Spoonin’ with Julia
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
There is a touching moment in Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts and Richard Gere are cuddled up spoon-style as young couples often do when there is nothing on TV. Just as Julia is about to drift off to sleep, she murmurs, “I love you.” Richard opens his eyes and we can see he is thinking. What he’s thinking we don’t know. I suspect it is either, “Oh, oh!” or “How do I get out of here without waking her?”
I’m kidding of course. Although Richard doesn’t say anything, I’m sure he is wondering if he loves her too. Don’t forget in the movie Julia is a hooker-person and Richard is a billionaire; which means they both make a living doing the same thing, #$*&^*% people for money.
What is wrong with this story? That’s right, madam, it’s the spoon-style business. Spoons don’t nestle together, at least not the spoons in our house. They are too misshapen to nestle because they are always being slammed in drawers and getting bent out of shape. The average spoon can survive for a little while because the forks take most of the beatings. And why is that? It’s because there is always too much crap jammed in the cutlery drawer. The plastic tray with the little sections for holding the flatware is resting on thousands of items that haven’t been used in twenty years and likely never will be. As a matter of fact, no one remembers what the mystery items were supposed to be used for in the first place.
Our forks no longer resemble the ones we bought just a few months ago. The prongs are all bent and twisted. Our forks look more like probes an alien would use to dig into those hard to get at places on your body. Just where those places would be, I’ll leave to you. (Hint: Alpha Centaurians prefer their guests bent over a saw-horse)
We have implements in that drawer we must have got as gifts from someone walking by the dollar bins at Home Hardware. They look like they might be useful, assuming a house-person can figure out what that use would be. We are afraid to pitch the mystery item out in case one of the kids comes to visit and says, “How come you never use that sterling silver radish splitter I gave you?”
We can pull out the drawer and answer “It is right here. As a matter of fact, we used it yesterday.”
”Really! That must have been interesting because that’s the hard-boiled egg-slicer I gave you last Christmas.
There is an odd-looking device in there I thought might be some sort of bust-line enhancing device. It is made of rubber and cone shaped like a beanie without the propeller. Apparently it’s for twisting the top off a jar of peanut butter if Mr. Peanut goes overboard with the cap screwing business. I suppose it would work for that, but I still like the idea of packing one side of a Wonderbra with it.
There is a brush for cleaning vegetables and another for digging mud out of mushrooms. There is a variety of garlic presses and a hammer thing with points on it. I think it might be for tenderising meat if we can ever afford any, but it also could be some sort of carpenter’s tool or one of Kim Jong Un’s loyalty persuasion devices. There is a soup ladle, a long skinny pie spatula and a fork from a kitchen utensil set that went into the drawer after the rack fell off the wall. I tried to put it back up but the hammer with the points on it bent the nails over and we had to scrap it.
While I was in the drawer looking for a pair of tongs to reach under the stove, I came across a piece of cardboard with the directions for using an Eggsact Egg-timer. (I dropped a heart pill and figured that moving the stove would bring on a heart attack. I never found it. The cat ate it and picked up the stove while I was looking for another one.)
I’m sure the piece of cardboard will come in handy if we can find the egg timer, but we have no idea what it looks like. I thought I had it for a second, but it was another indispensable item, a combination lemon zest collector and corkscrew.
But back to Richard and Julia and cuddling spoon-style, I guess it might be fun as long as someone doesn’t slam the drawer on them.
