Got a call late last night that the soup kitchen was open. So I went over to the neighbors’ house to see what was available. Their grandson (who’s my age) works in a Scandinavian bakery/deli near here called, naturally, The Scandinavian Bakery. He’s always bringing home leftovers.

Usually it’s bread in one of its various Scandinavian forms. I’ve found I have a preference for Scandinavian white bread. Just plain, white bread. It’s what they do best, apparently.

Anyway, last night my neighbor opened her fridge to reveal at least 15 containers of soup. Then she opened the freezer, where there were another dozen or so. Her refrigerator is not uncommonly large, so it was confusing how she could fit so many soup containers in there. It was like a strange, lackluster magic trick.

She hates to throw food out (as do I). In part, I think, it’s because she and her husband worked for years as Lutheran missionaries in Africa, so they know firsthand about hunger. I was never a Lutheran missionary anywhere, and I probably never will be, unless they change the rules about who can be one. But I understand that it’s not good to throw food out if you can help it. I think that’s not just a Lutheran thing.

The problem is, despite my expressed gratitude for her continued kindness (this isn’t the first time she’s called me to offer food, or even the fifth), there just isn’t much of a market for Scandinavian soup over at my house. My roommates (my girlfriend and my, um, normal-friend) seem to accept the bread and even find some uses for it. I make sandwiches with it. Once when a glass broke we used some to pick up the little pieces that would otherwise have gone on tormenting the delicate soles of our feet for months.

But soup has never caught on. It just stays in the freezer, accumulating frost and ice. It’s not that we don’t like the Scandinavian Bakery’s soups; some of them are very tasty. It’s just that I never have room to keep them in the fridge, so I immediately throw them in the freezer. But after an hour all you’ve got is four or five solid bricks, which are not easily converted into anything comestible.

And yet, I can’t bring myself to decline them. I keep hoping that these frozen soups will suddenly become very, very popular and coveted among my friends, like pug-dogs and Gmail accounts. Then I could go around hauling stacks of these little frozen soup-bricks to everybody I know, like a non-denominational Santa Claus. Have you been very good this year? Alright, go to the back of the van and pick out three containers. And then their faces would light up with glee. Soup! Yes! We get soup!

But it’s not that way. No, it really is not. People don’t like soup that much. And if I went around trying to pawn it off on people like a gift, I think they would accept it, but only in deference to what they’d perceive as my growing insanity. Then when I’d leave they’d call my parents and say they were concerned about me.

“So? What else is new,” my parents would answer, in their best Yiddish/New Jersey accent. “Was willst du?”

Or, rather: “Vad vill du ha?”

“Vill du ha more soup!” I’d shout, although deep down I’d know there’s just no more room in the fridge. There is, however, an old stand-up freezer in the basement that came with the house. It’s too big to move, and we have nothing to put in it, so it has always sat there; it’s door agape to keep mold from growing inside it.

But maybe now it’s found a new lease on life! My ancient, basement-trapped freezer will now be a sanctuary for unwanted soup-bricks. And so the cycle of life continues…everything is connected…everything is one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2004 at 6:58 am and is filed under Home-ownership, Minnesota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.