The Mystery of the Missing Meat and Other Adventures...

The week is done, and that is a happy thing. There have been many momentous occasions in the past seven days.

Thursday night, I arrived home after a long and busy day. I felt quietly exhilarated by the way that the day had gone. It was time to settle in and relax and enjoy the evening. My work week was nearly over. I settled into the easy chair in my pajamas. Ah...

The phone rang. It was my wife, calling from Fairbanks. Brenda had been trying to reach me. She was working at the preschool, and a meat delivery had been made there. Odd coincidence...we had a meat delivery that had not yet arrived...and as it turned out, the name on the packages suggested strongly that it was our meat delivery. It was now sitting on the porch at the preschool.

Damn. Eighty pounds of meat, in two boxes. I couldn't very well leave it there, although the temperatures were well below freezing. Heaven only knows what an enterprising dog, or fox, or human for that matter, would do with such a bounty. Suffice it to say that if the meat was ever to see the inside of our freezer, it would be up to me.

Off I went, to change out of my p.j.'s and into clothing suitable for single-degree temperatures. Off I went, to the school, to get a hand dolly, so that I could transport this mess. As I walked, muttering more curses about the way that things happen out here, I remembered that the last time we had such a delivery, the boxes themselves had fallen apart, leaving me scooping up packages of steak from the boardwalk...you don't suppose...

Of course you do. When I pulled the dolly up the ramp to the preschool, I noticed almost immediately that one of the boxes had only one band binding it, and was already partially open. The other was intact. If I could put that one on the bottom, and place the other on top of it and keep it intact...no such luck. Frozen packages of hamburger and sausage went skittering all over the porch. More curses. This approach was not going to work. On top of that, it was cold, and this was getting to be a pain in the ass. Perhaps the best thing to do was to return to the house and get the snowmachine, which still had the sled attached to it. That would work-I could scoop up the loose meat pucks into the sled and get them home that way.

Back to the home front. Grabbed the keys for the sno-go, headed out the door and down the steps. Tried to put the key into the padlock that secures the cable that we run through the tread to discourage theft. No go. Frozen. Again. I had spent almost a half hour getting the thing opened up on the previous Saturday when I took my beloved and her little ducklings to the plane for their excursion to Fairbanks. I had possessed two advantages that day. It was warmer, and it was lighter. Okay, it was light. Night falls here shortly after sunset, which comes at about 4:30 in the afternoon. I could not see a thing, and my glasses were quickly fogging up as I bent over in the cold.

At this point, one of my students happened to wander up. She politely inquired as to my activities. I mustered all of my patience (after all, none of this was her fault), and explained. She innocently asked about the whereabouts of my flashlight. There was a slight undertone of incredulity to the question. The slight tone of incredulity that suggested that I might not be possessed of intelligence sufficient to warrant me being licensed to teach. I was obliged to explain that all of the flashlights in our house were sitting in the school with dead batteries, because vocabulary flashlight tag is a more pressing need than finding our way around the house during one of our weekly blackouts. I am not sure of what she thought of this, but she was kind enough to offer me the rather faint light of her flip phone as a flashlight substitute. It didn't work, and the lock would not budge, but she was kind to me, and that helped restrain me from throwing the keys off into the snow where they would be lost until spring.

What now? Clearly, it was time for Plan C. The school sled. Yes. One of those plastic sleds with a rope on it. More curses. Up the stairs to the school door. Grabbed the sled. Kicked it down the stairs. Damn, that felt good.

Back to the preschool, were the last pretense of containment on the part of the broken box finally gave way, scattering hunks of meat halfway to Bethel. I sailed the cardboard over the porch railing on to the frozen boardwalk. I was in a mood that, at this point, defied description.

I learned one thing from this adventure. Scooping up various packages of frozen meat with mittens on would make a swell challenge on one of those silly TV reality shows. Even more cursing. I was beginning to get very inventive. I am very inventive when it comes to cursing already. I was getting even better. Finally, somehow, I got all of the meat into the sled. And the dolly, which had gotten left behind when I had the bright snowmachine idea. I now started hauling the mess toward home. As I walked, I was trying to figure out how to get all of the loose meat up the stairs to the house.

I finally settled on the obvious approach-haul the damn thing straight up the stairs. Not too much meat fell out. I abandoned the idea of throwing the meat through the window, first, because it was cold outside, and second, because it might have damaged our cool duct tape window screen. I got the meat back into the sled and hauled it into our entryway, where the big freezer was located. I began flinging meat into the freezer with gusto, picking the rebounds off from the floor and throwing them back again. Some required several repeat efforts.

I finally finished the thing off with a few more curses, hauled the sled and the dolly back to the school, and called it good. Only problem? It might be a bit of a bad idea to open the freezers around here quickly for the next little while.

The next morning, I got a call at school from a nice gentleman asking if I had gotten my meat delivery. I settled for the short version and just said "yes." I didn't think that he would want to hear the whole story.