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Freezers, Flashbacks & Fish

8/27/2012

Spaghetti-Os, Spaghetti-Os, Wherefore art thou, Spaghetti-Os?

So . . . I was sitting around in my foam curlers, Dale Evans holsters and fuzzy bunny slippers, thinking about what I'd write today when an e-mail from a friend triggered some memories: She was in the process of defrosting her freezer!

Sometimes I think my skill set is, uh, a tad limited. Oh sure, I can string together enough words to write a proper thank-you note. And I practice the recommended method for using dental floss. I can reload a tape dispenser in no time flat. I have excellent spatial abilities. I can even roll my tongue. (The ability to do so is likely not an inherited trait, despite what you may have been taught in Bio 101.) But really, what skill do I possess that's truly useful in the real world?

What a gift it was, then, this unexpected boost to my self-esteem, this detail in my friend's note to remind me that I am not just a shivering blob of protoplasm (something else that doesn't match what we learned in Bio 101), but protoplasm in shivering possession of an actual, bona fide practical skill. I, too, know how to defrost a freezer!

I give a nod here to my father, the one who taught me. Actually, he didn't so much teach me, as allow me sit cross-legged on the floor next to him while he de-iced the frozen mess. And with that great, gelatinous glop that is a child's brain, I learned by watching him.

Our refrigerator was stylish
stainless-steel, a 1950s built-in behemoth. It had a bottom-drawer freezer featuring a big basket on rollers that made it easy to access the contents: loaves of Oroweat from the day-old store, a half-gallon rectangle of banana-walnut ice cream (Dad's favorite, ick), white-wrapped hamburger clods, and the foil-clad salmon my grandfather would deliver once each year when he came down from Oregon in his camper truck. That fish was a thing we never, ever ate, and it had a habit of burying itself at the bottom of the drawer.The freezer also had an ingenious built-in system for alerting us when it was time to remove the accumulated ice: the drawer would be so impacted that it would no longer open! Nothing says "fix me" like inaccessible ice cream.

Defrosting the freezer was a father's job. My dad would switch off the appliance and fetch some towels from the linen closet. Then he'd lay a mat of newspaper on the kitchen floor and set a pan of hot water in the freezer drawer. After a bit of time had passed, he'd open the freezer and take to the ice with his specialized collection of defrosting implements: table knives, spatulas and wooden spoons. Dad explained the importance of not using a tool that was too sharp, lest the freezer walls be damaged. Dad hammered and chiseled. Softening slabs of ice broke free, and soon enough, the sliding drawer would loosen, and the lost treasure of frozen food would emerge!

My job was to carry the soup pots of shed ice out to the yard. I dumped them on the grass while Dad continued to scrape and pry, pound and jiggle, digging out the last bits of ice. When at last he was done, he sopped up the mess with the clean bath towels, and I stuffed the soaking newspaper in the trash. The freezer was clicked on. Bread and burger and banana-walnut were reinstalled. The big, frozen fish, ice-burnt at the ends where its aluminum wrapper had peeled back, was thudded into the metal garbage can outside.

And just in the nick of time, it seemed, as soon would come the inevitable phone call from my grandfather. He would soon be headed to town. And surprise of surprises, he was bringing us a special fish!

Dad Moody shows off his fish

Coda: Defrosting a freezer is like falling off a bicycle—you never forget how to do it. But is it any wonder I own a frost-free model?

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Back 2 Skool & the Loss of My Innocence

8/20/2012

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I love back-to-school shopping.

I have always loved back-to-school shopping.

All those aisles filled with the heady smells of pens and pencils and Crayolas and rulers and scissors and Pee Chees and glue and erasers and paints and . . .

. . . wasn't I surprised in the 5th grade when Kathy Hurd told me how much she, too, loved back-to-school shopping. O frabjous day! A soul mate!

Except . . . turns out that Kathy Hurd was talking about clothes shopping. Really? Clothes shopping??

I was stunned. It had never occurred to me to associate the joys of school shopping with shopping for clothes. Never mind that I attended Catholic school, where every new school year meant little more than replacing last year's plaid wool jumper and getting a fresh set of white blouses with the requisite Peter Pan collars. And that the fact of my orthopedic footwear didn't even allow for one single pair of saddle oxfords. Even if I had revolved in the same orbit as my public-school friends, new dresses and sweaters and anklets would hardly have been the thing to excite me into Hinshaw's Department Store in August or September or any month for that matter.

But what was even more shocking to me than the revelation that back-to-school shopping meant clothes shopping, was the obvious fact that my perception was so far out of whack. So I asked around, asked everyone I could think of. Did my 10-year-old's version of scientific research: What does back-to-school shopping mean to you? If I was off base, I wanted to know just how far off base I was.

And what I learned was that I was so far afield that I wasn't even in the ballpark. I wasn't even in a city with a ballpark. I wasn't even in a state in a country with a ballpark. Think slapped knees and raucous guffaws and lips curled in that classic, spirit-crushing "you're so weird" response. Apparently I was a 64-Crayola kid in an 8-Crayola world.

It took me a long time, but I finally found what one friend calls "my tribe." You know who you are, My Friends, my soul mates out there who understand the pleasures of a pencil's heft. Who can lose an afternoon to a stapler catalog. Who never met a ruler they didn't love. Who teem with opinions about gel pens and liquid ink. Who know to this day the smell that Crayolas leave on their hands.

Now I'm off to the office store. Folders are on sale for a penny each!

FOR EXTRA CREDIT: Read this blog entry about the Hinshaw's Arcadia Store
(goes without saying that "my" Whittier store was better!)

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Kobi's Not-So-Excellent Adventure

8/13/2012

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SMILE! IT COULD BE WORSE!

So read the cardboard sign being held by the man at the bottom of the River Road exit as it comes west off Beltline.

Tell that to the cat. I was taking Kobi to the veterinarian's office, a nine minute drive from home. He (Kobi, not the fellow with the sign) had been hollering the entire way there. One holler approximately every two-and-a-half seconds for nine minutes = 216 cries. Add in 2 minutes of load time + 2 more for unloading and that makes 312 sickening, heartwrenching wails. Very to-the-vet's-specific wails that were a cross between the yowls he emits while on night patrol down the hallway and the screech he lets out when someone's just stepped on his tail.

I was doing my best to be a good mom, making comforting sounds from the front seat. Embarrassing cootchy-coo sounds that—trust me on this—wouldn't play well on YouTube if I were running for public office. Then he broke me. No—I'll own it: I broke. Smile, I told my terrified cat. It could be worse.

Well, yes of course I know better. The very last thing one should do to an unhappy creature is try to cajole him into being happy. See how you feel when a tractor-trailer runs over your foot and someone runs up and tries to tickle you out of your pain. Think that evokes happiness? No sirree. More like a fist to the face. A fist to the face with no regrets.

I'm an all-regret kind of person. Whatever I do, there's always some way I could have done it better. Or, since perspective is everything, there's always some way I could have done it less worse. Thar she lies—DeepDarkSecret #42,391.

I'm also someone who doesn't believe in dumping my problems on assorted, innocent others. My problem isn't someone else's problem. Unless they start with that cajoling business. Then they get a faceful of it. Take that co-worker of mine. It was 1983. I was 25, and I'd just finished an extremely long day on my postal route. I was punching the timeclock (this is office vernacular, not meant to be taken literally) at the end of my shift, preparing to head to the hospital 30 minutes away where my mother was enduring her final days. That co-worker had barely ever said a word to me. But he chose this day, the very last part of this arduous day, to make his cheering move--Smile! You're too young to be wearing such a frown.

He got more than a frown. Get out your thesaurus and look up glower. Then multiply the definition by 312 and you might be getting close to what my co-worker got from me in that one spontaneous moment. There weren't any words. Just that look. And I think he got the message. A message I've never regretted sending.

But there is one apology that's truly in order: Sorry, Kobi. I do know better.

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The Origin of Mimeses

8/7/2012

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People sometimes comment on how creative I am.

HaHaHaHaHaHaHa!

There isn't an original bone in my body. Those moments of cleverness? They're mostly stolen, not even on the sneak, from other sources. And usually those sources have been around a while (my keepers will tell you I don't get out much), although they may be brand spanking new to me.

For instance, my wonderful, anonymous friend who writes a fantastic blog all about Oregon, recently sent me a link to an article about found poetry cobbled together from the spines of books. I've written previously about the joys of cut-and-paste, so of course this had instant appeal for me. I quickly summoned The Genie Google and did a hasty search for book spine poetry, a search which came up with approximately 500,000 hits! A half a million? Hmmmm. Alas and alack, once again I've arrived at the ball long after the glass slipper's found its foot.

Little matter. A good idea's a good idea, and any day I can find a new way to get the poetic love juices flowing is a very fine day indeed. So I've been writing. Or more accurately, I've been stacking books, and the poems—somehow, miraculously—have been writing themselves. Cock your head 90 degrees and take a good look at those bookshelves of yours. You'll never see your books in the same way again!

THE SIMPLE TRUTH

Sweet Machine,
you've just been told
you have time for this,
this clumsy living.

Looking for luck,
flying blind,
the light comes slowly.

Brace yourself.

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GroundBlog Day

8/6/2012

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DUE TO
CIRCUMSTANCES
BEYOND
OUR CONTROL,
THE MONDAY MORNING BLOG
WILL APPEAR
ON
TUESDAY MORNING.

DO NOT,
I REPEAT,
DO NOT
ATTEMPT
TO ADJUST
YOUR
MONITOR.

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Freezers, Flashbacks & Fish

Back 2 Skool & the Loss of My Innocence

Kobi's Not-So-Excellent Adventure

The Origin of Mimeses

GroundBlog Day

Nancy Carol Moody

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