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THE VAGARIES OF KITCHENLESSNESS

(June 20, 1995 entry from my housebuilding journal) Received word last night that the Japanese kitchen company whose kitchen components we decided on months ago and ordered because of price and height and the fact that we could get the stainless steel counter in the length we wanted (which 'fact' was later refuted by the same woman who had said 'of course you can get the stainless steel counter in the length you want'; 'it was a mistake,' she now said, when it was too late for us to back out), has gone bankrupt and now we have not even an imminent kitchen, though the cuisinal horizon is not absolutely kitchenless, I trust. There is of course a kitchen somewhere in our future, is there not? Perhaps somewhere over there by the national lottery prize with our name on it; but then who needs a kitchen? I was born without a kitchen, and I have every confidence that I will die without a kitchen. I don't mean to sound like sour kitchens; things could after all be worse: we could have paid already, and our kitchen could then have fallen from the delivery truck and broken into kitchen fragments, or we could have received and installed the kitchen and been about to pay when another, ruthless company might have taken over the suddenly defunct kitcheneers and demanded a kitchen's ransom for the thing.... But it appears that nothing pertaining to our order had been going on in the busily bankrupting company all the while we were waiting; nice of them, I must say. So now we are in the ranks of the kitchenless minions that have peopled history since man first walked erect and gave meaning to the concept of stovetop height, that to us here today is but a cruel mockery...