The Spoon

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

I recently received a great gift from my mother. The gift had been waiting for me to pick it up at my sister’s home in Maine since last fall. It is something that I once asked her if I could have as an inheritance. Mom is in the process of selling her home in Florida and has been handing out some of her possessions to family members for a while now.

The gift, as you can likely tell from the picture here, (and the title?) is a remarkably simple, unornate, and somewhat battered, big, old, aluminum kitchen mixing spoon. To some this may seem a strange thing to inherit. To me, although probably monetarily close to being worthless, it is priceless.

You see, this spoon is one that I actually remember Mom using in the kitchen of our small home in Maine when I was a young child. She would often use it in stirring a big pot of her delicious beef stew, (I still can’t make it as good as hers.) baked beans, vegetables, or other wonderful food on the stovetop. I remember her mixing cake batter with it and even stirring Kool-Aid for us kids on many sizzling summer days using that big old spoon. I think I even remember sneaking that spoon, (which was much bigger when I was about five years old than it is now,) out behind the house to dig in the sandbox with. I’m sure Mom scrubbed it pretty well after that.

There is one unusual thing about my (or Mom’s) spoon. It is something I haven’t seen on more modern utensils and may prove the old assertion that some things really were better in ‘the good old days.’ The spoon has a small pressed-out hook near its bowl which allowed the user to ‘hang’ it on the inner edge of the pot, keeping it handy for stirring and keeping any drips inside the pot. Pretty ingenious for something made nearly, or maybe more than seven decades ago.

The spoon also has other valuable things. It has little lines, scratches in its surface, that hold many secrets. Those scratches represent memories that it has stored for many years, and keeps. They are records, as much as any old phonograph record would be, of the time in which they were made. Some may be from scraping a big metal pot, or from being dropped on the floor by accident. Others may even be from grains of sand the spoon once shoveled into old Tonka trucks on that fateful day it found itself plowing through our sandbox. Whoops. Sorry, Mom, for that.

Regardless of whatever circumstances caused those tiny scratches to be carved into the spoon, they are certainly there forever. They record no music. They record no words. They record memories. The very moments of each of their creations there were just as real as this moment you are reading of them now. For me, they are the proof of the reality of many remembered childhood days and of an absolutely wonderful, dedicated and devout Christian mother as she prepared food for her big family.  

In just a few days my Mom will be the guest of honor at a large party celebrating her 100^th birthday. How amazing that is, and how amazing she is. Thank you, Mom, for your love, your care, and for the wonderful memories. And thank you for (our) spoon.

 

Those Dreaded Dreads

 

By G. E. Shuman

Hello my friends. Firstly here I will answer the question about dreads. No, I am not now inclined to grow dreadlocks, although maybe that would be an improvement over my rapidly retreating head of hair. Believe me, my dreads are not about baldness.

I’m talking about having the ‘dreads’. You know, dreading some inevitable something that you know is either in your immediate or even distant future. I for one tend to dread things more than I should. I know that. Still, there are things that I will probably always not exactly look forward to, and I’m sure it’s the same with you.

Once I actually had a doctor ask me how I felt about a procedure he was about to do on me. I told him I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. (The truth was I had been up most of the previous night, dreading it.)  His reply was: “There would be something wrong with you if you were looking forward to it.” I completely agreed with him.

Yes, I do sometimes dread medical appointments; things that seem to be occurring much more often than they used to. My brother-in-law recently even said that at our age doctor appointments become our social life. (And he’s a doctor.)

I also dread some lesser occurrences of life. I dread having to make certain phone calls. I dread starting home improvement projects, (Maybe that’s why our home looks as it does.) I dread meetings, and other things. Also, I can barely write the words ‘tax season’ without including the word ‘dreaded’ first. I often even dread, or at least don’t much look forward to things that are supposed to be fun. Church potlucks, school plays, and other functions are things I attend but don’t always relish, partly because, these days, I also try to avoid going out in the evening. I wonder what that’s a sign of. 

I ALWAYS dread using my snowblower. Yup, I really dread that. It’s a good one, but I don’t care. It’s a pain to use. Just yesterday as I was teaching my morning classes I couldn’t help dreading going home, bundling up, and spending two hours of quality time behind that thing. Still, as far as that machine goes, it’s definitely a love-hate relationship. I hate it, but I’m also glad I have it to use. Shoveling would be no improvement.

I guess I wrote all of that to say that I, and likely probably most of you, have definite dreads. My advice, mainly to myself, is to get a grip, quit whining, (just plain stop it,) and go do whatever it is I’m dreading. 

It’s a sure thing that dreading and worrying never helped anything. It never helped a doctor appointment or test result, it never helped a meeting or ‘dreaded’ phone call either. It dang sure didn’t help my ‘date’ with my snowblower yesterday.

The things that I have dreaded over the years have, apparently, not killed me. It’s time for me to trust more, pray more, and dread less. How about you?

 

 

 

 

 

Ticking By

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

I like clocks. I think that’s because I have always been interested in the concept of time; of its passing, in particular, and time travel and other science-fictiony stuff. As far as clocks themselves go, antique clocks are the best. My wife’s family actually once owned an old grandfather clock with all wooden works. Wow! I guess that shows how old her relatives are.  

I also enjoy other types of clocks. I’d love to have a real coo-coo clock someday; an old one if possible. If you happen to have one that you’re dying to get rid of let me know. And I even like the new clocks that run on a small black plastic chunk of works in the back and go for at least a year on one double A battery. Amazing! And more amazing to me is the fact that many young people probably think all clocks run like that, or don’t think of any of this stuff at all. (You don’t need a clock if you ‘ve got a phone. You don’t need to know things if you’ve got Google, I guess.)

To me, clocks are cool, and evidently people know that they are a big part of our home. We received two new, interesting, beautiful wall clocks for Christmas this year… ‘last’ year at this writing. Clocks are in almost every room of our home, not really intentionally, and I don’t know how some of them got there. Okay, so I’m probably to blame.  

When it’s quiet here it reminds me of Papa Geppetto’s shop, with the various ticking and ‘tocking’ sounding of each room. I’m often reminded that each of those ticks, and all of those ‘tocks’ represent more than just the sound they make. They are literally measuring and counting down real seconds of my life and yours, and they are seconds that will never come back. And that reminds me that many things around us are measured by time. We are in a certain day, month, and season, whether you’re reading these words in my ‘now’, or months from now. We measure other things in other ways, like calorie intake, (at least in January) heights and lengths of things and the new tallness of those grandkids who were shorter seemingly moments ago.

And, according to Albert Einstein, time, and the experience of it is somehow fluid and can seem to fly by in one instance and drag on in another. To loosely quote him: “Ten minutes spent in a dentist’s chair can seem like an hour; an hour spent with a beautiful woman can seem like ten minutes.”

As I write this, I’m looking at one ticking clock on the other side of the room I’m in. I look at it, and then look away. Looking back only a few minutes later those seemingly still hands have somehow moved to those few minutes later.  What happened to the ticks and tocks in between? Life seems to be short sometimes, but someone once said that it isn’t, “It’s just that we waste most of it.”   Humm.  My nearly one hundred-year-old mother, after experiencing more moments than I ever will, would say: “That’s just the way it ‘tis.”

From my point in time, right now, we have all just entered a brand-new year, and we would do well to pay attention to it, and not waste it. 

So, my clocks keep tick-tocking away, and time keeps ticking by.  Would it help if I took out all those double A batteries?