The arrival of a new refrigerator last week required me to clean out the old one. I say “me” rather than “we” because my wife was out of town. I had a plan. I’d move the contents of the freezer to our basement standing freezer. But I’d wait until I got word of the new refrigerator’s imminent arrival – the delivery company gave me a wide window of between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. – before I’d empty the perishable items in the non-freezer side.
All was going according to plan when I confronted an unanticipated issue. It transcended quotidian questions having to do with how long milk can sit on a kitchen counter before it starts to sour, and strayed into the aesthetic and even the philosophical. My conundrum was this: after I removed the various family and pet photos, magnets securing them, calendar, shopping list pad, dangling oven mitts, and several pithy quotes I’d scotch taped to the doors should I restore them on the new fridge or leave that beckoning white canvas blank?
I grew up in a home where slapping items like children’s drawings on the fridge was discouraged. My mother considered their effect messy, chaotic and perhaps clichéd rather than charming. However, she didn’t balk when someone gifted her a set of Boston terrier refrigerator magnets. But that was different. Her beloved Boston Terriers and any reproduction of them --- figurines, stuffed animals, neckties, Christmas tree ornaments -- were treated as objects of religious veneration.
I was frankly torn. There were arguments to be made on both sides. I could see the antiseptic appeal of an unembellished, unencumbered new refrigerator. On the other hand, what room of your home is more trafficked than the kitchen and what surface more prominent than your refrigerator doors and sides? If you have something to show or tell – if you want to share your family, and even its values and affections, with visitors – what better way than to affix things to the fridge?
In my case, vanity also played a role. Over the years, on especially slow news days, publications have very occasionally pulled quotes from stories I’ve written and republished them, and I’ve scotch taped a couple of them to the fridge. The New York Post used one as its Page 6 Endquote. It began life as a line in a Wall Street Journal column about dog owners who fail to scoop their dogs’ poop.
Penned in 2015 it sadly seems to become more relevant by the day. “Civilization,” it says, “is but a thin skein, a membrane, glazing over the roiling chaos, disorder and incivility that lurks just below society’s surface.”
But don’t think the old fridge door was defaced by my musings alone. I found this one in the New York Review of Books, loved its specificity, and thought it deserved a prominent place on the fridge: “The idea that lifeless chemicals assembled themselves into a living cell so early in Earth’s history indicates that life can happen relatively easily and therefore repeatedly.”
It’s the next part that I love: “And already this realization has paid off by helping scientists develop a new solution to the Drake equation, which estimates the number of civilizations in the Milky Way.” Here’s the kicker: “If life easily originates early in the existence of Earth-like planets, there must be at least thirty-six alien civilizations in our galaxy.”
I’ve always believed we’re not alone. Of course, apart from structural impediments, such as time and space, why would any advanced civilization worth its salt want to contact a species as primitive, polluting and prone to conflict as our own? But I take solace in the idea that there are thirty-six of them. Not zero. Not a trillion. But three dozen.
Does that New York Review of Books quote, and my bleaker assessment of our prospects, deserve to return to the door of the new fridge? Maybe it’s time for new bon mot or maybe none at all. A tabula rosa -- literally a scraped tablet -- a clean slate.
I was torn. I could make arguments for both. But then my wife got home. She suffered no such ambivalence. She took one look at the new refrigerator, or maybe it was the denuded old fridge waiting to be carted off, and said that the former décor, at least much of it, had to return.
I agreed. Without the family photos and kitschy bric-a-brac (though we’ve been discerning about what refrigerator magnets are allowed) the fridge felt like a formerly lively relative that had sunk into despair. So the dog photos, the over mitt, the Ansel Adams calendar, the newspaper quotes, the other pieces of family iconography – they’re all back.
But not everything. A refrigerator isn’t a museum piece. It’s a work in progress, a living collage. There remains much free space to document the upcoming chapters in the family saga. By the way, isn’t it about time we added a snapshot of our identical twin granddaughters?
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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