A [insert favorite cuss word here] Christmas Story

So I was fooling around on the Internet (way too much) on Christmas Eve morning. My wife yelled from the living room, “THE GARAGE REFRIGERATOR IS DRIPPING ONTO THE FLOOR.”
I have acute listening skills and intensely focus on each word, each pearl, that drops from my darling’s lips. So, I clearly heard, “THE GETORIS DEPINTO TFLOR.”
I like to answer with succinct and precise responses, so as I scrolled through a long blog, I responded “UH WHAT WAS THAT DEAR?”
At considerably higher amplitude she repeated her statement and I shouted back, “WELL LET’S HOPE IT ISN’T DYING. IT WOULD BE A HELL OF A NOTE IF IT DIED ON CHRISTMAS DAY AFTER 22 YEARS!”
Among other things packed in the machine was today’s tenderloin of beef, six pounds of it, for which I paid $$$ and a pound of flesh. In the freezer we had about 20 pounds of beautiful Gulf of Mexico shrimp we bought from some guys who came through our neighborhood selling shrimp caught the day before. (Don’t ever open a refrigerator knocked out with fresh frozen shrimp in it if has been that way for more than 48 hours. The smell will put you down like a felled tree.)
You can see where this is going, of course. But I was too distracted by my Internet meanderings to ken the urgent circumstance. The puddle leaking from under the box seemed to be drying up and in the hectic preparations ongoing during the day we put it out of our minds.
So this Christmas morning I told my wife, “I’m going out to water in the greenhouse.”
In the garage I noticed the refrigerator’s hemorrhage had increased. I opened the freezer door and looked, then felt. Then I said calmly to myself, “OH &%$#@***! HONEY THE REFRIGERATOR DIED!”
There followed an unscheduled flurry of removal, culling (a victual triage) and repacking now urgently precious space in our primary cold storage machine’s freezer section, going out for bags of ice and turning our dead box into an icebox, just that quickly feeling one foot pulled back a century.
In the spirit of the day we sublimated our bitterness at the way fate had flipped us off. We kept our Christmas smiles and did not wail and fret. But in a moments weakness I did find myself say inwardly, why, why, on Christmas Day; we’ve got 10 for dinner! I am not a great believer although I won’t dismiss first cause. But I thought I heard a rather startling new age voice (feminine at that), saying in my mind, “Tehehe, bad Karma buddy. Just lousy Karma.”