What, the Fork?

When it comes to dish washing, I'm the one to come to. Or as my son, Genius, tells me, "Somebody really needs to wash the dishes, because we're out of forks."

The boy exaggerates a bit. The kitchen is never completely without forks. It's just out of the forks that he prefers. The short forks. That's what we call them around here, though if we were the Rockefellers, our servants would probably refer to them as salad forks. My boys like to use the short forks. I'm guessing that's because they can be maneuvered more quickly, cutting meal time down to a three-minute interlude instead of four.

It's bad enough that I am the only woman left on the face of the earth who does not have a dishwasher. At least I have the space below the kitchen cabinet reserved for one. But until one magically appears, I soap the dishes up by hand in my little Flintstone world, and leave them in the drainer to dry. Surely you don't expect me to dry them as well as wash and rinse them. Mother Nature can assist me in that chore. Why waste a perfectly good step in the water cycle, we science teachers always say.

A few days ago, I caught Genius eating with a regular fork. A long fork. I thought my little boy had finally grown up. Even though, at the time, he was squatting on his heels on a stool at the cutting block. "Oh, I see you are using a long fork today."

"Well, I tried to find a short one. I reached in the drainer and pulled out a long fork. Then I tried again, and pulled out another long fork. The third time, it was still long. So I gave up and decided to use it."

I started putting away the silverware. "Why aren't the long forks in the silverware drawer?"

"Oh, I put them back in the drainer when it wasn't what I wanted."

That boy needs a refresher course in the law of probability.