jeff bender

March 2024

As our new year’s resolutions cool down and we edge into the heart of 2024, I take pause to reflect on the slow demise of one of my resolutions for 2024. Admission of my lack of ambition also reveals a bit embarrassing information about our housekeeping practices here at our home and here it is: we have not cleaned our oven in over 20 years.

I should say from the onset that we are not filthy people. We clean our toilets, we dust the top of door frames, and shake our rugs out in the Spring. My bills are organized in rows in a special cubby, and I prep all our veggies for our salads each week so they fit neatly in sealed containers. We are neat people. And organized. Even my art studio does not look like an artist works there as I carefully place my found objects on shelves based on how much damage they would cause if my grandkids grabbed them. But when it comes to our oven, we are complete and utter embarrassments. We cannot go back to that oven in its present state any longer. We must look ahead, bow our heads, and take that first and most difficult of steps, towards peace and the restoration of our oven to its original condition.

That being said, we are faced with an oven interior that has at least a solid inch of crusty drips and blotches caked along the sides, with a particularly nasty looking black zone, care of an overfheated lasagna in 2012 that festered into an angry insurgency in the upper right corner. If I studied the interior of our oven for a few minutes, using my first-grade magnifying glass, I could probably name ten or twelve dishes other concoctions we baked in that uprising over the past fifteen years, and maybe a few confrontations going back even further.

Even when we just crack the door, we open the door, our oven releases bits of dried sea anemones and gritty sand-like meteors which sprinkle out onto our wooden floor where they do a little salsa together in 2/3 time, and then collapse and call for help. At that point, we normally get out our little beige dustpan with the matching brush, sweep them up and sprinkle them back inside where they revive each other like miniature paramedics. You see, we do that because back in our youth we watched our grandmothers do the same thing, reheating leftovers, reviving injured scraps six or seven times, claiming that their concoction would taste better the second time around.

“It’s history!” G’ma would point out. “All of those juices and spices have settled down deep in the bowels of the oven walls!” G’ma was prone to poetic devices. 

“Didn’t we have this last night, G,ma?” we’d complain quietly.

“Yes, we did, but your stomach doesn’t know that! So eat up boys! He only thinks to terrify by feints!’ which was a quote from Melville.

Afterwards my grandmother cleaned the pots and pans with the same rag her grandmother had passed down to her, and her oven added one more layer to its illustrious cooking history.

And while I’m sure my grandmother broke at least a half dozen OSHA regulations, my artistic inclinations, my bent towards the creative, has caused me to revel in the variety of textures slowly accumulating there, later inspiring me to enroll in art school. Now, years later, I have fine-tuned our own oven to include areas of subtlety – fine air-brushed reticulations, fascinating surfaces and other culinary revolutions that are simply genius. Inside our oven, there is a wall to wall of fascinating surfaces, embattled revolutions that are certainly better than half of the etchings and lithographs I saw being developed in the art studio during my graduate school years.

As fate would have it, we recently had a service guy come to fix our icemaker, situated next to our obstreperous oven, and while he was laying down on our floor inspecting, pushing buttons, and telling us how he jammed an ice pick through his hand last week on another job, I thought I would carefully ask him a few questions about oven hygiene.

“Have you ever gone into a house,” I started quietly, “that was so disgusting you were afraid to work there?”

“Oh, no, not really,” he replied quickly, “in this line of work you see just about everything, so nothing surprises me anymore. Could you hand me a ratchet, please. No, that’s a hammer, yea, that one, I think I see what the problem is here. Just needs a bit of tightening.”

I handed him the ratchet and waited.

“Well, “I’m not really seeing anything really wrong with your ice maker,” he continued, giving the ratchet a half turn, “probably just needed a little adjustment.”

But as he backed out and began to stand up, he froze for an uncomfortably long and awkward second.

I can’t be sure, but I think his line of sight went through the splotched door of our oven where from my vantage point, I believe he caught sight of some charred spinach noodles with pale yellow gouda cheese drips from circa 2013, probably September if memory serves me. I cannot be sure, maybe it was 2014, but what happened next cemented my impression that he was shaken, really unnerved, by what he had glimpsed behind our oven door.

Service Guy stood up abruptly, muffled a “We’ll bill you later,” and disappeared out our back door covering his mouth.  

By the sound of squealing tires, I am convinced that what he saw through the oven window was scary enough to render the benefit of lingering not worth the risk. We even tried to call the company to set up payment but were told that they had not seen hide nor hair of Service Guy in days, and that he had left no forwarding address and of course, no record of ever having been to our house. I felt bad for him, and I think my wife did too, although I haven’t seen her for a few days either.

My plan at this point is to book a vacation somewhere far away, turn the dial on the oven to the clean cycle before we leave, and then, wherever I land, watch TV in my hotel room in hopes that there is no breaking news about a house in Indiana that blew up, and is now under investigation for initiating an unspecified, slightly cheesy and burnt-smelling airborne virus into the upper atmosphere. I am fearful, for my family that our oven may be at fault, but fearful for humans everywhere, that it will be given an unfortunate name like C-oVen, and I will be sentenced to a life of cleaning kitchen appliances in prison until my parole, the next year of any numerical significance, 2345.