It may be hard to believe, but when I was young, my mother used to lock our refrigerator. It was an old fashioned refrigerator, with one door and handle to open it. Inside there was a freezer part on the top about the size of a bread box, with its own pull down door and the rest was just refrigerator space for regular stuff. Having only one door on the outside it was easy for my mother to take a length of chain, wrap it around the refrigerator and have a keyed lock in place to prevent any unauthorized entrance. You might wonder why?
The answer to this question has to do with both my mother’s occupation at the time and my sister’s eating habits.
My mother worked for Fanny Farmer Candy. For those of you too young to know about the Fanny (sometimes spelled Fannie) Farmer Company, it produced a popular brand of chocolate that was sold in New York (and other places in the United States) up until the late 1980’s. What was great about the Fanny Farmer Company was that one of the factories that produced this chocolate was about 5 blocks from where I lived and my mother worked there. I spent many a time going down to the factory to pick my mother up from work. I would put on my cutest, neediest face as all the factory workers came out in the hopes that I would get a free sample the chocolate they were producing. Sometimes it worked. The other perk to having my mother work there was that she occasionally would bring some of the candy home with her. And where was it stored – in the refrigerator.
My sister on the other hand was known as a ‘nosher’ (That’s a Yiddish word which means, little nibbler). She would take little bits of chocolate, cakes, other baked goods, as well as regular foods stored in the refrigerator in the hopes of not being discovered. Of course being a nosher meant that she would return to the scene of the crime and continue to nosh on the same items. Eventually it would be discovered when there was not much left of whatever she was noshing and she would get in trouble. This noshing, was a trait that I would eventually inherit from her, especially when it came to jars of maraschino cherries. For the most part, I was able to use my sister’s reputation, to avoid getting into trouble. When questioned if I had eaten a cake, I could respond in all honesty that I saw my sister eating cake to deflect suspicion. Her past convictions would suffice even if she hadn’t eaten that much. “We all know what one of your little pieces is like,” would be my parents’ response to her denial.
So my mother locked the refrigerator to prevent food from being purloined. The game that my sisters and I played was to figure out where she hid the key, so we could get the food anyway. We rarely shared the information when we found out. My favorite technique was to pretend to be asleep when my mother hid the key. This was a good strategy, but only worked when she hid the key in the same room that I was pretending to sleep in. For the most part my mother wasn’t very original and had only about 2 or 3 different hiding places, which we all knew about. After a while she gave up locking the refrigerator, since it didn’t seem to completely stop all of the food thievery and life went on.
