For Christmas 1990, a friend of the family gave me…a toaster oven. I was in college, and this was a gift that had never once been on my radar as something I wanted or needed. But off to college it went, whereupon my room-mate at the time saw it. This exchange, or something like it, happened:
HE: A toaster oven?
ME: Yup.
HE: We have a toaster oven?
ME: Yup.
HE: Did we need a toaster oven?
ME: Maybe? I mean, we can make toast now.
HE: Is that something we’ve been missing until now?
ME: Maybe it’s one of those things we didn’t know we were missing?
HE: Huh….
Anyway, we set up the toaster oven. I don’t recall how much we used it at the time, in our dorm room (given we were college students, probably small cheap frozen pizzas), but it did become more useful the next year when we were living in a rented off-campus house.
That toaster oven lived through college, and then…it kept on going. And going. And going. It stopped serving that roommate and I, and eventually served The Girlfriend when she moved out to Western New York, and it served us both again when we got married and she became The Wife.
And this morning there it was, that old toaster oven, still in our kitchen. I made toast in it just this morning.
But…this is the last day for that old toaster oven. Thirty-two years of a toaster oven. I’d say I got our old family friend’s money’s worth out of that toaster oven.
Now, why is it the last day for that toaster oven? Well, we’re upgrading. What to? Well…that’ll be a post for later this week, I hope!
(oooh, wait! A random memory of my grandmother’s toaster. I don’t know if it was specifically a toaster oven, but it looked like one. When you went to open it to put bread in it, the wire rack would actually slide out at you, and when the toast was done the door would open and the wire rack would pop out to give you your toast. That, for six-year-old me, was magic. A lot cooler than those boring toasters where you drop your bread in through the top….)