What Happened to the Spoons?

I’m sure we can all agree that only a psychopath would knowingly throw away a perfectly good piece of silverware. 

About six months ago we bought a new set of utensils for the house.  I for one was tired, tired of running out of teaspoons, which had for some reason depleted to the low single digits.  Every day, I ended up stirring my coffee with one of the fancy entertaining teaspoons, the ones we received as a wedding gift decades ago and which we only bust out for holidays and special occasions.  The problem is, since those are kept in another drawer on the other side of the kitchen, I kept having to walk back and forth to get a clean teaspoon. That’s no way to live.

(And if you think for a minute that I’m going to stir a cup of coffee with a huge-ass tablespoon, you and I are going to have problems.) 

Why had they depleted to the low single digits?  The short answer is that I don’t know for sure.  But I do know that when you live in a house with four kids, stuff gets lost.  Little kids are not great at keeping track of even their most prized items—where’s my baseball glove, dad?!—let alone practical items that they don’t think twice about. I assume that they assume that these items spontaneously regenerate in the cabinets and drawers from whence they came.   

But now the kids are grown, two away at college, one about to go to college, and the youngest in middle school. For this reason, I was recently surprised to find myself once again walking across the kitchen so I could stir my coffee. Didn’t we just buy a whole new set of silverware?  I did a thorough inventory of the house, including the utensil drawer, the dishwasher, every bedroom, the basement, and every other drawer. 

After a thorough accounting, it turns out there were eight teaspoons left.  Eight out of an original twelve.

What happened to the spoons?

Actually, let me rephrase: what the fuck happened to the spoons?    

The reason for the profanity is that the ready-made explanation—that we live in a house filled with kids—is no longer in play.  Or at least it shouldn’t be.  Everyone in this house should be mature enough, mindful enough, accountable enough, and not-psychopathic enough to not throw out valuable silverware. 

Valuable, you say?  Well, yes.  Putting aside how much the set cost, a set of silverware is only as useful as its weakest link. When one of the utensils falls below a critical mass, you not only have to buy a new set (we’re not savages, we’re not going to mix and match), but the cruel irony is that you can’t throw out the old ones (again, only a psychopath would do that). 

So you end up with a pile of forks and knives and tablespoons that dwell in a form of purgatory.  They’re neither the everyday set of utensils nor are they the fancy set.  Pixar should make a movie about them and their sad purposeless existence.      

Going back to the original question, the most likely suspect would normally be the youngest child, but I’m skeptical.  This is a kid who won’t throw out an empty bag of Takis left in his room, will leave it there literally forever, but will go out of his way to throw out a perfectly good spoon?  I don’t know. 

The kids away at college would normally be exempt from suspicion, but they’re home enough where they can’t be completely ruled out.  My daughter in high school?  Possibly. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lost spoon turns up at the bottom of a pile of clothes and towels, which would be good, but it’s doubtful we’re going to recover all four.  The problem is that there is no level of interrogation that is going to help solve the case.  No one would have done it on purpose, so their denials are both 100% honest and 100% useless.        

There are several possible ways for this story to end. 

For example, it would be funny if I revealed that I had just thrown away my own yogurt cup and then saw a glisten of metal in the garbage.  I look inside and, lo and behold, it was a teaspoon.  It turns out I was the culprit all along.  Mystery solved.  But alas, that would be fiction.

Even better, it would be epic if everyone else in the family was in on a prank to drive me insane by removing one spoon per month from the drawer.  In that scenario, they would be Jim Halpert, and I would be Dwight Schrute. It might kill me, sure, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t still be funny. I’m secretly hoping that this is the actual explanation, as it would at least restore agency and purpose to the universe, instead of wading in this sea of arbitrariness and uncertainty.     

The real answer is that it all remains a mystery. This is just another unsatisfying Netflix crime documentary, a five-part series about how the spoons are gone, everyone denies losing them, and no one is lying.  A moronic cold case file.   

The older you get, the more you realize this is simply the way the world works.  Sooner or later, we all end up being Dwight, a flawed person on the receiving end of a series of diabolical long-form pranks.  The catch is that Jim is not another person—Jim is the Universe.

Instructions for my funeral:

In the coffin, please put a teaspoon over each eye, but please paint a big eye on each spoon, like they do with rocks on Game of Thrones. 

If there are not enough spoons in my house to carry out this last and final request, just throw my body off a cliff.  Regards.