Jens Column / Spoons

For Erma Bombeck, it was socks. They'd disappear from her dryer never to be seen again. At my house, it's spoons.

It started when my oldest son was a toddler. As I watched him grow, I watched the stack of spoons in our cutlery tray shrink, from ten spoons to nine. To eight. To seven.

"Where are they all going?" I asked my husband, accusingly.

"Well, I'm not hiding them," he answered. But between you and me, I was beginning to think he was.

And then one day, as our two-year-old cleared his dinner plate (his latest parlor trick), we watched him throw his leftover hot dog coins, his two remaining green beans, his small stack of orange peels — and his spoon — into the garbage. (Incidentally, it was at about this time that our television remote, my favorite red gel pen, and six of our nine fridge magnets also went missing. I can't prove it, but I think there's a connection.)

Since then, we've been spoon deficient. While our forks take up two sections in our cutlery tray, our meager spoon offerings barely fill one.

At Christmas a few years ago, my mom asked what was on my wish list.

"Spoons," I answered.

"Spoons?"

"Yah, spoons."

"Like a silverware set?"

"No, just the spoons."

We've managed to stay status quo for a few years — getting by with a motley collection of spoons we've amassed over time. (Case in point: I've bought breakfast cereals based solely on the free plastic light-up spoon inside.)

Still, mealtime compromise has become a way of life. The kids squeeze soupspoons into their yogurt cups. They eat their Cinnamon Life with serving spoons. On really bad days, they bring applesauce to their lips with those miniature decorative collector spoons.
I was away for work recently. When I returned home, our spoon inventory had declined to the point of ridiculousness.

"We have three spoons," I announced as I set the table for dinner my first night back.

"How can we have three spoons?"

"I don't know," my husband answered. "Chipmunks?"

"Would your mom have put them away somewhere else when she was here?" I asked, digging through the towel drawer.

"I'm pretty sure she knows where the spoons go," he answered.

I moved on to the next most-likely culprits.

"Where did all the spoons go?" I asked my boys, whom I'd cornered in the bathtub.
They were earnest, if obvious.

"Did you look in the silverware drawer?" my oldest son asked.

"Yes."

"How about the dishwasher?" offered my youngest son.

"Yes."

"Then we don't know."

"Thanks for your help."

I searched all the logical places: The bathtub, the sandbox, our nightstands, the storage space under the stairs. When those yielded no utensils — spoons or otherwise — I looked under beds, in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator, and in the cup holders in the van. I looked in the boys' sock drawers and next to the fire pit. I checked the dryer.

Nothing.

"Unless we want to take shifts every time we have soup, we need to find our spoons!" I hollered in frustration.

But, frankly, no one else at my house seems to care.

It remains a mystery — the Great Spoon Calamity of 2008. We still have three spoons — unless you count my collection of teaspoons and tablespoons. Which, really, you should. Because we're going to start using them next.