Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Objects

Kitchen gadgets. What is so darned important about kitchen gadgets? You buy one, you lose it or it breaks, and then you buy a new one to replace it. Isn't that the way? Well, not at my house, it isn't.

 

Take spatulas, for example. To begin with, let's define our term: a spatula can be one of two things. It is either a pancake flipper or a flexible rubber rectangle on a wooden handle that is used for scraping all the good stuff out of the mixing bowl and into the pan. I already had a long talk with you about the pancake-turning kind, remember? How I broke one and thought it had been my mother's and I'd never find its equal, and then I discovered that it is a common, readily available style and was never my mother's and I now have two of them (plus two others that are bigger and are not my favourites).

 

Obviously, that story has been told. Today's story is about the other kind—the kind called "a rubber spatula" although it is no longer made of rubber. I have a favourite one. (What IS this business of making favourites of inanimate kitchen gadgets?) Others, which I keep in the gadget drawer, are either not very flexible or too small for general use (though perfect for getting the last of the Moutarde de Meaux out of that crockery pot it comes in).

 

No, my favourite is creamy-white and firm but flexible. Its handle is gently scalloped to provide a good purchase for slippery fingers. The hole at the end allows me to hang it on a little nail right beside the "appliance garage" on the countertop, ready to clean out the mixing bowl of my KitchenAid heavy-duty mixer, which can whip up a triple batch of chocolate chip cookies in no time at all, and my oversized Cuisinart food processor. What a well-equipped kitchen, to have that handy implement hanging right where it is needed.

 

So perhaps you can imagine how I felt when my spatula went missing. I reached for it and it wasn't there. Nor was it in the sinkful of dishes to be washed. Nor in the drawer with the other rubber spatulas. Nor in the dishwasher. I decided that my husband must have put it away in the wrong place. But when, five days later, I remembered to ask him, he denied everything. True to his legendary status as Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Objects (in this case, Lost Kitchen Gadgets), he took it upon himself to hunt for it in every possible location. Then he asked if I might have appropriated it for use in the crafts room. No. Or perhaps, he suggested, I loaned it to a friend? I didn't deign to reply.

 

So he conceded defeat. A quick check behind the chest freezer, under the stove, and under the sink revealed no spatula. We'd thrown it out with the garbage, obviously. Where would we find its like again? As far as I was concerned, a replacement would have to be exactly like the original, which had been part of a swag bag from an Egg Marketing Board promotion. Oh, how would I ever find a new one?

 

I'm sitting at the dining room table after lunch, finishing up a book review in the TLS. My husband comes to the door and says, "I've found it!" He leads me to the kitchen and there, completely hidden behind a wooden plate-holder on the drying rack suspended over the sink, is the spatula! In order to keep it from falling through the ribs of the drying rack, he had tucked it up there out of sight a week or two ago.

 

But he had not found it by accident. Still in search mode (I wonder if St. Anthony's mind works the same way when he finds lost objects), my husband had tried to imagine what kind of hiding place the spatula might have found. He thought of the drying rack and looked at it from a different angle, coming up to its left-hand edge rather than looking at it head-on. There was its pretty little cream-coloured handle with the scalloped edges.

 

Calloo, callay! The spatula came home today!

 

 

Copyright 2012 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com