but opening that refrigerator door still seems weird and out of place, out of time. Maybe there really was a fissure in spacetime. Who knows where life might lead now? Maybe I’ll find myself holding a gun to Donald Trump’s disembodied nose, threatening a junta that seeks to clone its leader…