Oh, Grandma!

Hey diddle, diddle!

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed 

To see such a sport, 

And the dish ran away with the spoon

If you have a grandmother, she’s probably shown you her spoon collection.  You probably pretended to be fascinated.  Oh, yes, Grandma, there’s your spoon from a silver mine in South Dakota.  That must have been an exciting trip.  Yeah, you’re faking it big time.

I had a grandmother who collected spoons, but not the memorial kind.  I had a grandmother who stole spoons from every restaurant she ever went to.

You might wonder why your server collects your silverware almost as soon as you’re done with it.  (Okay, this is pre-pandemic and hopefully post-pandemic when we have servers.)  Said server was probably ordered to do so by the management because management was cognizant that people like my grandmother existed.

I knew what she was doing, of course.  I would roll my eyes and say, “Grandma, please don’t.”  But she would get that shifty look, place her napkin on the table, her eyes darting around to see if anyone noticed except me; then she would wrap the napkin around the spoon and slide it so that the spoon would drop into her open, waiting purse, the old-fashioned kind that snapped shut.

Was Grandma a kleptomaniac?  No, for some reason she just collected spoons.  And if we were out for a grand meal, there was the soup spoon, followed by the regular spoon, followed by the dessert spoon. I think this is why she ordered sherbet a lot of the time.  Those spoons were quite dainty.  I did see her once, when we ordered ice cream sodas, strawberry, the favorite of both of us, try to cram that spoon into her purse, but no such luck.  She gave me a look of disappointment, I just turned away and rolled my eyes. Again!

Grandma died, as grandmothers tend to do.  It was left to the rest of us to clean out her house because she stayed in that four-bedroom until the end.  We pondered the nine boxes of Easy Spirit shoes she never wore and the linen dish towels from various countries around the world.  Mementos I doubt she could have stuck in her purse.

And, of course, there were her spoons.  Some even had the names of the restaurants from which she snatched them.  Should we treat them like overdue library books and try to return them?

My thrifty uncle took it upon himself to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Meaning the silver from the baser metals.  He had the silver spoons melted down; and with the money he received, we had a grand celebration in Grandma’s honor.  All spoons remained on the table.  I think.