When Linebreak asked me to blog for a week, I was sorely tempted to say no. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the honor but I didn’t think I was the right person for the job. I’ve never journaled. And though I’ve written a little prose here and there, I haven’t much faith in my abilities in that direction. I do have hopes for my poems but that’s because in them I can get in and out before anyone notices.
In the end, as you see, I decided to say yes, because when I’m presented with something I think I can’t do, I have enough it’s-good-for-you in me that I usually go for it. It also helped that Linebreak told me I don’t have to write about poetry. If I were capable of writing intelligent essays and if doing it would bring someone I admire into the light, I would. But it’s a non-issue because I don’t happen to have a critical set of bones.
So what I thought I would do, since I’ve never managed to settle down to just one discipline, is to spend my week as diversely as possible. I’ll start with refrigerators and move on to Hindu classical music. From there, I may talk about my sixth grade teacher or creativity or wild spaces or mistletoe, or maybe water, I haven’t decided. The only promise I can make is that I’ll try not to be boring. Okay, I feel better now. Here goes…..
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When I was little, some people were still calling refrigerators “iceboxes” and as far as I knew, all of them were as white as Miss Gillespie’s uniform. Miss Gillespie was my pediatrician’s nurse. At some point early on I had a condition that required weekly shots. And since I didn’t like needles especially the big ones they used for penicillin, I used to squeeze myself underneath the doctor’s desk where Miss Gillespie, who was fat, couldn’t reach me. And every week she had to fetch my mother from the waiting room because she, being wiry, could get under there and pull me out. Which, I’m sorry to say, she did.
Like nurse’s uniforms– usually flowered now, right?– refrigerator colors have come a long way since then. I think the first fashion was avocado. Remember when even toilets were avocado? Now, we seem to have calmed down and it’s bone that most often joins the classic white. And for people with urban tastes, there’s black. I did though once come across a red refrigerator. So why stop at red? Why not hot pink? Or sports team colors? Or camo, for people who hunt or are in the military? Feel free to pick that up; I won’t charge you a penny.
Refrigerator size has grown more diverse since I was young too. Though I didn’t know anyone who had one, I should think there’ve probably always been small ones, in dorms or apartments and definitely, as there still are, in Europe and Asia. But I don’t think there were always the steroidal specimens you sometimes see in people’s houses, usually people who pretend to being gourmet. The only justification for those, in my view, is that you live so far from a store you can only stock up once a year. Or you serve twenty or thirty meals a sitting on some regular basis. But if you’re that into level of service, why not open a restaurant? I have a confession to make here, though, and once you read it I may not have further credibility. I was the child, who looked at COMING SOON! signs and thought why are they building another grocery store? We already HAVE a grocery store. Remnants of that child still linger. I still don’t see why we need another place to buy the same clothes every other store already has.
But it’s not consumerism I want to talk about. Nor is it even, at least not directly, refrigerators. What I find most interesting is what we do with (and to) the outsides of them. Until the 1970s, it would have been basically nothing because until then fridge fronts and the corners tended to be curved, so nothing larger than plastic letters (which came into vogue in the late 1960s) would have stuck for very long. When I read in Wikipedia that the first patent for refrigerator magnets was issued to a Mr. Zimmerman of St. Louis early in that decade, though the date made sense, I wondered about that because I’d thought patents were for processes not ideas and it seemed to me that magnetism (not the David Copperfield or the Jesus kind, the scientific kind) would have been in the public domain. And sure enough, according to Patrick Dwyer, the nephew of that same Mr. Zimmerman, the Wikipedia information (which was picked up by almost every other website in the cool world) is wrong and Mr. Zimmerman hadn’t patented refrigerator magnets. But he WAS the first person to successfully market magnetized cartoon figures as paper-holders; he even got the initial contract to make the Disney ones.
Incidentally, while I was looking around for magnet information I found out that refrigerator magnets are technically different from conventional ones because hey alternate polarities rather than being set up uniformly north-south. The result of that is that to double the magnetism on the back side while almost erasing it from the front. It’s that polarity difference that gives larger refrigerator magnets their staying power.
Enough science, let’s get to the real stuff. I don’t know about you but when I walk into someone’s kitchen the first thing I notice is what’s posted on the refrigerator. I asked Patrick, Mr. Zimmerman’s nephew, what’s on his and he said mostly travel stuff. He’s in the Air Force and has recently come back from Turkey to Del Rio Texas. It’ll be great when he posts pictures of Del Rio, which is a few miles from the Mexican border, alongside shots of Turkey—what an interesting contrast! Still, I‘d bet good money that what the Dwyers post on their fridge is going to change as their baby grows up but, you know, maybe not. When I contacted him, Patrick started looking around for magnet info himself and he told me about a collector named Louise Greenfarb on Facebook who owns 30,000 magnets, nearly all of which are on either her refrigerator and her car.
The most interesting thing I’ve personally seen on a refrigerator was in the house of someone I dated for awhile, a very good person—we’re still friends—but notoriously commitment-phobic. And what does he have on his refrigerator but several pictures of himself with a gorgeous blonde lady, both of them looking thrilled to be together. The blonde lady, who doesn’t resemble him, happens to be his sister but he doesn’t volunteer that so the photos work perfectly to alert the rest of us that there are plenty of women out there and we’re bound to be replaced by one of them sooner or later. My daughter’s refrigerator, by contrast—she and her husband have two little girls– is plastered with a barrage of school schedules, scribbles her children have come up with, grocery lists, and a scatter of miscellaneous reminders. Oh, and, sliding towards the bottom, some plastic letters. I had those for her when she was growing up and one thing I’ve noticed about them is that as their novelty fades they tend to slip farther and farther down the front of the refrigerator until finally, because they keep falling off, you put them away.
When D’Arcy and her brother Django were growing up, I used to post kid stuff too but I also posted items entirely absent from D’Arcy’s space: listings of upcoming art movies, concert notices, opening, continuing ed possibilities, the Florida gymnastics team’s schedule, etc. etc. I didn’t get to go to many of those events but just posting them kept them, albeit in a shadowy way, part of my life. I also put up newspaper clippings I’d found interesting, lists of what to plant in the garden, cleaning remedies- how to remove red wine stains was a big one, phone numbers I didn’t want to lose, whiteboards for grocery lists, the odd poem, and so on. A few of the magnets had actual meaning, like the one Django decorated at school and the one commemorating the Coast to Coast, a 200 mile trek across northern England I made with my ex-husband. From time to time my postings would get so layered they began to resemble the internet—too much information and not only that, a lot of it out of date. I’d tolerate the mess for awhile then, when I couldn’t stand it any more, then I’d go through and junk things. Because our house wasn’t air-conditioned (I live in Florida), I used to find that some of it had been there so long it had mildewed (note the metaphor) underneath. So what do I display now, all these years later? Tune in tomorrow and find out!
As you’ve probably already noticed, Carolyn Guinzio is guest blogging here at Unstressed this week, and we couldn’t be happier about it. Carolyn is the author mostly recently of 
