What Pulls Us To The Singing Fridge

Sometimes we return because we miss something. Sometimes we return and discover it has changed. And sometimes the past comes looking for us through a volleyball, a bowl of beetroot, a song—or a very suspicious fridge.

The question sounded simple enough.

“What is something you keep coming back to, even though nobody is making you?”

Then everyone had to think.

Monica was joining Lunch from Germany, with a bakery about a hundred metres from her hotel and an impressive collection of cakes already waiting nearby. Rosii was in Brazil. Fruitloop was wrapped in tights, jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, a jersey and a jacket against a 12-degree South African morning. Rosii’s coffee machine had apparently not yet done its duty.

In other words, the table was ready.

And slowly, the things that pull us back began appearing.

For Monica, it was cold places.

Mountains. Lakes. Snow.

She keeps finding herself choosing holidays where these things are waiting for her. Mont Blanc. The Matterhorn. Soon, the fjords of Norway. It is a slightly amusing attraction for somebody currently sitting in Germany as the temperature heads towards the high thirties, but the pattern is unmistakable.

There is simply something about mountains and snow that calls her back.

Rosii’s answer was different. She remembered Cunha, a place in Brazil where she once spent a holiday with her sisters and sister-in-law. It was a three-hour journey from home, but what stayed with her was the little hotel, the wonderful breakfast and the homemade jam.

“I would like to come back there,” she said.

Perhaps that is the first thing we misunderstand about returning. We imagine we are going back to a place.

Sometimes we are really going back to a feeling.

When the place is still there, but isn’t

Of course, returning carries a risk.

The place might have changed.

Rosii remembered visiting an aunt in Ubatuba when she was young. Nearby was a waterfall she would walk to with her cousins. In her memory, it was surrounded by trees, quiet and beautiful. There were no shops selling food or drinks. There were simply children, water, trees and space.

When she returned many years later, she could hardly believe what she saw.

The area had become commercial. There were more people, places selling things, and far less of the peaceful landscape she remembered.

“It’s totally different than when I was a child,” she said.

Monica recognised the feeling. She has seen familiar parts of Germany change too. Places remembered one way in childhood can look surprisingly different decades later.

Yet returning can also give something back.

Last year, Monica’s cousin surprised her with a birthday weekend in the snowy area where Monica had learned to ski and where her daughter later learned too. Monica had thought she might never see it again.

Then suddenly she was there.

Fruitloop had her own version of this. As a child, she regularly travelled to South Africa’s South Coast with her best friend’s family. Years later, she returned there on honeymoon and found changed beaches, new buildings and different shops.

Closer to home, she now takes her son to the same school she attended herself.

The teachers have changed. The playground has changed. The hall has been renovated. The old flooring is gone. There is new paint and new parking.

Yet somehow, underneath the renovations, it is still the same place.

Perhaps places can do that. They can change completely and remain strangely familiar at the same time.

The things that find us again

Then Fruitloop asked a more interesting question.

Is there something you loved when you were younger that has somehow found you again?

For Rosii, it was volleyball.

A few years ago, while teaching at a school, her students occasionally persuaded her to join their games during physical education classes.

“Please, teacher, come on, play volleyball with us.”

So she did.

It brought back something she had loved before, but there was another part to it too.

“I feel myself young,” she said.

That small sentence changed the conversation.

Because perhaps returning is not always about trying to recreate the past. Sometimes an old activity simply unlocks a version of ourselves that has been quiet for a while.

Fruitloop knows that feeling too.

When she was young, she played cricket in the garden with her sister and her dad, particularly during summer. Now, on warm days, cricket has appeared in the garden again—but this time it is Fruitloop, her husband and their son.

The game came back.

The people changed.

And something continued.

Monica’s return to skiing was more complicated.

She had loved skiing when she was younger, but after about eleven years away from it, she decided to try again in Switzerland last year. There was a straightforward goal involved: she wanted to prove that she could still do it.

She did.

She also finished the day uninjured, which is a perfectly respectable definition of sporting success.

But something surprised her.

The old joy did not return in quite the same way.

“I’ve proved that I can still do it, and not die,” she laughed.

She was glad she had gone. She enjoyed herself. She had satisfied the urge to try once more. But she realised that skiing itself might not have been the whole reason she had loved it before.

In earlier years, she had often skied with friends and family. There had been company and camaraderie.

Perhaps part of what she remembered loving was not the skiing.

Perhaps it was the people beside her.

“Life moves on,” Monica said. “You get new things that you enjoy.”

There is freedom in that too.

We are allowed to return to something we once loved and decide not to bring it home again.

One dance that stayed

The Mayor initially struggled with the question.

His younger life happened in a very different environment, one he has not returned to for decades. He described himself as more focused on the future, joking that the future had him “in its dirty little hands” and was pushing him forward.

Fruitloop, however, had been listening.

“What about dancing?”

Silence.

The question had landed.

Rosii laughed that Mr Mayor was now “travelling in his mind.”

And eventually he found the memory.

He was a young man in Germany. He and his girlfriend had taken dancing lessons, and the dance school sometimes organised events at a hotel outside the city.

One evening, during one particular song, everything came together.

The music.

The dance.

The partner.

For one moment, they were all in perfect harmony.

He had never experienced a moment quite like it before, he said, and never experienced one quite like it afterwards.

A few minutes earlier, he had said he could not think of anything from his younger life that pulled him back.

Then one question opened a door he had apparently forgotten was there.

“Just got hit for a six there,” he admitted.

Sometimes curiosity works like that.

You think there is nothing behind the door until somebody turns the handle.

Herrings, beetroot and second chances

Not everything from the past deserves a romantic reunion.

Monica proved this with herrings.

As a child in Germany, she was served herrings by her aunt. Trying to be polite, she said they were very nice.

This was a tactical error.

Her aunt kept feeding them to her.

Monica kept eating them.

“It ended badly.”

For years afterwards, even the smell of herrings made her feel queasy.

Today, the relationship has improved from outright hostility to diplomatic tolerance. If somebody serves her herrings, she will eat them. She simply will not be campaigning for them.

Rosii had better luck with maxixe, a green vegetable she had rejected when she was younger without really giving it much of a chance. This year she tried it again, prepared with onion and garlic.

“Oh my God, it’s really, really good!”

Her surprise was not simply that she liked it. It was that she had spent so long deciding she did not.

Fruitloop’s great reconciliation was beetroot.

As a child, she disliked it before it even reached her mouth. Beetroot had an unforgivable habit of turning everything else on the plate pink.

“I don’t want pink food.”

A reasonable childhood policy.

Then, a few weeks before the conversation, something deeply suspicious happened.

She craved beetroot.

She put some in a bowl, ate it and discovered that it was actually rather nice.

There are limits to personal growth, however. The beetroot will still be kept in a separate bowl.

Some boundaries are sacred.

Monica then revealed that the disappearance of beetroot from an Australian fast-food burger remains, in her view, a serious injustice. The old Aussie burger had beetroot. Then it vanished from the menu.

“It’s just wrong,” she declared.

By this point, curiosity had taken the table from childhood waterfalls and lost landscapes to the moral importance of beetroot in hamburgers.

Which is more or less how a good Lunch should work.

The fridge starts singing

Then Fruitloop produced the question that finally removed any remaining dignity from proceedings.

Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that every time you open your fridge, it plays one song from your past.

What song keeps coming back?

The Mayor immediately identified the biggest problem with the scenario.

“If you wake up tomorrow…”

He seemed less concerned about the musical refrigerator than the possibility that nobody had guaranteed survival until breakfast.

Rosii chose Pharrell Williams’ “Happy”—the kind of song that could start the morning with the feeling that today might be a good day.

The Mayor travelled back to the late 1970s and his teenage job at Kentucky Fried Chicken in Manly. His memory landed on Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street,” surrounded by the music of the Bee Gees, Dire Straits, ABBA and the strange glamour of opening refrigerators full of frozen chickens.

Monica went straight to ABBA.

She saw them in Adelaide in 1977 and still loves the music. She has visited the ABBA Museum in Stockholm, still loves Mamma Mia!, and would apparently be perfectly capable of bopping around in front of a musical fridge.

Recently, she went to a concert with friends and spent the evening enjoying music from the 1960s and 70s. One man in his eighties could still twist his way down towards the floor—and, more importantly, get himself back up again.

Monica has adopted this as a future ambition.

“Hashtag life goals when I’m 80.”

Fruitloop’s refrigerator, meanwhile, chose Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time.”

She had no idea why.

“I hope the fridge won’t hit me.”

And there it was: an hour of conversation condensed into one ridiculous kitchen appliance.

A waterfall can pull us back.

So can mountains.

A school playground. A cricket bat. A volleyball. A dance remembered after decades. A food we swore we would never touch again. A song that somehow knows exactly where we used to be when we first heard it.

But returning does not always mean recovering what was there before.

Sometimes we discover the place has changed.

Sometimes we discover that we have changed.

Sometimes the thing we thought we missed turns out to have been the people who were there with us.

And sometimes, wonderfully, something we thought had disappeared comes back in another form: a childhood game played with our own child, an old sport that makes us feel young for an afternoon, or a memory that waits quietly until somebody asks exactly the right question.

Maybe that is what keeps pulling us back.

Not the past itself.

Just the possibility that there is still something there worth meeting again.