Spoons, knives, boiled eggs, and beans

 Spoons, knives, boiled eggs, and beans

By Bobby Neal Winters

Consider the spoon. I will wait a moment while you get yourself to thinking spoon-shaped thoughts.  If you are eating your breakfast cereal, you might want to hold it in your hand and look at it.  

The spoon is an incredibly useful thing. We use it to stir milk and sugar into our coffee. (An unconnected aside: After many years of horrible ignorance, I’ve gained a greater insight into T.S. Eliot’s line “I’ve measured my life with coffee spoons. There is such a thing as a coffee spoon instead of a teaspoon. Coffee spoons are incredibly tiny.) We use it to eat cereal, soup, and beans.  One could say that the canonical use of a spoon is to eat liquid or semi-liquid food.

But a number of years ago, the lady who taught my daughters Home-Ec showed me that you can use a teaspoon to peel an orange or a boiled egg.  Indeed, they are incredibly useful in peeling boiled eggs.

Is that their proper use?  I don’t know if I can say.  There is a hierarchy of usgage.  I am old enough and from a part of the world where we were taught in school it was not proper to eat our beans with a knife.  There is even kind of a poem about it:

 

I eat my peas with honey /

I've done it all my life /

It makes the peas taste funny /

But it keeps them on the knife 

So there is this phenomenon. A tool is created for a purpose, but in using it we find other things we can do with it. The use of a spoon can be expanded to peeling boiled eggs and that is very satisfactory; a knife can be used to eat your pinto beans with which is non-optimal if you have a spoon around, but is better than eating them with your fingers, perhaps. You can also use a spoon to cut cake with, but if there is a knife around, why?

This is a simple idea.  It is a basic idea.  It is an idea that can be used in different ways.

Consider the human body.  “When we are born we are given a body.”  (I originally wrote that without the quotes, but then as I wrote the sentence I decided to add them.  Because there is a question here: Are we given the body or is the body what we are? The first way of thinking presupposes that there are a bunch of souls waiting in line to be rolled into a body; the second does not. Rather than wrestle this one out here, let’s go with the statement in quotes as being at least metaphorically true and marshall on.)

We are given a human body.  And we must figure out what to do with it.  There was a time when we didn’t have to do as much thinking.  You had to walk, run, climb, or swim everywhere that you went, so getting enough exercise wasn’t a problem.  There wasn’t so much around to eat, so you ate when there was food, and you starved when there wasn’t.

Now we have cars and don’t have to walk to get where we are going.  We have machines to help us work, or we work at sedentary jobs, so we have to learn to use our body in different ways. We need to learn the right way to eat in terms of amount and contend.  We need to learn how to maintain fitness by being active outside of work and setting aside time to exercise.

We are given a human mind. (Same discussion as above.) We need to think with that mind and we need to learn the right way to think. The right things to think about.  For example, we need to realize--to really know--that we’ve only got a short term on this globe.  What sort of mark do we want to leave?  We need to look at the end and how we want that end to look, and then we can attempt (an important word there chosen with care) to arrange our actions to get there.

This all sounds hard...and it is.  It is made easier by one thing: Tradition. (Cue up the music from Fiddler on the Roof here.) All of these things have been worked out. Most of them, anyway. When you get married, you can write your own vows, you can design the whole thing.  If you like that then bully for you. But you don’t have to.  The preacher has it in a book. You can just take it from the book.  Easy-peasy. You can now spend your time working on world hunger.

You want to learn to be a better person: Join a religion. You want people to think kindly of you when you pass: Do things for them. These are tools too and you can learn how to use them.

This learning thing never ends.  Until we die, I guess. But then there are different schools of thought on that.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )