Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Fridge"
For all that 4325 Baltimore Avenue was a hothouse
ambience, generating all the action a young artist could
want, the fridge was a hovel. The lordly sense of warm
entitlement, to graduate from a serious matrimonial bed
down the due-right set of stairs from Mary’s room, all for
a midnight snack, was thus undercut. What you would see
when opening the refrigerator door— two-thirds a salami,
tin-foiled only halfway, or an uncovered bowl of half-eaten
pasta salad, along with Mary’s more staunch, more solid Brita
pitcher, then desert terrain, of the grungy, grimy kind—
bespoke of the vicissitudes of Bohemia, taken out to
the Nth. I learned to bring my own snacks, and Mary’s
Brita-water was fine as accompaniment. The due-left
set of stairs from Mary’s room, where, when she had
finally konked out, a combination of pot and matrimonial
exercises rendered her useless until the morning, led down
into the foyer area at the front of the house, where new
arrivals could be heard banging around at all hours. I seldom
ventured down those stairs in the middle of the night. It
seemed to me that the politics of the house favored me in
Mary’s room with her, even when she was rendered senseless.
The kitchen was nonetheless loose enough, that if I showed
up after midnight, no one minded seeing me in my boxers.
All of this was precocious of all of us— we celebrated, from
that fridge on out, a new America, a cultural America that
soared past what had been imagined before. The bawdy, boisterous
level of the celebration made victory seem like a fait accompli. But,
to make a crude pun, our salami was only half tin-foiled then. Time would tell.
© Adam Fieled 2026
ambience, generating all the action a young artist could
want, the fridge was a hovel. The lordly sense of warm
entitlement, to graduate from a serious matrimonial bed
down the due-right set of stairs from Mary’s room, all for
a midnight snack, was thus undercut. What you would see
when opening the refrigerator door— two-thirds a salami,
tin-foiled only halfway, or an uncovered bowl of half-eaten
pasta salad, along with Mary’s more staunch, more solid Brita
pitcher, then desert terrain, of the grungy, grimy kind—
bespoke of the vicissitudes of Bohemia, taken out to
the Nth. I learned to bring my own snacks, and Mary’s
Brita-water was fine as accompaniment. The due-left
set of stairs from Mary’s room, where, when she had
finally konked out, a combination of pot and matrimonial
exercises rendered her useless until the morning, led down
into the foyer area at the front of the house, where new
arrivals could be heard banging around at all hours. I seldom
ventured down those stairs in the middle of the night. It
seemed to me that the politics of the house favored me in
Mary’s room with her, even when she was rendered senseless.
The kitchen was nonetheless loose enough, that if I showed
up after midnight, no one minded seeing me in my boxers.
All of this was precocious of all of us— we celebrated, from
that fridge on out, a new America, a cultural America that
soared past what had been imagined before. The bawdy, boisterous
level of the celebration made victory seem like a fait accompli. But,
to make a crude pun, our salami was only half tin-foiled then. Time would tell.
© Adam Fieled 2026
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