(Not Quite) Silver Spoons

The new in-sink-erator really works. Found out the hard way tonight when my grandmother’s metal measuring spoons took a few turns in the jaws of death and ended as a mangled mess. Kind of how my day went as a whole: a jumbled twist of metal. Just another thing to add to the garbage pile, I thought, as I saw the dents where the ONE TABLESPOON used to be.

I always thought of her when I used those spoons, measuring out salad dressing or vanilla for cookie dough or liquid ibuprofen when the pharmacy spoon went missing. And in my kitchen I drifted back to my days as a girl (funny that a cheap set of spoons could spawn a time machine.) But with the magic spoons I remembered the tapioca pudding and homemade soups and the way she ate peanut butter straight from the jar.

They were plenty older than I, and tonight was just their time I suppose. They were a connection, however tenuous, to a woman I loved so much and who has been gone way too long. She died when I was in eighth grade, twenty-five years ago. This year marks the silver anniversary of her leaving.

I’m not sure how she packed so much love and so many lessons into such a short amount of time with me, (although maybe I teach eighth grade in some vain attempt to re-create the life I knew when she last walked this earth.) And I am sometimes amazed that she has stayed so vividly in my head all these years.

But those brief moments with her measuring spoons kept her alive somehow (yes I know that Prufrock would rather they be coffee spoons that were measuring a LIFE, but a little baking powder in a warm cookie counts pretty well too.)

And it will take more than the death of the spoons to kill the lessons inside me. She taught me to love books, to read voraciously, to hunger for mysteries. I’ve already passed on THAT lesson to my own daughter, the kind of girl who falls asleep with the book on her head or hides under the covers to finish a chapter.

She taught me kindness, to accept people and see the best in them, no matter what their lot in life. She loved them equally: the young man who cut her grass, the neighbor lady across the fence, and even those who did her wrong. She had her moments of fire, but mostly she shared her faith and friendship under the pear tree at the end of her lane.

My grandma instilled in me a sense of duty, demanded that we work first and play second. We woke up at the crack of dawn, drank coffee (mostly warm milk for me), cleaned the house, set the stew on for dinner, and then changed back into our pajamas around three in the afternoon for reading and eating and Wheel of Fortune. We each had our own couch. That is my kind of living.

And the lessons have stayed. Just today in class I was recounting her words when my students were whining about taking notes: Work first, and play later. And yesterday I was admonishing my son to be nice, (yes even to the girls.) The lessons in reading and writing come easily. I pass them without thinking. And I just this minute remembered she did a stint as a reporter before her familial roles began. I can channel her muse as I begin the school newspaper this year.

The measuring spoons are toast, no trade in value for that kind of metal. But my grandma and I are going for another twenty-five years. We’ll ditch the spoons and measure the smiles, the hugs, the good reads, and the good friends. Even if we have to do it in a strange past and future realm.