Utensils

My daughter and I can just about always get a rise out of her mother by referring to the spaghetti fork as a back scratcher.

We first did it about a year ago, and my wife went ballistic, vehemently insisting that it was not a back scratcher. The more she protested, the more we did it, allowing that we supposed you could use this marvelous back scratcher to pick up spaghetti, too, wasn't it wonderful, a two-use tool? After a while, she figured out that a simple, declarative statement - It. Is. Not. A. Back. Scratcher - would take the wind out of our sails.

This morning, I mentioned that I would be going over to the school to meet with my mento, and that I was pretty sure I'd be able to get my left shoe on okay. With the brace on, I flat cannot rotate my leg, and even without it, it's virtually impossible. What I need, I said, is something I used to have and threw away a long time ago: a long handle shoe-horn. Because, you know, I'll always be able to bend over, why would I need that? Ahem. Well, my wife said that when she was a kid, her father would occasionally use a big soup spoon as an emergency shoe-horn, why didn't I just try that? Perhaps one of the big serving spoons that's in the utensils drawer, the ones with the lip and the deep bowl? Oh, I said, great -- another dual purpose utensil!

You could just see her thinking Oh, darn.....