The other night, I swear I saw my late husband’s urn shaking a bit, probably because I did something that made him roll over in his ashes.
I bought a new microwave.
Let me explain…
The first 20 years of my marriage were spent with my husband asking (which eventually led to begging) me to buy a microwave oven, to which my response usually was something like, “Over my dead body!”
But my refusal wasn't without a good reason. The first time I ever saw a microwave oven, back in the early 1970s, it was in the form of something called a Radarange, a monstrosity of an appliance that stood in the lunchroom at the place where I worked. And posted all around that Radarange were signs with big red letters that cautioned people who had pacemakers not to go near it.
Concerned, one day I asked the custodian what would happen if someone with a pacemaker accidentally did go near it.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I do know it cooks food from the inside out, unlike regular ovens that cook from the outside in, so maybe pacemakers would attract a signal from it that would cause it to roast their internal organs.”
That image stuck with me for many years. And even though I didn’t have a pacemaker to worry about, I stopped eating in the lunchroom, just to be safe.
My husband was persistent, however.
“Think of how great it would be to pick up some fast food on the way home and not have to eat it all cold and dried out anymore,” he would say. “A microwave would make it taste as hot and as fresh as if it were just served.”
“If you want your fast food to taste hot and fresh,” I’d answer, “then just eat it in the car instead of bringing it home.”
“What have you got against microwaves anyway?” he’d ask.
“Radiation! You can’t tell me that radiation is good for you.”
That’s when he usually would roll his eyes and say, “Oh, you’re just being ridiculous. Microwaves are perfectly safe. We have one at work and I use it every day.”
“Well, then just don’t come running to me when you grow a third eyeball in the back of your head!”
Still, he never passed up an opportunity to try to convince me. And I have to confess he nearly did sway me to join the Dark Side when he used my love of baked potatoes for ammunition during one particularly hot summer night.
“Did you know you can bake potatoes in a microwave oven in only 10 minutes?” he pointed out as I stood sweating near the kitchen stove, waiting for my potatoes to bake. “And you won’t be heating up the whole house in the process. Imagine having a nice, fluffy baked potato, perfectly cooked, in only a fraction of the time it usually takes?”
He’d actually managed to pique my interest enough to the point where I was on the verge of finally surrendering and agreeing to buy a microwave.
But that was when I happened to see a magazine advertisement for a gadget called a microwave radiation-leak detector.
“That does it!” I said, thrusting the ad at my husband. “If microwaves are so safe, why would this company be advertising something that detects radiation leaks in them? No way would I risk having anything like that in my house! So don’t ever mention it again. You’ll thank me for it someday!”
For the most part, he did stop mentioning it after that, other than an occasional comment about how soggy, cold pizza miraculously could be resurrected into a crisp, hot and fresh-tasting delicacy in a microwave.
Then something happened that was totally unexpected on the night before our 24th wedding anniversary. There was a knock at the door and in walked the couple who lived across the road. They were carrying a huge box with a big red bow on the top.
“Happy anniversary!” they shouted in unison. “We brought you a gift!”
The gift turned out to be a microwave oven…a really expensive, state-of-the-art model.
I immediately became suspicious, especially since they’d never even sent us an anniversary card in the past, never mind bought us a gift. I narrowed my eyes at my husband. I wouldn’t have put it past to him to buy a microwave and then bribe the neighbors to pretend they’d done it, so I wouldn’t be so likely to reject it.
“I swear,” he said with a laugh, reading my thoughts and holding up his hands in protest, “I had nothing to do with it! It was just coincidence!” He then rushed out to the kitchen to clear a space on the counter for his new toy. If there had been firecrackers in his slippers, he couldn’t have moved faster.
At first, I kept my distance from the microwave. Every time I heard the whirring sound of the turntable inside it, which was often (like 10 times a day), thanks to my husband, I’d run for cover in an attempt to protect myself from the millions of invisible radiation particles I felt certain were just waiting to fly at me and transform me into a mirror image of the Phantom of the Opera.
But my husband was just the opposite. He bought special microwave products like meals, popcorn, and even a bacon cooker, and used the microwave so often, I was afraid to look at our electric bill. He also purchased so much takeout food, just so he could reheat it in the microwave and see how it tasted, we could have opened our own restaurant.
The first time I finally caved in and used the microwave was when I wanted a baked potato on a hot summer day. Instead of running the conventional oven for over an hour and heating up the house, I shoved two potatoes into the microwave and pushed the “potato” button. They emerged looking like big black raisins.
“What the heck is it?” my husband asked, eyeing the potato when I plunked it down on his dinner plate that evening.
“It’s your delicious, fluffy, microwaved potato,” I said sweetly.
Over the years, I did use the microwave for small tasks, such as melting butter when I needed it for a recipe, or heating up a cup of water for tea. But I never cooked a meal in it, or, heaven forbid, meat or poultry, which never browned and came out gray in color whenever my husband attempted it.
Not exactly something that would whet my appetite.
After my husband passed away, so did the microwave shortly thereafter, probably because it was so lonely without him. I didn’t mourn its demise and vowed never to buy another one. But when I spotted a small one on sale for only $29 while shopping one day, I couldn’t resist.
It served me well until the day of the Great Popcorn Fire a few years later, which transformed it into a charcoal briquette inside. Again, I swore I’d never buy another one, but caved in yet again and splurged on a really cheap one on sale.
Two months ago, however, I noticed holes in it where it had severely rusted right through the protective paint on the interior metal. The online advice when I researched it was to get rid of the appliance because the all-important seal might be compromised (and require the aforementioned radiation-leak detector).
“Okay, I’m done!” I muttered after I lugged the microwave down to the basement and shoved it back into its original box, where I figured it probably would end up becoming a housing unit for the spiders. “I’m never buying another one. I can live without it.”
But as it turned out, I couldn’t. And I blamed my husband for ever introducing me to the contraption in the first place. So I hate to admit it, but I recently bought a new one. In my defense, it was a reputable brand-name model for a change, not some unknown brand like my previous one that rusted, Nuke-A-Meal.
And I won’t use it much, so I'm pretty certain it will outlive me.
I mean, yesterday I used it only to heat up a therapeutic neck wrap, thaw out a package of frozen biscuits, melt some margarine for my cookie batter, cook chicken scraps for the dogs, pop some corn for my crows (Edgar, Allan and Poe), reheat a bowl of the soup I made, and boil a few mugs of water.
Like I said, I will hardly use it at all.
Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
