When Adam Burnt the Food Storage

In 1989 I was redlighted by the Tarzan Zerbini Shrine Circus.
That is circus lingo for abandoned without any pay. It happened
in Arkansas, when I was sent ahead of the show to supposedly
do some publicity for the upcoming performances as a clown.
However, when I reached my destination I found that the show
was not scheduled to play there and that my phone calls to the
show office in Missouri (this was before the days of personal cell
phones) were not answered. I had been fobbed off with a wild
goose chase, and the Welcome mat was decidedly withdrawn.
Tarzan Zerbini was a loutish boor more at home as a carny barker
than as a showman, and we did not get along -- so my rude jilting
did not come as a complete surprise.

However, it did throw a large and determined monkey wrench
into the financial works of the Torkildson clan. It was too late in the
season to get another circus gig, so I parked Amy and the kids with
her parents in Tioga, North Dakota, while I drove down to
Minneapolis to visit my alma mater Brown Institute of Broadcasting
for help in putting together an audition tape to find work in radio again.
Brown had an excellent placement service for all their ‘Brownies,’
and could usually get their graduates a job within a week or two
of being asked for help. But 1989 was not a lucky year for me,
career-wise. I waited and waited for job offers, staying with my
parents. Finally I realized that I’d better just take the first job I
could find in the Mini-Apple so I could bring the family down from
their Siberian exile in North Dakota. And that’s how my oldest son
Adam got to set fire to our food storage.

I went to work as a telemarketer for Time/Life Books, in their Grain
Exchange Building office downtown. For those unfamiliar with
these monolithic highbinders, Time/Life offered a vast series of
coffee table books on everything from a sixteen volume set called
“Australians at War” to “The Encyclopedia of Collectibles.”
 Cookbooks. History. Sewing and photography DIY -- they
covered every known facet of the human experience, and
by golly they were bound and determined to sell every single
person on the planet at least a dozen books this very instant
come hell or high water. That’s were I came in. I was given
sixteen pages ripped from a Canadian telephone directory
and told to call each number to offer “How Things Work” or
some other glossy almanac at a discount price. I quickly
learned to push the telephone buttons with the eraser end of
a pencil and not my index finger to save said digit from becoming
painfully inflamed.  

And I had amazing initial success. I was calling a town called
Iqaluit up in the Canadian Territories -- home of the Inuit tribes.
They were extremely complaisant people; everyone I talked to
agreed to take the book and sign up for the Time/Life Book Club
as well. I got a tremendous cash sales bonus that first week
and was able to bring the family to Minneapolis. Of course
nobody in Iqaluit ever paid for their books, and eventually I
was fired for it. But by then we were well established in a five story
rent-controlled townhouse on Como Avenue, and I quickly
found another telemarketing job at Fingerhut.

Together at last as one big happy family, my thoughts as an
LDS paterfamilias turned towards a major religious bugaboo
of the times -- food storage. This was an era when the LDS
Church asked every family to lay in a two year supply of food
and water. Nothing was ever said about Judgement Day or
the Apocalypse -- it was just considered a prudent precaution
in case of layoffs or local natural disasters like floods and tornadoes.
With my ever-growing brood I was hard pressed to find the
wherewithal to stock up to such an extent. The best I seemed
able to do was to buy a few extra canned goods each week.

One particular Sunday in Sacrament Meeting the High
Councilman gave a very stirring talk about the absolute
necessity of having that two year supply on hand -- no excuses
or temporizing! I could see it had a strong effect on Amy,
and as we drove back home after church she said to me
“Timmy, we’ve got to follow the prophets on food storage!”
I agreed with her, saying that we would keep accumulating
canned goods and filling empty distilled water plastic jugs
with tap water until we reached the two year goal. But I could
tell she was not at all satisfied with my lackadaisical attitude.
It smacked of heterodoxy.

And so a few weeks later it came to pass that a UPS truck
delivered unto us forty brown cardboard boxes filled with one
gallon cans of dried beans, egg powder, sugar, oatmeal, cracked
wheat, yeast, dehydrated onions, flour, powdered milk, peaches,
and so on. The total came to two thousand dollars. Payable at
sixty dollars per month. Amy had placed the order with a
company in Utah without consulting me.

I decided to approach the issue in a calm and dispassionate
manner.  But first I sat in our blue Ford station wagon,
locked the doors, and screamed until my vocal cords began
moulting. I also beat my head on the steering wheel. Then I was
ready to face Amy.

I asked her to please consider sending it all back and getting
a refund, but that met with such a cold response that I turned up
the lapels of my jacket and wearily agreed to keeping it all in the
basement and using it up little by little, to see if it would help
stretch our grocery budget so we wouldn’t have to go on food
stamps again. Just one of those amusing little episodes that go
to make up the rich tapestry of a solid marriage.

At the same time our son Adam began playing with matches.
Every little boy goes through that phase. Usually a few stern
words and the careful secreting of matches in an out of the way
place is enough to discourage a young boy from burning down
the house around his ears. But Adam did not take kindly to being
told “no.” Not then, and not now. Once his mind is fixed on an action
or idea, he carries through no matter the obstacles -- or consequences.
In this case, he simply went next door to the neighbors, noxious
chainsmokers, and procured another book of matches without
any trouble. Then he lit a fire in our basement, using some scraps
of paper and cardboard from the food storage boxes.

Luckily I caught the blaze before it did too much damage, using
the kitchen fire extinguisher to douse it. Several gallon cans of
egg powder had burst from the heat, leaving behind an evil
smelling yellow stain on the basement walls.

I went out to the Ford again for another screaming session.
Then both Amy and I talked earnestly and kindly to Adam,
who seemed sincerely abject about the alarm and destruction
he had caused. He never tampered with matches again, and
we eventually ate up all the food storage in the basement --
and paying for it long after it was gone.