While doing chores with my son, I had occasion to bring up an old maxim.
"You should never put anything smaller than your elbow into your ear," I declared.
"What?" he said.
"This whole project just reminds me that you should never put anything smaller than your elbow into your ear," I repeated.
"But what's that supposed to mean?" he said.
Aha! Today's teenagers know so much - always calling us over to the computer to show us the latest YouTube video, read a topical joke, view the hottest commercial or pass on breaking news. So when we have the chance to impart some relatively insignificant information of our own, we must relish every moment. We must deliver an entertaining and informative lecture that our child will retain for at least the next 30 seconds.
So I explained to my son that while I don't really remember when or from whom I first heard this outstanding saying, it basically underscores the time-tested wisdom of not putting anything into one's ears.
Like most adages, this one serves an important role in cautioning children from infancy to age 5, whose first thought when encountering an unfamiliar item is: "I wonder how this tastes?" If the item is unpalatable, their curious new brains come to a second, equally disturbing thought: "I wonder if this thing will fit in my nose? Or maybe one of my ears?"
As a result, many products today come cluttered with pamphlets and labels that remind us, "Do not ingest" or "Contains small parts - not suitable for children under 3 years of age." Ironically, the intended audience for most of these warnings usually cannot read them.
At any rate, such dry, official-sounding warnings just do not stick in the mind the way an old saying does. So families continue to repeat things such as, "Don't make a mountain out of a molehill" and "The early bird gets the worm" because they get the point across while creating a memorable mental picture.
That's why the old proverb about elbows and ears suddenly came to me while cleaning out the refrigerator. But even after I went over its meaning, my son was perplexed.
"I just don't understand what this has to do with cleaning out the refrigerator," he said.
Granted, he did not appear to be on the verge of shoving anything into either of his ears at the time. In case it seems like a non sequitur to you, too, here is the connection: The design of the modern refrigerator has metamorphosed into a giant "ear," which we are forced to clean using what feels like our "elbows." It's simply all wrong.
My refrigerator has way too many tiny spaces inside - places where the salad dressing from a tipped container can drip and harden, places behind coils of plastic tubing where the spray from an exploded soda can is now glued forever. There are slide-in shelves with removable tempered glass, slide-down shields for the door sections, a cold-cuts drawer and snap-in side panel containers, all of which tend to have the perfect minuscule canals and repositories for soy sauce, shredded cheese, pickle juice, ketchup and yogurt that unfortunately and invariably leak from their containers.
You have to take all of this apart to clean it, and you will undoubtedly end up air-conditioning the entire lower level of your home while you try to put the complicated thing back together.
We should no more be deconstructing a modern refrigerator, in my opinion, than we should be taking apart and reassembling our eardrums.
If refrigerator manufacturers really want to bring good things to my life, let me be clear: What I want in a refrigerator is a big, cold box you can wipe out with a sponge.
Maybe that's just not possible anymore with advancing refrigerator technology. But can we at least order some oversized refrigerator-cleaning Q-tips, please?
Contact Janet at janet@janetgilbertonline.com