The Universe is sentient and it hates me

 

 

An over dramatization to be sure.  The Universe is not out to get me, but it does have lessons to teach and mysteries to be wondered at.  One of them is my personal conundrum of this spoon. This is the spoon of my childhood, rural Ohio, single mom, food stamps, etc.  It was likely left in a thrift store nearly 2500 miles from where I sit now, 50 miles from the pacific ocean.  

It appeared in my silverware drawer a few months ago.  I had but a passing thought about what it was, how it may have arrived.  My  working theory is that our neglected Brownie (a kind of mischievous house elf with a fondness for taking onions off the counter while I am cooking) manifested it there.

Regardless of its means of arrival, it has stirred up my thinking.  I wonder at who thought this spoon was a good idea?  Someone designed it and wasted steel and energy in its making.  Obviously someone who had little idea of what a spoon is used for, no practical spoon use knowledge of any kind.  A designer who had never used a spoon to dig out ice cream on a hot summer day, a person who had never seen a child grab a spoon to dig in the yard or play spoons on the knee.  Perhaps the designer had only ever seen spoons used in movies to "cook" heroin and thought they were supposed to be bent in that peculiar way.  

It is a weak bendy spoon despite its promise of "stainless steel" in its manufacture.  

As a child, I had no idea of how a spoon should perform, thought the reality of spoons was that care needed to be taken when eating oatmeal to keep from bending them, ultimately work hardening that narrow little "neck" and snapping the bowl free (see search, parts of a spoon).  

For the moment, I can ponder the merits of a 50 year old spoon I thought was buried in the back yard of a Kettering house,  but panic might ensue if the true evil nemesis of our antique silverware drawer turns up, the last silverware item ever used in the drawer while the dishes stack in the sink, the grapefruit spoon.  Man I hated those things.