The day the microwave died

There are a couple of things without which I cannot function. One of them is the microwave oven.

Garrison Keillor tells about a Lake Wobegone housewife who kept her microwave oven in the carton under the bed. (She must have had on old-fashioned four-poster into which she climbed with a step stool after putting on her bed jacket and nightcap at sundown.)

My mother-in-law kept hers in the carton in the back room on top of the dryer/
I have had a hard time adjusting to some kinds of new technology, like texting and Facebooking, but when the microwave oven appeared in stores, I was one of the first in line. Microwave energy and I are totally compatible. I have warmed everything from playdough to ear drops in the microwave. Nothing that was still alive though.

We would have died of hypothermia last winter without those rice bags and hot drinks we warmed in the MO.

I was forced to try out deprivation once when our microwave oven died of overuse. Thirty times a day I opened the broken microwave's door, put something inside, and closed it. Not until I tried to set the time and temperature did I remember that this dead oven could not cook no matter how much I believed in resurrection.

After removing the item which would still be in one of several stages of cold, I had to go through a complex readjustment process:

“Okay, this is stupid. How many times am I going to put food in this broken microwave before I finally remember not to?”

After that reprimand, I still had to try to think of some alternate method to thaw, heat or cook the meal.

“Okay, dinner is going to be a little late today.” (Anything after 9:30 p.m. is considered late.)

I had to call up mental pictures of my mother or grandmother cooking certain dishes before I could go on with dinner.

“Now would grandmother have put this in the oven, in a pot on the stove, eaten it raw or just gone out for dinner?”

“Scratch that last option. They never went out for dinner…oh yes, I remember, they ate bread-and-milk on nights like this.”

“Well, scratch that too. No one under the age of 33 has ever heard of bread-and-milk. You could get reported for child abuse.”

Well, I turned into a mediocre cook overnight. There aren't many foods that you can cook on a range when they are frozen solid. And the rest of them take some planning ahead.

I think we mostly ate cold cereal during the three days that it took us to find, buy and set up the new microwave. (We didn't waste too much time deliberating.)
If you think that I was upset at the loss of our main method of cooking, you should have seen the six-year-old when he realized that the microwave could do nothing more than act as a temporary storage unit.

He sank down to the floor and began to cry.

“Now we can't make hot chocolate”

I was trying to think. “Now how did grandmother do that?”