There’s something reassuringly grown-up about owning a matching set of crockery. Something satisfying about the orderly way in which each item belongs with the others. My crockery isn’t anything fancy; I happen to prefer the aesthetic appeal of unadorned, simple, no-frills white. I find it to be a little disturbing when my food clashes with my crockery, so patterned china holds no appeal. I don’t doubt I was a laugh-and-a-half when playing tea service as a child what with my demand for clinically clean dishes and my aversion to ever having anything organic touch my hands. Seriously, I was the only child around who could play Mud Pies and stay clean — in part because if I got anything on my hands then I ran indoors to have it cleaned off. To this day I don’t even like putting lotion on my hands and I wear rubber gloves to wash dishes and latex gloves to prep food.

Something else I find to be disturbing is when I manage in my typical klutzy fashion to break one of the pieces in my pristine little set. I generally lack the funds to replace the entire set, and replacing just one matching cheap plate is usually not possible. Right now, I have four matching plates from one set, three from a second set, and a lone survivor of a third set. So imagine my consternation when I recently discovered that I was missing a bowl from my dinner set!!

Exhibit “1″

The set consists of four each — dinner plates, dessert plates, mugs, and bowls. Yet you can clearly see in the above photo that there are, in fact, only three bowls pictured. One bowl is clearly missing! Now, for the life of me I could not remember breaking a bowl — wine glasses on a fairly regular basis, yes, even a plate or two, but definitely NOT a bowl, dammit. I found myself frantically searching the kitchen cupboards, glaring with steely-eyed intensity at the three stacked bowls, even lifting them out and counting them to make sure they weren’t just playing a trick on me as inanimate objects in my home are wont to do at times.

This scandalous kerfuffle continued for about a fortnight in one manner or another. I found myself attempting to bargain with the three remaining bowls, offering a small reward for the return of their obviously kidnapped sibling bowl, pretending to laugh along with their everso-funny game of Bowl Hide n’Seek, offering extra-long sink massages and bubble baths. I attempted several ninja-style sneak attacks by leaving off the kitchen light, leaping through the doorway, and flinging open the cupboard door so as to catch the bowls in the act of … well, something nefarious I’m sure. I launched surprise searches in unexpected hiding places such as behind the telly, in my sock drawer, and under the bath mat. I even tried some of these brilliant rescue missions while stone cold sober!! No missing bowl was to be found. Sadly, despite living alone and only using one or perhaps two pieces at a time, I resigned myself to life with an incomplete set of bowls.

During the time that this witch hunt was taking place, I happened to take my monthly $10 grocery allowance to Mall-Wart where, due to making the costly mistake of shopping while hungry, I found myself stumbling into the produce section whereupon I purchased several pieces of fresh fruit. I know, I know, I have champagne tastes on a cider budget! The problem, I find, with my buying fresh fruit is that it is roughly 95% more appealing when I am hunger-shopping, so when I get it home it tends to sit around for a couple of weeks or more morosely awaiting its eventual destiny. I did manage to make a chicken/apple/walnut salad about a week ago, but only just got around to eating one of my three tangerines yesterday. Much to my shock, it was not at all sweet! While I am really not one to waste food at the best of times, let alone in my present reduced circumstances, I decided not to try to force myself to eat the remaining two tangerines, but instead to invest them in some local entertainment by feeding them to my Squirrel Empire. I even Google’d “do squirrels eat oranges?” and was assured that they probably do. Luckily, they also eat tangerines. For the record, my squirrels are highly entertaining and it’s probably not inaccurate to say that I spend more time watching them than the kats do.

Thus, it was not until this morning that I went to remove the tangerines from the bowl in which they had been quietly lounging for the past fortnight. The very same bowl that has been sitting on my stove top in clear view for the past fortnight. The very, very same bowl that has been missing from the cupboard for the past fortnight.

Exhibit “B-13.X7″

At the rate the silver hairs are coming in on my scalp, I shall soon be renaming these episodes from “Blonde Moments” to “Senior Moments”.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 11:50 am and is filed under Humour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.