Anderson, South Carolina
Some years ago Roger Fulgham wrote an exquisitely funny book called Some Observations From Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door. In this collection of vignettes, Fulgham gives the reader some warm hearted insights into human nature and a few culinary forays into late night fine dining while standing at the refrigerator. You will have to get the book for more details on the perfect 2 AM bachelor meal that requires no cooking skills, pots, or stoves. I recently had my own late-night experience at the door that provided a lesson on the safety that comes from community. Perhaps the insights I gained are as compelling as the perfect 2 AM meal. You will have to decide. I opt for the community bit.
My friend Joanne, being in a wheel chair, is challenged by the American dream. She does not do things like climb on the roof with a leaf blower to clean the pine needles out of her gutters. She does not climb ladders and change light bulbs. Certainly, she does not grab the huge side-by-side refrigerator and pull it out to cut off the water supply to the ice maker. But I do all of these things. I have two legs with attached feet that are presently working well.
As part of what has become nearly a year-long habit of great hedonistic value, I open one or the other of the doors to her big side-by side and find all manner of Italian culinary wonders that do involve cooking skills, pots, and stoves. And so it was one night just before midnight I opened the left door looking for a frozen culinary wonder. I found a wonder of a very different and unsettling sort – frozen waterfalls cascading down all of the shelves with all of the culinary delights encased in crystal clear shrouds of ice. My culinary reverie was instantly thawed out and I went into emergency plumber mode.
Differential diagnosis quickly revealed the solenoid valve in the ice maker to have locked into the open position. This allows water to freely flow into the ice maker through that thin little hidden plastic tube one only sees when pulling out the almond colored beast for the every tenth year cleaning. If this frigid cascade had gone on unnoticed all night I would have been able to go ice skating without visiting Rockefeller Center in New York. I grabbed that big side-by-side and pulled it out and found the cut off valve. Joanne didn’t even know that water supplies to ice makers have cut-off valves. I did the requisite chipping and mopping up operation and earned double points for my Heineken beer account. I left Joanne in a dry house with the security of knowing Sears would be on site in the morning to replace the solenoid. I don’t keep spare parts for her particular model I think I could have asked for half the Kingdom and gotten it at that point but I limited myself merely to the promise of a beer the next day.
A couple of days later I installed an anti-virus program on my computer and did what I thought to be the correct procedure. After getting eight viruses and hammered with hundreds of worm messages I figured it was time for major action. The only problem was that I didn’t do it right. I found I could not do anything at all in any of my programs. Visions of ten years of lectures and manuscript work being vaporized by a cyber carnivore loomed in my over-active imagination. I happened to be on the phone with Joanne while going through this cyber-crisis. Joanne claims to have the barest knowledge of computers and manages to do her e-mail and some modest work in Word and has even begun using PowerPoint. But Hotshot here with thirty years of building and working with computers did not know what to do to fix my problem. With the faith of a child, Joanne offered a simplistic solution that left me in awe when it worked instantly – “Reboot.” Others have since told me that nearly all computer problems can be fixed by this procedure of simply turning it off, waiting, and turning it back on. Joanne could have asked for half the Kingdom and gotten it. The computer worked perfectly when it came back to life.
Suddenly I knew what community really was about. Joanne and I were both in circumstances that at the time were very big in our micro worlds. Ice cascades in the kitchen of one in a wheelchair are not a joke. A computer locked up with ten years of one’s work in it is not a joke. The tiniest bit of insight or knowledge on the part of the other brought about an immediate solution. I knew about cut-off valves. She knew about the universal application of “Reboot.”
In the ancient writings of Ecclesiastes we are told that if one sleeps alone, one gets cold. If one sleeps with another, one stays warm. Not so long ago I learned that there are other applications to this than the physics of the heat loss that occurs from excessive surface/volume ratios from sleeping life forms.
For those of you having forgotten your high school biology, college level thermodynamics, and postgraduate quantum physics, a short refresher of this concept is in order. Very very crudely: If a life form has a volume of 10 gallons and a surface area of 1 square foot we could say the surface/volume ratio is 0.1. If another life form has a volume of ten gallons and a surface area of only half a square foot, then we could say its surface/volume ratio is 0.05. With a smaller ratio there is less surface area for the warmth of the creature to leak out of. Tiny birds and mammals spend much of their lives seeking ways to compensate for this heat loss. Often they will sleep together in piles to reduce this ratio and better preserve their warmth. Large animals such as elephants and rhinos spend no time worrying about heat loss, if anything they find a good mud hole to wallow in to get rid of heat. The same physics applies to humans.
The writer of Ecclesiastes was not telling us that we should all hop into bed with each other just to stay warm. There are some moral implications mentioned elsewhere we won’t deal with here. He was making a much more important global statement about the safety, pleasure, and strength that comes from setting aside our insistence on self-sufficiency and entering into a healthy interdependence with those around us.
Reach out to those around you. It just might keep them from freezing up and it might keep your own world from locking up.
“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”
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