An Heirloom Salad Fork
grandmother/fork
My sister had a special fork in a kitchen drawer in our childhood home. Last Thanksgiving, she and I were twenty-four and twenty-one. I sat at the table for our meal.
“That’s my fork,” she said. She found it in a playground when she was four and I was learning to walk. I don’t remember her finding it, but I knew from that day forward no one else was allowed to use it. It was intricate, patterned like fancy China. Four pronged, though I don’t know what that means.
“We’re still doing that?” I said, handing her the fork, she passed me one of the simple, three-pronged (fish, maybe?) forks.
“It’s my fork,” she said again.
There’s something about discovery that makes us feel ownership. Never mind that someone lost that fork on the playground, never mind the picnic where some child might have speared grapes out of a bag from the Whole Foods down the street, never mind that she didn’t purchase it. She found it, and it belonged to her. Manifork Destiny.
I own no cutlery. When I moved into my college house two years ago, the tenants before us left a handful of spoons, two butter knives, and three forks in the drawer next to the stove. A year later, my roommate’s aunt and uncle moved to India and gave him a lot of stuff. The biggest hauls were a 55’ flat screen, ten plates, and fifteen (no idea why so many) forks. So, I used Kevin’s forks. We all did. To this very day, I have not bought my own fork.
An adult move would be to buy forks for the house I move into in the fall. Or, to save myself some money, I could buy them from a thrift store for a dollar apiece.
In all honesty, forks are not my favorite utensil. I prefer spoons. A spoon spreads peanut butter better than a knife (use the backside, it will change your life), you can eat soup with a spoon, you can eat pasta and mac n cheese, even some salads. A knife is singularly functional. But no one had a special spoon.
Also, why are there different sized spoons. Soup spoons I understand, but why is there a smaller version of a spoon. It’s not for smaller mouths, despite what my sister said to me once when I dipped a big spoon into a bowl of cereal. (“You don’t have a big enough mouth to use that spoon.”)
Do some people have cutlery heirlooms? Maybe? It seems like the kind of thing my mother’s southern roots might pass down, the kind of spoons with the oval pictures on the top, set alongside a tiny teacup on the porch of a large Georgia estate. If my grandmother has heirloom spoons, I haven’t seen them.
My mother’s mother has a southern drawl mixed into her years spent in Chicago. Listen to her poetry sometime, better than melatonin. She’s a hugger, my grandmother. She walks her fingers around my waist, nails tickling my kidneys, then squeezes, “Ohhh, it’s just wonderful to see you again, Craigers.”
I once spent a long weekend up at my grandparent’s cabin in northern Wisconsin. They have kayaks, a basement room still with three cots for my siblings and me. My grandfather swept the deck each morning, before the mosquitoes. Once, my sister, mother, grandmother, and I went blackberry picking around their property, I filled a bucket and my stomach with wild berries, turned my legs red from blood and purple from juice in my romping around.
They live in Chicago when they aren’t in Wisconsin. There are statues in their yard from the previous owner. Nudes of his wife. Whenever my grandmother takes a picture of a deer in her yard, there’s a pair of boobs staring back at the camera, the deer off-centered, like my grandmother intended to get both in the frame, or maybe saw it as an afront to the statue to only show one boob. I always have to read the captions to know what to look at when she sends a picture.
They’re retired now and spend most of their time and money on the Chicago Symphony. Every June, we go down to Ravinia Park and sit outside the fancy seats on the grass and have a picnic and listen to the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack or some guest musician. I loved watching my grandfather conduct the squirrels with a breadstick. He walks through the woods in Presque Isle, Wisconsin with two trekking poles. It makes him go faster. We timed it once. Super scientific. My sister and I each walked fifty yards from the front door of the cabin to the edge of Carlin Lake. Then did it again with trekking poles. Trekking poles are faster. Peer reviewed the next year by our brother.
There’s little else to say about my grandparents. They eat well, they’re manageable cooks, my grandfather likes coffee (first wave, Maxwell House), my grandmother drinks coffee but doesn’t need it, she stays up until 3am watching television on her laptop, he’s in bed by 7pm and up by 4am, sometimes they pass each other in the hall, her going, him coming from the bedroom. She read poetry to us when we were younger and still slept in their basement with the thin green carpeting and would watch the old, black and white Super Man movies on VHS. My mom recorded some of her reading, “The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things,” still plays in my head in her voice.
My grandfather bought a few Laica cameras and started snapping pictures. Vivian Maier style. I hope that one day I’ll open a box and find hundreds of prints of his and wonder where he found the time/dedication/experience to capture such moments. Next to those prints will be an heirloom salad fork with a note that says, “For Craig and no one else.” And I’ll finally own cutlery.
