We have a serving spoon in our kitchen that my wife bought for about fifteen cents at a rural Texan junk shop outside of Houston last year. I believe her reasons for procuring the rotting culinary implement had something to do with it supposedly having a bit of authentic, rustic charm. We'd purchased an old colander in a junk shop in Paris a year earlier for the exact same reason (I remember struggling to describe it in my pigeon-French to a decidedly non-English speaking customs agent as "a cooking device"). I have no problems with the colander. It's cool, cute and charming in an old world sort've way. And it's from Paris. Everybody wins. The spoon, meanwhile, came from Texas, and let's remember that some seriously scary-ass folks come from Texas (Leatherface, David Koresh, George W. Bush, need I go on?) At first glance, (when my wife popped it out of the bag, post-purchase) the spoon looked to me like a murder weapon. I could clearly envision it being used to scoop out someone's gooey cranial casing for the purposes of turning the victim's skull into a goblet from which to drink moonshine. It's old and rusty and was probably forged at the Alamo and used to gouge the eyes out of several unsuspecting Mexican militia men. Put simply, it certainly doesn't strike me as something one should be putting anywhere near food that one plans to ingest, unless of course one's keen on consuming microscopic flakes of corroded metal. But, she bought it, we own it and, worst of all, we use it.
I should point out at this stage of the proceedings that some consider me to have a lot of needlessly strange hang-ups. I don't like traveling with food, I find it wicked inappropriate to bring your own food to a movie theatre (even despite the ridiculously escalating price of popcorn), I don't like condiments on my sandwiches if there's already cheese on'em (cheese is the condiment, you see), I wish death upon people who bring food onto subway cars, etc. Okay, fair enough, I'm uptight and opinionated (or as I like to say, I have fierce convictions). But there's something truly strange to me about buying used cutlery (especially specimens of same that really look used). It's like buying used underwear. Oh sure, you can wash it, but it's still been all up in someone's orifices. And who wants that?
The wife and I have been over it several times, and it usually ends with her telling me to get ahold of myself and get over it. Being that she does the lioness' share of the cooking in the household, I really don't have much of a leg to stand on in the argument. But I still shudder every time I see that the spoon's been taken out of the drawer and been languishing (and, summarily, slowly decaying) in a pot of some spaghetti sauce I'm about to partake of.
When I'm rushed to the hospital after complaints of sharp stomach pains sometime soon (and they pluck a golf ball sized dollop of metal shavings out of my lower intestines), don't say I didn't tell ya so.
I blame Texas.
Recent Comments