Pilot Light by Jo-Ann Mapson (Part One)

I’ve had better.  Twice.

My first, best stove was a vintage, four-burner gas with a chrome griddle, two ovens and a broiler.  The top shelf folded down to cover the burners in sleek white enamel with a few character-inducing chips.  Vin T., I called him.  His stove innards were that deep cobalt porcelain with the white speckles.  So what if he had to be cleaned by hand?  I was twenty-three years old and thought I knew everything.  Decades later, I realize that Vin T. came into my life thanks to my mother’s fearlessness.  She found him for me at a used appliance store in the heart of Santa Ana, California, back when gangs were new and terrifying and women didn’t go such places alone.

Imagine her: five-foot nothing, ninety pounds, walking around the appliance corral and choosing Vin T.  Until recently, her world had been easy.  She had just moved into the custom built home she and my dad planned and worked toward for years.   But only two years later, he suddenly died of a heart attack.  He wasn’t even fifty.  Of all the things my mother could have been doing, she chose to venture out and find me a vintage stove.  I learned to cook on Vin T.  Bread never failed to rise in his always-warm oven thanks to his pilot light.

Pilot light:  a metaphor lost to history, thanks to the Energy Star appliances we’re encouraged to buy.  But there’s something about it I miss.  Like an ember in the woodstove, banked against the cold.  The tiniest stoke brings back fire, and fire is life, comfort, and a necessity.

We foolishly left Vin T. with the first house we owned when we moved to the ranch style tract home we’d live in for twenty-five years.  When the first house fell out of escrow, I suggested we go back and steal Vin T., but by then I had a new stove, and I talked myself into believing it was a better deal all around.  Over the years I’ve thought about Vin T. many times.  He was the Appaloosa horse of stoves, sturdy and uncomplaining.  I hope he’s still making somebody Sunday pancakes.

The cookers between Vintage and the Viking don’t bear remarking upon other than to say if we can make Mercedes automobiles and Volkswagens live forever, what is up with our cheap, ugly appliances?  Look at the gorgeous Aga cookers in the U.K.  Why America doesn’t make beautiful, curvy stoves I cannot figure.

Onto the Viking: my dream stove.  Vi King was the jewel of my newly renovated kitchen.  Stainless steel, with a matching hood.  A fan that sensed heat and turned on automatically.  Four, easy-to-clean, lift-out burners.  A switch for convection and regular gas heating.  A perfectly designed pullout tray that caught all the crumbs.  When I set Vi King to 400, she heated up in less than five minutes.  She delivered crusty bread, butter-seared halibut cheeks and far too many brownies than a middle-aged person should consume over eight Alaskan winters.  My only lament is that I was working so much that I didn’t have time to try everything Vi King was capable of cooking.  When we got ready to move back to the lower Forty-eight, I experienced that same sort of pang as I did for Vin T.  But Vi King was a behemoth, too heavy to move, and the buyers of our house were already in love with her, as well they should be.

“We’ll buy something just as great when we settle in New Mexico,” my husband promised.

To be continued…