Point of View

Buying a new refrigerator saves on knee strain

By Carl Heintze

I don't know how things are at your house, but at ours we have a new refrigerator. No big deal, you may say, but it seems to me it is otherwise.

Our old refrigerator we bought at least 15 years ago. It's massive, I guess is the word, and tends to roar a lot. It's been faithful, but it suffers from a design flaw that afflicts almost all modern refrigerators. For reasons never clear to me, its freezer compartment is its top third, while its refrigerator section its bottom two-thirds.

This is great if you need to look for something in the depths of the freezer, but lousy if you want to find anything in the refrigerator. For instance, if you want to examine the vegetable trays, you have to stand on your head, more or less. And if you're looking for something on the top shelves of the refrigerator compartment, the only really comfortable way to do it is by kneeling in prayer before the open refrigerator and looking up, like entreating God for something.

This was not too much of a challenge when we were young, but as one grows older, kneeling for any purpose gets to be more and more difficult. Knowing this, we finally reached the point of frustration, which made us go look for a new refrigerator.

When we did, we discovered two things. The first was that almost no one makes a refrigerator with the freezer compartment on the bottom and the refrigerator compartment on the top. Indeed, there is only one manufacturer that does, although several models are sold under different names.

The second problem we found was that refrigerators have gotten bigger over the years. Unfortunately, the space in which to house them hasn't. At least not in our house.

After measuring a lot of refrigerators and the slot in our kitchen where the refrigerator had to go, we found the one we would like to have had--with the freezer on the bottom--would not fit. It might fit if we sawed off an inch or so of the cupboard above it or removed the cupboard altogether.

And then again, it might not. It might be too wide, and the only way we could get around this problem was to undertake a major remodeling of our kitchen.

There was one other solution. We could buy a side-by-side refrigerator. This is one in which the freezer is up and down beside the refrigerator compartment. It has two doors. It also has an ice maker that crushes or cubes ice, drops it into a glass from a port on the door of the freezer and costs a lot more than our old refrigerator--a whole lot more.

It also appears to be--and is--somewhat smaller than the old refrigerator, but (hey!) it is more energy efficient. Why it is more energy efficient is not clear to me since it makes ice on demand, but, anyway, that's what its maker says.

Everything is up and down. That is because both compartments are narrow, not wide, so everything has to be stacked on top of everything else. Packing both the freezer and the refrigerator takes a certain amount of skill. It also takes a certain amount of skill to find things.

We're learning that, though.

And we are getting used to the magic door, which drops ice into our drinking water, and to the filter that filters it (cost: about $35 a year for a filter) and to the fact that the refrigerator is so quiet we keep wondering if it is really on.

Getting a new refrigerator also has impressed us yet again with the central place such appliances occupy in the American kitchen. Not having an operative refrigerator, like not having electric power, is something we just don't expect ever to happen. Both electricity and refrigeration have become such a part of living in the United States and California that we take them for granted.

Somewhere in my dimmer memories is a time when we didn't have refrigeration. I was just a kid then, but I remember the sense of wonderment when we got an icebox.

It had to be resupplied regularly with ice by the iceman, but it was the first time we could keep things really cold, and the first time we could retard spoilage. Before that, I can remember coolers--little closets in the kitchen that circulated cool air from under the house--and one my grandparents in Sacramento had that always fascinated me.

It continually ran water down its sides to cool the food inside, no mean feat in Sacramento summers. Those definitely were not the days.

So every now and then when I pass the new refrigerator silently chilling away, I give it a little pat. Even though it's narrower; even though it doesn't hold as much as the old one; even though it dishes out ice and filtered water and at a cost I never thought I could afford; I consider it an essential part of the family.

And the best thing about it is that I don't have to get down on my knees in front of it and pray when I want to find something.

That's progress.

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