Missing Spoons

The older I get, the more I believe that our houses eat small things. Sock, pens, reading glasses, remote controls, keys, wallets. The lid to the good Tupperware.

It is always the spoons that leave first.

Not the forks. Never the knives. They stand in their places year after year like dependable old men that hold the door at church. But the spoons disappear as soon as you buy them. Quietly, without a trace, one at a time. There is never a meeting about it, no opportunity to make arrangements, and absolutely no announcement. One day there are twelve, then seven. Before long you are stirring your coffee with the straw from a Stanley water bottle. No one ever has any details.

Ask the kids and they shrug without making eye contact, Ask your wife and she blames school lunches, and bowls of ice cream that never reappear from upstairs bedrooms. Ask yourself and you realize you have been asking the same question for thirty years. Where are the spoons ?

There are theories and none of them hold water, It seems impossible that something of significant weight, made of stainless steel could simply vanish from the house. Yet it does.

The older I get, the more I believe that our houses eat small things. Sock, pens, reading glasses, remote controls, keys, wallets. The lid to the good Tupperware. The charger that fit only one thing, all gone.

You don’t notice it happening because life is busy, children are growing, dogs need to go outside, dinner burns, someone needs a ride to pickle ball.

The whole business with the missing spoons has made me wonder if that isn’t how most loss finds us. We spend so much of our lives expecting change to arrive with some great announcement, as though the important moments should always carry enough weight for us to recognize them while they’re happening. But they almost never do. They slip quietly into the rhythm of a Tuesday afternoon while we’re answering emails, or stressing about something that won’t matter a month from now.

Then, years later, you realize your first born is getting married in November, your mom is moving a little slower than she used to, and somehow you never noticed the exact moment it began. The local restaurant has become a bank, your dog is blind and smells like bleu cheese, and your knees crack like bottle rockets on the 4th.

None of it happened all at once. It couldn’t have, because we would have noticed. It happened the same way the spoons disappeared from the silverware drawer, one at a time, so gradually that by the time you stopped long enough to count, the absence had already become part of your life.

Maybe somewhere there is a place where all the missing spoons finally gather. Beside every unmatched sock, every borrowed book never returned, every favorite coffee mug left on a tailgate, every baseball cap carried away by the wind. I like to think they are all there together, waiting patiently.

Or perhaps they were never really lost. Maybe they simply paid the price of being useful. A spoon lives in cereal bowls before school, it stirs chicken soup for sick kids, It scoops ice cream after hard days, It measures coffee before dawn, It tastes the gravy at Thanksgiving, and then it disappears because it was busy doing exactly what it was made to do, that is not a bad ending.

When I buy another set, I know exactly what will happen. The forks will stay. The knives will endure. And the spoons will begin their quiet migration into the void.

I’ll complain about it, of course. Then I’ll make another cup of coffee, and stir it with whatever.