spoonwork

 I was talking with a friend about memory work the other day. She said she really didn't remember a lot about the past and I said that when I was in my forties, I did serious memory work. That is, I'd take an object - in my account of this, for this is not the first time I've talked about memory work, the object I select always seems to be a spoon. Thus, a spoon. I'd take that object and I would dream about past iterations of the spoon as it passed through my life. I mean, how many spoons have I held between my thumb and forefinger? But I'd dive down through the river of spoons and try to alight on my first spoons, baby spoons, which in my case meant that the handle of the spoon - when I have a memory-dim lit image of this, it seems the spoon is pewter gray - was shaped like a cartoon figure. Was it Pop-eye? And then I remember the grapefruit spoons, which are associated with living in Atlanta, in the house Dad and Mom bought in Clarkston. The grapefruit spoons seemed to me to be a secret signal of middle-classness. First you afford spoons, tea spoons, soup spoons - blue collar spoons - and then you are a Yankee immigrant in the booming sunbelt and you acquire grapefruit spoons, which are more fragile looking, thinner, than the other spoons, but have a serrated edge. Teeth, in short, on a spoon! Looking in my mind at the grapefruit spoon calls up visions of grapefruit, boxes of it delivered at the door, because my Dad liked grapefruit. And my Dad liked to have boxes of stuff delivered to the door. Two great thins in one!

From grapefruit spoon I can jump to plastic coffee spoons, which I associate with being a college student. I liked to do reading or writing in diners, restaurants, at the counter of Krispy Kreme shops. The white, shiny, mass produced, disposable coffee spoon, and the cardboard cup, which I know are called ripple cups, designed for hot drinks. This image is, to me, as bucolic as any garden Marvell sat in. In the mix of coffee odors and the odors of fried flour and lard, and of course cigarettes - I didn't smoke, but I was a college student in an age in which smoker-non-smoker segregation had not even started. I could probably trip from one plastic white coffee cup to another and retrace the odyssey of my college days - from Tulane to Emory to Centenary College in Shreveport to the University of Texas in Austin. With a stop in France at the Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier. Although in Montpellier, I believe, the white plastic spoon did not have the prominence it now has. More actual metal spoonwork, there. My life among plastic cutlery - a pretty typical late twentieth century American life, in that respect. Instead of a trail of breadcrumbs, we leave behind the plastic fork, knife and spoon, from the great mass of fast food joints, convenience food stores, diners, etc. -all of them hand to mouth to trash, and thence on the great journey to the ocean, joinging the great plastic islands, or to land dumps. Each of us fleas on Gaia's capacious hide.
No man - or plastic spoon - is an island.