A mini-fridge could save our marriage

All I want is to be able to make a sandwich. A little ham, a little cheese. My needs are simple. My tastes are simple. Some would say I myself am simple. My ex-wives would say this, for sure, but they’re predisposed to make disparaging comments whenever my name is mentioned, so you can’t believe everything they say.

When I was still living on my own, making a sandwich was easy. I opened the refrigerator, pulled out the plastic tub containing all my sandwich-making stuff, tossed out anything which had begun to acquire a patina of green fuzz and used what remained to make the sandwich.

There was plenty of room for the “sandwich tub,” because aside from some beers and a container of the finest red wine to ever come in a box the rest of the fridge was empty.

Sitting there in my lonely bachelor kitchen eating my sandwich, I would sometimes reminisce about the halcyon days of marriages past, when my refrigerator was full of food that could be served without first being placed between two slices of bread. 

Women like to have food in the refrigerator; married women, anyway. They buy things like milk, eggs, pickles and other, even more extravagant non-necessities.

The love of my life and the woman who will become my wife in less than a month unless she wises up really soon, Lori Frankfurter, is direly stricken with this feminine food buying obsession. At any given moment, we have enough food in the refrigerator to feed the neighborhood for at least ten years following a nuclear apocalypse. 

She uses all this food to prepare things called “meals.” For you guys who have never been married, meals are collections of edible items consisting of a main course, salad (yes, people really eat this), and some sort of vegetable (these are edible plants grown in the ground that don’t taste nearly as good as steak, but again, people eat them anyway).

Meals are something married people eat. Which is why they need all that food in the fridge.

Problem is, Lori works a lot. She’s an accountant until 5 p.m., after which she generally attends for a couple hours to her retail business, Li’l Shop of Lori’s. (Free plug for ya there, babe!) By the time she arrives home, dinner time is just a memory.

I’m a liberated dude and I’d be happy to prepare meals, but neither of us feel like eating that late in the day.

So in her absence, I eat the same thing I ate when I was single: sandwiches. I’m not complaining; I like sandwiches. And on the rare occasion I feel like something more elaborate, there’s a Chinese joint not 20 minutes from my front door.

Unfortunately, that full refrigerator turns the making of a sandwich into an operation only slightly less complex than open heart surgery. I know all the ingredients to make a sandwich are in there … somewhere. But where?

As some women have no doubt already noticed, men lack the capability to see beyond the first row of items in any refrigerator. Even those located near the front of the fridge are frequently all but invisible to us.

My long ago sandwich tub contained the following items: 1) sliced ham, 2) sliced turkey, 3) Muenster cheese, 4) smoky horseradish sauce, 5) a tomato, 6) an onion, 7) that fancy mustard with the seeds in it. 

Now, Lori stocks our fridge with all that stuff, but because of the abundance of other food in there, there’s no room for my sandwich tub. Moreover, Lori has a “system” for stocking the fridge. She says – get this! – that there’s “a place for everything and everything in its place.” 

Makes no sense to me.

My sandwich tub made sense. Without that tub I can still usually locate the turkey and maybe an onion. But no cheese or smoky horseradish sauce. I can find the ham, but not the mustard. It’s a nightmare, I tell ya!

We’ve been living in sin for the past couple years and in that time have been unable to resolve the sandwich conflict. We’re only inviting a handful of guests to the wedding on September 11, but I’m hopeful one of them will think to gift me one of those little mini-fridge things. 

It could save our marriage.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273