Published: October 03, 2008 02:07 pm            

TOM LAVIS | A teaspoon in hand worth seven in bag

BY TOM LAVIS

TLAVIS@TRIBDEM.COM

I’m a creature of habit. I always shower and shave in the morning. Get dressed for work, go outside to retrieve the paper and prepare to enjoy my cereal.

I recently went to the kitchen drawer that holds the silverware to grab a teaspoon to eat my cornflakes.

When eating cereal, a teaspoon is the perfect size. But as I peered into the drawer, I saw no teaspoons.

What the heck, I decided to use a tablespoon.

Two bites into my cereal and I knew something didn’t seem right. Tablespoons are great for soup, stew and chili. But much too large for cornflakes.

The teaspoons were in the dishwasher because we had hosted a family dinner the previous night and all the kids and grandkids were there. No one started the dishwasher the night before, so I was faced with a mountain of dirty dishes when I opened the dishwasher door.

I decided to wash one of the teaspoons to finish my breakfast. There among the dirty plates, bowls and glasses from the night before was the rack holding the silverware. I had to push away a couple of butter knives, several steak knives, a handful of dinner forks and several salad forks to finally discover a teaspoon.

I picked one that didn’t have too much chocolate ice cream clinging to it so I could wash it quickly and get back to my cornflakes.

As I took a step away from the dishwasher, it struck me that I saw only three teaspoons in the rack.

“Where are all the teaspoons?” I yelled to my wife as she was going through her own morning ritual.

“In the dishwasher,” she yelled back.

As she came into the kitchen, I informed her that there were only three teaspoons in the dishwasher.

“Someone must have stolen them,” I said, jokingly.

It was at that moment that panic swept through the kitchen.

“They must be in the GARBAGE,” my wife said in a voice loud enough to startle a banshee.

The reason for the pandemonium was that the roar of the garbage truck could be heard coming from the street as we spoke.

I was the closest to the back door and rushed outside in my stocking feet to stop the pickup.

The guy in his fluorescent green vest had just removed the lid of my garbage can when I ordered him to halt in my best drill instructor voice.

“It would be the top bag,” my wife yelled from the deck as I made my way through the dew-covered grass to see if the spoons got tossed.

The garbageman looked at me as if I were nuts.

“What did you lose?” he said, obviously thinking it must be jewelry or money given the way my wife an I were carrying on.

“Teaspoons,” I said.

Now he knew I was loony.

There I stood in the half-light of dawn, dressed in a long-sleeved, white dress shirt, sifting through a mountain of garbage and lasagna fragments from the previous night’s dinner.

As the streetlight shined overhead, I noticed a glint of sparkle near two pieces of half-eaten garlic bread.

Diving deeper into the bag, I came up with seven spoons. Plus, there was an ice cream scoop and a spatula.

I triumphantly raised my arms in the air while holding the missing objects.

“That was close; who threw them away?” the garbageman said.

“No one is ever going to admit it,” I said.

“That’s OK, the guys at the dump won’t believe me when I tell them this one,” he said.

If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the tomato sauce on my sleeves, I would have wiped the egg off my face.

        

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