The Impending Death Of Our Microwave

I had heard about this new-fangled machine called the microwave from the TV and friends whose parents got it.  A machine that heats up food almost instantly, and without all the messy cleanup of an oven?  Kewl!!!

And when my parents brought one home, it basically changed our lives.  We could now "cook" for ourselves -- leftover rice, pizza from Red Baron, all those fries and fish sticks and onion rings with instructions on how to open the package but keep the lid covered over the food to help it heat up.  It made me, my brother and my sister more independent.  It probably also made us all fat.

But that microwave, that was a mainstay.  It has fastracked dinner for us siblings, and then the family, for, shit, many years now.  Did we get it in the early nineties?  Could it have been the late eighties?  My God, it's like our long-lived pet.

I'm getting very nostalgic about it because I realized tonight that the microwave Father wanted me to buy at the hardware store will be used to replace this one.  I may or may not have blogged about My Father getting pisssed at Grandmother because he thought the reason the food he wanted to nuke in the microwave wasn't hot was because of her.  Well, they've tried to cook more stuff in there, but it's not hot.  They've come to the conclusion that the microwave is broken, and since it's so old and inefficient, might as well buy one that's smaller, infinitely more powerful, and cheaper to buy than the old one when it was bought (presumably new).

Hey, if it's broken, it's broken.  But I remember so many things about it: The arc of bright colors indicating how hot the settings would b;, the roman numerals whose purpose on the machine I still don't understand to this day; the little brown square screen that Grandmother would always ask me to slide back on just under the microwave's ceiling fan even though I don't know how in the hell it came off, to this day; the loud "ding!" to indicate the end of the timer.  I didn't think about those things in decades, yet now, knowing that Our Microwave is a dead box walking, I can still remember intimate details of it and memories evoked by it.  That microwave became a part of our lives.  I hope I didn't take it for granted, but if I did, it was because it was so reliable that the family didn't have to worry about it.

It has more than served its purpose and gave us loyalty for more time than we were obligated to ask.  And yet ... this feels like death.  Microwaves last a long time; I think my parents have one at work even older than the one on our counter right now.  Maybe I should wish it could've lived on a little longer.  Unless we're overlooking a simple solution, like unplugging it and letting it rest, an appliance that has been in my life for almost two decades is spending its last night in our kitchen.