Back in the early days of electricity, my grandma's small
town had a community refrigerator. Each
family contributed to its purchase, and each had a designated area in a chilled
room which was the size of a small store.
This fascinates me. Can you
imagine leaving your supper someplace where anyone could touch it, take it,
sneeze on it? I imagine everyone was
considerate and cooperative. Those
people knew how to work together and helped each other in a million different
ways. Some people fantasize about
living in a castle, I think about the community refrigerator.
I obviously don't want to sacrifice my personal fridge to
walk to a store for my food every day.
I just want to experience a gentler time when people are nicer. Maybe I'm dreaming as much as the people who
want to be Cleopatra in a past life.
Maybe people have been and always will be a combination of saints and
psychopaths, but I bet they at least acted nice if they needed help to raise a
barn?
I was instructed to create a 70s kitchen for this
illustration in "Mensa Bulletin" magazine (which printed in the same
article with the boy I posted a couple of weeks ago). This isn't the kitchen I grew up with. Our kitchen was from the 50s or before. I aspired to a 70s kitchen. I wanted a Harvest Gold side by side
refrigerator with ice cube and water dispensers in the door, but the
multi-generational wisdom of my family is all appliances should be white. White is always in style, goes with
everything, cleans easily, and matches replacement appliances. This is ultimately sensible and kind of
boring. I admired my friends' colorful
kitchens. I wanted to be in style too.
Suddenly, Harvest Gold was out. Eyes were rolled when anyone saw it. So passé! How long are
you going to keep that?! Something
significant clunked in my mind. If the
refrigerator is still good, why replace it?
Because some nameless person decreed you had to spend money? And it wasn't just the appliances, you had
to buy new clothes too, and probably a car.
Throw out everything you own and get new stuff that looks exactly like
everyone else's new stuff! Conform!
Except for a wild college moment when I painted my rusty
refrigerator with school bus yellow Rust-Oleum, all my appliances have been
white. Maybe boring practicality is in
my DNA. I still get ice from a tray and
water from the tap. I don't want a
Harvest Gold anything. Certainly not an
orange countertop.
Grandma said ignore popular styles. Buy classics of quality. They last forever and you'll always look
right. Excellent advice. A little boring like the white appliances,
but very sensible on a budget. She said
the key was to accessorize and dazzle with a sparkling personality. She was a very smart woman.
Maybe part of her wisdom came from growing up with a
communal refrigerator where it was bad taste to show off? Neighbors had to get along. If
someone else was having a hard time, give them a hand. Grandma kept her values when she moved to
the big city of Akron, Ohio and was
happy hobos marked her sidewalk during The Great Depression indicating she'd give them something good to eat.
Grandpa thankfully had a solid job, but maybe Grandma could afford to
hand out sandwiches because she didn't follow fashions?
