12th Moanin' of Christmas

wordsmith810
a few seconds ago
3 min read

November 28, 2005

Greetings from a man agog,

Our toaster is gone.

With some people it is plants, some people hamsters, for us it is toasters. We can’t keep them alive.

I don’t know what it is about toasters, maybe it’s the way we take them out of the box, because we plug them in and they succumb. Some go with a whimper, some with a bang, but they all go. We no sooner become accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of a new toaster then it begins its descent into oblivion.

There were warning signs with this latest. It was a four-slot toaster, but only two have really lived up to their potential in the last few months. And, no matter what level of toasting you desired, you would get a very pale tan version of it, unless you are persistent in pushing the lever down multiple times. Some days it did little more than just warm the bread. The little dial on the front was merely a distraction, something to play with while you wait for your bagel to bake.

Finally someone put it over the edge. I suspect it was when they were trying to get French toast sticks that were jammed in the moving parts. Some metal tool, strictly forbidden from being poked into electric devices, had severed the coils that conduct the heat to the bread. Their bright orange glow had been extinguished and no amount of prodding with other metal tools would reverse their plight.

We have always had a toaster, always toasted a lot of stuff, and inevitably toasted the toaster. I don’t know what we could do differently. We did the required maintenance; shaking it occasionally, poking it with metal tools, lubricating it with potato cakes.

There is a little tray in the bottom of the toaster that needs to be emptied periodically.

The goal is to loosen the old pieces of bagel, bits of whole wheat bread, fragments of pop-tart, lying in a petrified mosaic in the bottom of the slot. I am certain that someone, (not me, I’m in charge of refilling the toilet paper holder) has emptied this tray at some time during the abbreviated life of this toaster.

It was easy to take this toaster for granted, even its failing weeks, since it was always there for me when I went to the counter. There, sitting next to the coffee pot, neat and out of the way, ready and willing and mostly able to fill the demands I placed on it.

Then yesterday I went to toast some bread, a little epicurean excitement to dress up one of the many turkey sandwiches I have eaten recently, and I was a little startled. The toaster was not there. All that was there was a rectangular line of crumbs, like one of those chalk outlines around a body at a crime scene.

It is in the garage, next to the garbage cans, waiting, in that inanimate way that toasters wait, for Tuesday to arrive when it will make the next leg of the Final Journey.

I became a little disoriented by the vacuum left behind by the toaster. I was a blender of emotions, relief and sorrow. My heart was sliced and diced, my mind a crock-pot of questions. (That was the minimum requirement of small appliance metaphors.) Was our future to be toastless? Were we destined to consume doughy bread and cold bagels?

According to the website for the Toaster Museum in Portland Oregon, the first electric toaster was patented in 1909. Isn’t that remarkable? I mean the fact that there is a toaster museum.

Anyway, electric toasters have been made for nearly 100 years, and the design has not evolved to the point where an ordinary family cannot turn a toaster into a paperweight in only a few months of ordinary use. “Ordinary” being a relative term, although not one applied to my relatives.

We will press on, and iron out this problem. (That was the last one.) Somewhere out there is the perfect toaster that can stand up to the rigors of 100% multigrain bread, and we shall find it. If they can put a man on the moon, surely that man could have toast with his Tang.

Hope this finds you toasting to your health,

David