What does an open freezer door mean to you?
Grand spiritual epiphanies rarely find us when we’re out searching for them, beneath ornate cathedral ceilings, along grand ocean vistas, atop mountain retreats full of wise old men sipping tea. They generally find us, surprise us, tackle us, even, when we’re least expecting them. God often speaks loudest and most directly when we aren’t even listening. At six in the morning, for example. In our garages and in our pajamas. Before we’ve even brushed our teeth.
When you open one door to find another wide open, a freezer door, a door designed to keep very cold contents from becoming warm, a typical reaction might be annoyance. “Great. Melted ice cream. Ruined hamburger. Water that was once ice now flooding out over the floor.”
But if you have an infant in the house and your wife is nursing, then that freezer door might be protecting something much more crucial than frozen waffles. It might be protecting hundreds of ounces of food for your child, hundreds of dollars worth of calories, dozens of hours of suddenly thankless work. If your wife is crazy, it might actually be protecting your very life.
Fortunately, my wife is not crazy. It turns out she is quite forgiving, as one must be to stay happily married. Granted, the immediate conversation upon waking her and letting her in on the disastrous secret—that the freezer door remained open during the night and thus put at risk a sizable portion of frozen milk—was not at all pleasant or even suitable to print. It was short, though, and merciful, and, after taking sober stock of the situation and listening to some professionals—both online and over the phone—after accepting that many of the calories could be salvaged, after coming up with a game plan to deal with the situation, it was somewhat therapeutic.
And this is why.
The reason the freezer door was left open most of the night is because I did not shut it. Now, one might ask, why not? Why not shut the door, considering that is the task for which doors in general are meant, considering that this door in particular was safeguarding over a month’s supply of baby food? Why, Mr. English teacher smarty-pants writer-boy, did you not shut the stupid door?
Well, the simple answer is, “I forgot.”
Forget? One might ask. How did you forget? Forgetting is something that happens when you’re grocery shopping, as in, “I forgot to get the Ding Dongs.” Forgetting is something a child claims they did when they chose not to wash their hands after eating sand. Forgetting is for un-fond memories. Forgetting is not for freezer doors. Freezer doors are giant white rectangles suspended above the ground. They’re cold. Normal people do not forget to shut freezer doors. Normal people shut freezer doors and then forget where they left their keys. (Perhaps in the freezer?)
How did I forget?
Because of multitasking. I was actively multitasking. In my exhausted brain, I was thinking about something not at all related to doors, freezers, or even cold things whatsoever. It was late, I was tired, I was in the middle of washing dishes and was looking forward to watching some quality television programming before going to bed. In the morning I would wake up before my family so I could enjoy a quiet cup of coffee with the sunrise, which would then mean I could start a busy day of yard work, or parenting, or basement organizing, or whatever else school teachers do in the summer to keep them from feeling guilty while most people go to work.
I was physically putting something in the freezer, but I was mentally doing something else. That’s multitasking for you; doing two or more things at once, such as infuriating your wife while simultaneously throwing money down the drain, or wasting electricity and melting ice, all at the same time!
The sweet irony behind this debacle is that by multitasking—by putting food in the freezer in the middle of washing dishes while mentally conjuring up a landscaping project I’ll never actually have time to complete—I created for myself additional multiple tasks. Before I left the freezer door open, for example, I was not getting up at three in the morning to feed our son a bottle. Before I left the freezer door open, there wasn’t an assortment of plastic baby-feeding contraptions next to the sink each evening that needed washed. I saved absolutely no time by multitasking. I lost time. Which brings us back to the spiritual epiphany part of today’s column.
I am an eternal optimist, almost to the point of delusion. (Actually, to the point of delusion in some cases, but not in this one in particular.) Almost regardless of what happens, I try to see some kind of good in it, and I believe some good has actually come out of this accident.
For one, since I’m doing more of the feeding, my wife is getting a little more sleep at night. (Very little.) Because I’m feeding our son more, he seems to like me a little more than he did a week ago. (Very little.) By not strangling me when she discovered I’d ruined her day, again, my wife has proven that she really does love me, or, at the very least, is able to control intense homicidal urges.
And, also important, this episode has convinced me my brain needs re-educated. It needs to learn, again, how to do one thing at a time, like a kindergartner learning how to tie a shoe, or an outfielder gauging a pop fly.
Like a husband shutting a freezer door late at night.
Again and again, just to be sure.
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