Tom waits for Godot

Tom volunteers to help me defrost the freezer. He is my 17 year old son, and has homework to avoid.  His essay about the play Waiting for Godot* is due tomorrow.  He claims a little housework will clear his brain and help him to think.

Perhaps, I speculate, he hopes to find Godot in the freezer, but he ignores any sarcasm in the air.

The freezer is the trough type, with a lid that lifts with a whining of hinges.  Tom is large and cheerful and genuinely interested in the solid frame of ice that has formed a ridge around the top of the freezer.

'How often do you defrost the freezer?' he asks, as we dislodge frozen meat and ravioli and shake off the splinters of ice.

'When we run out of ice cream,' I reply, dodging the real answer.

The drifts of ice around the freezer wall can probably be carbon dated back to his conception, while the use-by dates on the small frozen dinners expired five years ago.  I ditch them.

When the freezer is empty, Tom leans down into the trough, and gathers up the loose peanuts.

Several years ago, I had discovered that you can freeze peanuts.  Not only do they stay fresh, but they are delicious when eaten frozen.

However, they come in cellophane bags and these do not respond so positively to sub zero temperatures.  After a time not yet scientifically measured - but I'd estimate 10 minutes - the cellophane splits and the nuts spill and congregate in a naked state at the bottom of the freezer, along with a slush of ice and elderly bread crumbs and broken frozen pizza.  I ditch them.

Tom and I stack the frozen pies, ravioli, bread and pizza into a freezer basket, hoping that togetherness will stop them from thawing immediately.  It is becoming clear that they will thaw much more readily than the ice around the top of the freezer.

Being a hot mid-summer day, we agree that it would be foolish to wait for the ice to melt, and that it must be chipped off by a strong man.

Tom - he assures me - that that strong man.  Anything rather than write an essay on Waiting for Godot.

I supply him with the job-specific implement: a stout plastic spade which had been supplied with the freezer.  It disappoints him.  He had had his eye on the carving knife so he could attack the ice with a virility in keeping with his puberty.

I explain that a knife would lacerate the freezer walls.  He does not see that as an obstacle but something a mother would invent to spoil his fun.

At first, the plastic spade does not seem meet its job description, but time is on its side.  The ice succumbs under the pressure of Tom's heavy breathing and heat-wave temperatures and it falls, with perfectly satisfying thuds, to the freezer floor.

The lumps of ice are shaped like seed glaciers, and we dump them into a large plastic container and while I wash the freezer walls, Tom takes his treasure to the kitchen sink.

Being a child of mild Australia climate, he is starved of snow and ice and other sub-zero playthings.  He empties it into the kitchen sink and as it softens, he coaxes it into a limp snowman shape.  Then he subjects it to a flow of tap water which sears an instant hole.

He discovers that the running water will melt single pieces into instant shapes that hold their form only if whipped away from the water at the moment of conception.

He becomes a master craftsman, the creator of all things ice: he finds a face with a jagged grin, a camel, a half star.

Then it melts, no longer ice but its unfrozen form, only to wash away, until nothing is left but a pile of soggy peanuts trying to escape down the plug hole.

Not knowing that this is indeed the theme of his essay, Tom goes back to his desk - and waits for Godot.

*Waiting for Godot is a play about two men who sit under a tree and wait for Godot.  Its theme is the passing of time, the tedium of waiting, the futility of living and the finality of being washed down the plug hole.  Furthermore, Godot stands them up.