I Invented the Refrigerator to Display Wedding Invitations, So Please Stop Defiling It with Food

When I invented the refrigerator, I did so with one goal in mind: to devise a way to display wedding invites. As a young man, I had reached that age when my peers began popping the question to their sweethearts—it was the early nineteen-hundreds, and there wasn’t much else to do. “Save the dates” and “you’re joyfully invited to”s began to pile up on my countertops, climbing perilously skyward, a creamy card-stock Tower of Babel that inevitably toppled, burying me beneath a card avalanche. In the hours that it took me to claw my way toward the surface, I thought about how there had to be a better way.

I set to work like a man possessed, sketching all sorts of complicated contraptions for displaying invitations. A circular stand to go in the bedroom. A dodecahedron for the foyer. A rhombus by the toilet. That one gained some traction. But, ultimately, none of these shapes or configurations was quite right. The same peers who had invited me to their nuptials began to doubt me, to call me mad, to call me “shape boy.” That one wasn’t very creative, but admittedly it stung.

And then, in a vision one night, it came to me. I must have fallen asleep at my desk when a figure appeared before me, bathed in a bright light. At first, I thought it was an angel, but as it approached the light disappeared, revealing a quadrilateral shape the size of a man, covered in wedding invitations. When I awoke, the figure was gone but the divine image was seared into my brain. Suddenly, everything clicked: rectangle in the kitchen.

Once I’d determined the basic dimensions and location of the refrigerator, the rest of the invention was easy-peasy. So, no, the refrigerator is not meant for food storage. Yes, I receive constant inquiries of “Well, if it wasn’t meant to preserve food, why did you invent a closed system that compresses and condenses gas to liquid through a series of coils, in order to circulate cold air? That seems like a lot of extra effort!”

Simple. I noticed a problem one day while I was testing the refrigerator prototype. As I hung up my eleventh wedding invitation of the season, a funny thing happened. My mind started tallying up all the thousands of dollars I’d be spending on travel, bachelor parties, registry gifts, tuxedo rentals. The days that I’d have to take off work. The nagging worry that I, Henry P. Refrigerator, a perennial bachelor, had wasted my best years toiling away in a lab and would never find a great love with whom I could send out a wedding invitation of my own and financially burden friends.

Just as I was about to descend into a full-blown panic, Providence would have it that the door to my workshop swung open, letting in a frigid blast of wintry air that snapped me back to reality. Standing in the doorframe was the most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes on. She had a face like a goddess and a body like a rectangle. At that moment, I knew two things: that I was staring at the future Mrs. Henry P. Refrigerator, and that the refrigerator would have a door that opened and cold air inside.

To see my invention bastardized and stuffed with expired jars of marinara sauce and Styrofoam containers of leftover pad see ew is crassly insulting. Would you put a bumper sticker on a Ferrari? Would you display an Academy Award by the toilet? No, unless you’re Kate Winslet, in which case it’s cheeky and charming. But Kate Winslet you are not!

So, please, find some other way to stow your produce that doesn’t defile what was meant to be a testimony to holy matrimony, not a storage system for your petty spaghetti. And, who knows, perhaps one day some mad inventor will come up with a device specifically designed for food preservation. A trapezoid in the living room feels like a good place to start. ♦