Yogi Berra’s famous quote may have more significance than I thought, given some developments around our house.
My wife recently started noticing a dramatic decline in certain items in our every day eating utensils. We were down to just two forks and four spoons after originally having eight of each when we acquired the set years ago when we were first married.
I used the word acquired rather than purchased because we got the set using S&H Green Stamps we had saved when grocery stores and other retailers offered them as a sales incentive.. They peaked in popularity in the 1950s through the 1960s, but were still around by the early 1970s when my wife used them to buy the flatware set from Oneida.
There’s a whole other story about S&H Green Stamps, but I won’t go into it now, except to say that my mother was a great fan of them. I remember licking glue on large blocks of the stamps and pasting them into thick paper books about the size of a pocket calendar and accompanying her to the “Green Stamp Store” to redeem them for what seemed to be many of our household furnishings.
But on to the mystery of missing forks and spoons. My wife’s suspicion was that when we have guests (mostly family members with young children), they accidentally get tossed into the trash when everyone tries to help clean up the kitchen. It sounded like a reasonable explanation, but I decided to look up the phenomena online and see if we were the only family suffering from this insidious plot to spirit away forks.
When you go to Google and start typing “missing for…,” the queue of answers fills up instantly with many explanations before you even finish typing the last letters “…ks.”
Here’s one story from the search:
“Something “is definitely happening in my kitchen drawers. Suddenly I have nothing but 87 butter knives, a smattering of spoons and a couple shrimp forks. I am down to eating with toothpicks and plastic cutlery from gas station delis.”
And another:
“Those forks are spirited away by the Fork-Faction, taken to a secret, underground bunker where they are melted down and turned into wire coat hangers.“
And another:
“I am seriously wondering if tricks are being played on me? Is there a fork conspiracy going on? Are they being thrown away while everyone pleads the 5th? I have asked the rest of my flatware if they can shed some light on my dilemma. Like everyone else, they just sit there and stare at me, not uttering a word or giving up any information on the whereabouts of my missing forks. Geez!“
And this spiritual offering,:
“You might be wondering, ‘What could possibly be spiritual about missing forks?’ Well, it turns out that the Universe has a way of communicating with us through the objects and situations we encounter in our daily lives. In this article, we’ll explore the spiritual meaning of missing forks and discuss the six messages that the Universe may be trying to communicate to you.
I chose not to read any more after the first paragraph.
And although I’m not a user of TikTok, I found this link when I searched for “missing forks”(Clicking the link may bring in some other posts, but the one about forks is the only one I wanted):
So below are some of the new forks my wife ordered after doing her own search for “replacement flatware” on Amazon.
But if you come to a fork in the road, pick it up and put it in your pocket. You might just need it some day.
aero-cordero.com 