There was an oven on the boulevard. You don’t see that often around my neighborhood. When folks around here get a new oven, the deliverymen take the old one away. What becomes of it, I don’t know; perhaps they’re shipped to poorer countries. Perhaps every kitchen in Sierra Leone is full of orange and avocado appliances. This house was a duplex on a busy street - a rental in an owner-occupied neighborhood, a 50s rambler out of character with the 20s houses that make up this part of town. Except that it wasn’t really out of character, if you looked a bit deeper into the urban archeology. A few blocks down the street was a Jetsonesque church; a few blocks beyond that was an intersection with two bland brick boxy shopping centers, each still bearing a few residual remains of their 50s incarnations. When I saw the oven, I was reminded that this street was, for 30 years, the town border. In the 20s, my house was the edge of town. In the 20s, this neighborhood was sprawl. In the 20s, the town came up to the north side of the street and stopped. To quote the unremarkable words of Mark Knopfler’s remarkable “Telegraph Road,” then there was a hard time; then there was a war.
After my dad & friends put the boot in the Axis nads, the town started moving south again. Nowadays it takes twenty weeks for a town to vault over a dozen old parcels of farmland. In those days it took twenty years to move one block south. I prefer the current model. I prefer peace and prosperity to depression and global strife. But that’s just me.
This oven was an original, sitting on the boulevard after a half-century of service, butt-end to the Eisenhower rambler, staring at the ancient houses across the street. I could tell as I drove past that this was a nifty item - I turned around, doubled back, parked, and got out the digital camera. Took a few shots. It’s a beaut. It has the heft you find in items of the pre-60s era; it’s streamlined, breezy, and modern.
Anyway. Today I stopped and took a few pictures of the oven, thinking: if the occupant of this house sees me, he might think I’m daft. And I suppose I am. He might wonder if this oven is worth something.
It isn’t. Too bad. Now it’s outside for the first time in half a century, brilliant white enamel reflecting the sun, staring across the border of 54th st to the old part of town across the road. I should have pried off the knobs and the faceplate, but that would have felt like vandalism. Give it some dignity; let it leave intact.
Got back in the car. There was an ad for a local bagel chain on the radio; it featured “Mr. Bagel,” a cheerful Mr. Bill-type character who suffered indignities at the hands of the narrator. Haw haw. Haw. There’s a new idea: ripping off 1977 SNL films. In the background, happy cheer chipper 50s music, the stuff that tells a modern audience that Ironic Self-Aware Commercial Entertainment is En Route! Screw it. As banal as these bouncy tunes are, nowadays they make me wish I lived in a time when music like this meant just what it was supposed to mean, and didn’t come loaded with an ironic subtext. I get tired of ironic subtexts now and then. There are times when I want to shop at Sears, slam the solid oven door, and wonder whether the Modern world requires a tux.
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