Appliances - the Romance
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Buying a home appliance can be an exciting event if it involves your first
refrigerator with your bride to be. That was so with my Rosemary.
But when
you are an old man and you have to go to London Drugs to see if you could return
a Hoover (poor suction and the removal of attachments was a Waterloo to my
arthritic limbs) to then buy a much more expensive but well-designed Dyson, it can
all be a yawn and stressful, too.
And yet after
tonight’s Rachel Maddow I took it for a spin and it worked like a charm. I was
not overly excited but I was satisfied that it sucks (well).
I remember
(and how many of you remember a similar scene) when sometime in 1955, In Mexico
City, the door bell rang and a man selling Elextroluxes was invited in by my
grandmother. The man did ( the rigeur) demonstration with that predictable apology, “Don’t be
insulted, this looks like a clean house,” of quick passing over our living room couch and he then he opened the lovely
aluminum Electrolux baby and showed us all that dirt.
We bought
it. It eventually failed and then vacuum cleaners disappear from my psyche until we moved to Vancouver in 1975
In 1977 in our Burnaby renter, a man gave us a gift, a set of
steak knives, (did he suspect I was Argentine?) and we bought his cyclonic
wonder. Since then there have been too many more vacuums in my life.
In 1950 the
ice man in our Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Coghlan stopped coming to our
house. We were the first on the block with an almost brand new refrigerator my
mother bought from a departing American diplomat. In that refrigerator I made
my first package of Jell-O lime flavoured dessert.
A couple of
years later when I visited my friend Susan Stone (I was madly in love with her)
at her spacious home, her father was the general manager of GM in Argentina
(and had sent his Cadillac to pick me up) I watched my first program on a TV. I
vaguely remember oil derricks.
After that
I was only passably excited when in Mexico City in 1956 my mother bought a
Zenith TV.
Then I discovered Boston Blackie!
It was only
in 1966 when an appliance and romance somehow became intertwined.
I had this lovely girlfriend called Susy who wooed me with food. I was a starving and very thin conscript in the Argentine Navy. When I visited her she would make me lovely sandwiches with Swiss cheese, liverwurst and pickles.
At the same time I fell in love with the music of Astor Piazzolla. I secured a couple of tickets for an evening performance at the Teatro Florida (long gone) on Calle Florida. Before the concert, Susy and I went to a party. When it was time I told her we had to take the train to town. She informed me that she was having a very good time so she was going to stay.
I left a
sad man and became more so as I waited in the evening for the train to take me
to Retiro. I arrived at the Teatro Florida feeling very sorry for myself and sat down. The room was packed. The seat next to me was empty. I was at that point reaching a basement of
melancholy. Piazzolla began my now (not yet then) favourite piece Milonga del
Angel. I was about to cry when I felt a gentle hand on my right thigh. It was Susy,
who whispered, “I changed my mind.” After the performance we crossed Florida
where there was a store with appliances. Susy to the day that she died of
cancer told me this was my invention. We looked at a kitchen range in that
awful avocado and she said, “Alex wouldn’t that look nice in our kitchen?”
Her romance
and love for me lasted until she met a violinist from the Colón Philharmonic. I
was dumped over the phone.
Sometime in
1987 I returned to Buenos Aires assigned
by a Toronto magazine called Vista. I rang the bell at Susy’s apartment. She opened the
door, looked at me and said, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” Later she confessed
it had not worked out with the violinist and I did not ask any questions nor do
I have any memory of what might have been said. I don’t even remember her
kitchen.
But there
is memory, and how memory can affect one like a sharp utensil. I have in social
media a couple of friends who knew Susy. In one of the postings I noticed a man
called Miguel with Susy’s last name. I might have met him since he was
obviously her brother. I have no recollection. In his photos I found a family
photograph that froze me.
It is a feeling that, even as the photographer that I am, is one that throws me into the confusion of trying to figure out death. Taking Epicurus’s advice that death is the absence of pain is not to my liking. It is the idea of thinking about not being able to think that is so terrible and why death is our human bet noire.
Part of
that is seeing the face of a young woman who was alive with all her future in
front of her (refrigerators and stoves perhaps?) that I cannot reconcile while
still remembering the tone and substance of her voice and even the flavor of
all those sandwiches.
