Of Antique Lasagnas and Turkey Bombs
Since this is my most requested humor column, I have decided to start my blog with it. I wrote this several years ago and since I’m middle-aged, I really have no idea when I wrote the damn thing. But I’ve heard it’s funny. So check it out. If you like it, you can read it along with many more like it in my book: Confessions of a Pink-Haired Lunatic.
Of Antique Lasagnas and Turkey Bombs
As you age, your memory becomes elastic. It stretches and distorts, making things that happened years before seem like they happened yesterday. And yesterday, well, you usually can’t remember that at all. Or if you do, it seems like it happened years ago. It all kind of blends into a confusing mixture we define as “our past”. This is why old people have twenty-year-old food in their cupboards. It seems like just yesterday they purchased that Chef Boyardee Pizza Mix. Except for the fact that Chef Boyardee discontinued making pizza mixes in the late seventies. I realized the other day that the same kind of phenomenon was happening to me. I took a bottle of steak sauce out of the fridge and went to use it when I happened to check the date on the side of the bottle. Expires 01/92. 1992? I remembered buying that particular bottle of specialty steak sauce and it couldn’t have been nine years before. But there was the proof. Scary. Then just a week after that, my brother, Dan, approached me with an equally frightening tale about my grandparents and aunt. It seems as if the Periat family, in particular, has a genetic predisposition for archiving food.
My grandparents had two freezers they kept stocked out in their garage in San Mateo. My grandfather died in 1979, my grandmother in 1994. It was at that time that my aunt inherited the two freezers. Just recently, my aunt decided to get rid of them. While Dan was visiting one day, she had him unplug the two antiques with the intention of having her housekeeper clean them out.
Fast forward three months. Dan gets a call from my aunt. “Could you come over here soon? The garage is starting to smell from all the rotten food in those freezers.”
Dan asked the next logical set of questions. “What happened to your helper? Why didn’t she clean them out?” “Oh, the doors were stuck, she couldn’t get them open.”
Upon receiving the unpleasant and annoying news, Dan wisely avoided asking the next obvious question: “Why did you wait three months to call me?” No, instead, my valiant brother agreed to drive over and help her out. The only poor planning on his part was drinking two bottles of red wine with me the night before.
As we drank the wine in preparation for his unpleasant endeavor of the next day, Dan revealed his plan of attack. He was going to plug in the freezers, wait for the contents to freeze and then dispose of them. I congratulated him on his brilliance.
However, even the best laid plans can go awry.
The next day I saw him and asked him how things went. Well, despite the fact that he was hungover at the time, he said at first sniff around the outside of the freezers, the stench didn’t seem that bad. Fairly awful, but not horrible enough to cause immediate vomiting. So he decided to clean them out without freezing the contents first.
How brave he was, I told him.
He took twelve garbage bags and made four triple-thick bags out of them. Then he dared to open the freezers. And, oh, what he found there.
The first things he saw were ten boneless Butterball turkey rolls. The kind of turkey rolls that are encased in plastic with metal staples at each end that close off the packaging. Each turkey was so inflated from the gases of decomposition, my brother said “…each one was about at 50 PSI. Tight, really tight, like an overfilled water balloon.” He quickly and carefully loaded them into the garbage bags and moved on to the other contents. Berries in Ziploc bags. Vegetables that had been parboiled then frozen.
As Dan unloaded the decomposing time capsules, he tried to ascertain when the food had initially been stored in the freezers. Soon, he had an answer. At the bottom of one of the freezers he discovered the piéce de résistance, the signature piece of frozen artwork, the Woolly Mammoth in Glacial Ice of my grandparents’ freezer. He found a lasagna marked August 1978. A lasagna made while Jimmy Carter was in the White House. A lasagna assembled before home computers, before satellite TV, before Britney Spears was born. A lasagna created at a time when first class stamps cost fifteen cents, disco music was all the rage, everyone watched M*A*S*H* on television and the first arcade video game was created, Space Invaders. The lasagna was old enough to vote, to drink and own property. It outlived both its maker and its intended recipient. Until it finally met its end, just this year, at twenty-three years old. I feel like we should have had a funeral for it.
Instead of burying it in the family plot, Dan dutifully bagged up the lasagna plus the rest of the contents of the freezers. Then he loaded up the bags into his truck. The only problem was that San Mateo was having a heat wave that day. So by the time he headed back over the hill to take his putrid load to the dumps, he started hearing noises coming from the back of his truck. First he heard a loud hissing. Then hissss-BANG! When he looked back, the entire bed of his truck was covered in red berry juice. Fearing for his life, my brother pulled up to the nearest dumpster and off loaded the volatile cargo. And just in the nick of time. As he jumped back into his truck, he heard one of the turkeys explode. At least he thinks it was one of the turkeys. It was either that or Ted Kaczynski had just escaped from jail.
Relieved he had avoided certain death, Dan headed back home. As he drove along, he finally relaxed, confident that he was done with all unpleasantness for the day. He stuck out his hand to feel the warmth of the spring air, to embrace the beauty of the day. Then, SPLAT! One of the biggest and juiciest bugs alive exploded full force into the palm of his hand. The unsung hero’s reward for all his courageous efforts.
We are planning an awards ceremony for my brother. We’re buying him a trophy that says: To Dan Periat: For Bravery and Heroism In The Face Of Exploding Turkeys, Bug Attacks and Ancient Lasagnas. My brother, a family hero.
©2008 Janet Periat
