FIRST PERSON | Something looms in the air: A deep-freeze fiasco ...

This is a First Person column by Andrew Waterman, one of the journalists who recently lost their job at the St. John's Telegram. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

I woke early on Saturday morning humming a simple melody. As I lay still under the covers, I could see the structure and chords of a song. It may as well have been written on the ceiling.

A five-word phrase circled around in my head. I didn't think I had ever heard that phrase and those chords together so it looked like it was mine for the taking. 

The phrase was "something looms in the air" — the suggestion of impending disaster over a pleasant melody. That sounds like a song to me.

The next morning, the only thing in my head was a silent grog and a determination to get back to the business of raising a family after finding out I was terminated from The Telegram newspaper part way through a vacation around the bay the previous week.

I got out of bed, walked down to the basement and opened the deep-freeze. The ground meat on the top was grey. A pool of deep, dark red gathered in the corner of the bag. I reached down to move it and the absence of chill surrounding my hand mystified me.

Then the smell hit my nose and I retched. Something loomed in the air alright. I looked toward the outlet, the deep-freeze was unplugged. We had been away for a week at that point.

So I grabbed a bag and tied a shirt around my face. The dish gloves made a rubbery noise as I struggled to pull them up over my fingers. When I began discarding the food, it occurred to me to tally up the total but the sickly feeling in my stomach made me discard it as quickly as possible instead.

At the time I guessed there was $200 of rancid meat, spoiled turkey soup, rotten berries and several bags of foul vegetable discards I would have used to make stock. But after some time and consideration, it was likely closer to $100. I suppose my heightened state of agitation and disgust contained its own math and inflated the number. My mistake.

We had left on the Saturday before to go camping and visit family a couple hours away. The day before, some tradesmen had come to the house to fix the appliance next to the deep-freeze which shared the same outlet. I wasn't home that day, as I was still working, but my wife was there.

"Nice guys," she said.

We called the company but they assured us after using the outlet, they would have plugged it back in.

"Our men wouldn't do that," we were told. It appears they're the only people around that don't make mistakes.

For days, the house smelled inside and the garbage outside was fierce. I feared the wind would waft the stench toward the twitching nose of a rat and worried, perhaps unreasonably, that by leaving the window open downstairs, which was level with the ground, a rat might somehow chew through the screen and get into our house.

The whole thing disgusted me. I felt like I was surrounded by rot. From time to time, I'd shudder.

Everything was soaked in some maddening musk of indifference to my recent loss of employment.

Then there was the task of mopping out all the putrid liquid that had gathered at the bottom. Even with that gone, and with an air purifier going all day for several days and the window open, the deep-freeze was still rank. We have cleaned it several times, and still, it's there. It's fainter, to be sure, but still there. We asked someone else to smell it, just to make sure our memory of the scent wasn't tricking us. It wasn't.

So now we need to throw out a deep-freeze. To get a new one, even second-hand, would cost more than the bottle of rum we traded for this one.

But it's not just that, it's what a deep-freeze does. It allows us to buy food in larger quantities when it's on sale to save money. For a family of four, with a wife on maternity leave and now me, "terminated," that makes a difference.

Being terminated was rough but hardly unexpected. Despite the fact I should have been safe, I couldn't shake the feeling I wasn't anything but a stack of papers in a folder, and most certainly not a man with mouths to feed.

But meat and food spoiling because of a mistake — a mistake no one would own up to — that was a whole other world of indignity.

That's how life is, I guess. There are too many factors we don't control. We don't control whether we are employed or not. We don't control someone else's inability to admit fault. We don't even own the food in our fridge, it appears. If the power goes out for some major storm, that food could be gone.

But life also swings upward. A couple of days after the deep-freeze fiasco, a neighbour walked across the street with a bunch of formula. Her granddaughter couldn't drink it. She wanted us to have it for our son. It was a lot. It wasn't just the money, we'd find that somehow. A boy's got to eat. But the relief of stress and worry, what a gift that was.

And then, my cousins visited our son for the first time. They brought gifts. Among them was a gift certificate for a grocery store for the same amount we lost. They had no idea about the deep-freeze, they just wanted to do something for our family because they thought it was a nice thing to do.

Something does loom in the air, but it's not all foul.

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Andrew Waterman is a freelance journalist living in St. John’s.