The missing fork

By John Gould | from the March 26, 1959 edition

It’s the little things that count, and if somebody will just tell me where I can catch a three-tined kitchen fork, about so big and so long, things may improve about the old homestead. We’ve lost ours.

You would expect if the roof blew off the manor, or the foundation settled under the parlor, some degree of consternation would set in, but the simple loss of a three-tined kitchen fork might be borne up under with some fortitude. This is not so, for the progress of our domestic program has gone to pot, and unless I can find a fork soon the future is gloomy and unpromising.

“I’ve misplaced my little fork,” she said, one day, I suppose it was a month ago. I was meditating on some abstruse hypothesis at the time, and didn’t pay much attention, but a few days later she said “I wish I could find my little fork!”

After a few more times I said, “What’s with this little fork stuff?” “Why,” she said, “the little one with three prongs, the one your mother gave me. And it didn’t go out with the swill!”

We still say “swill” around here.

Things do go out with it. Every time I clean out a hog pen I find artifacts long supposed gone forever, and all of the things a hog has no use for. She said she had gone down and looked.

I did, too, and I also poked around on the compost heap, and gave the duck pen a scrutiny, throwing the ducks into a tizzy. But the fork could not be found and we had constant moan over the disappearance. Not one bit of housework can be done, right that is, without that fork.

I remember my mother did give it to her. My mother was ever the practical one. It was an antique of sorts, something long in the family somewhere, sort of an old wives thing. It was approximately the size of an ordinary dinner fork, with a riveted wooden handle, and it had only the three tines. It was steel instead of silver, and the tines had a bit more upward bend to them than an ordinary fork. Made it more grasping.

When we set up housekeeping Mother contributed several smallish items like that, the kind of things wedding guests and the social set wouldn’t think of – or give if they did. We had 17 table lamps and 33 pickle dishes, but Mother said, “I couldn’t keep house without one of these,” and she gave us the fork. It didn’t get put on the table with the fancy things – nor did it get put in the barn after the ceremony.

It was a “utility” fork, of course. It would spear the brisket right out of the boiled-dinner kettle, and nothing would turn bacon so well. It could flip rolls out of the tins, stir scrambling eggs, and filch an olive right out of the bottle.

So, we exhausted the chances, and still didn’t find it. It must be gone. Every time I go into the kitchen I hear the lamentations. Everything is harder without it, so much more clumsy.

“Look how I have to chase doughnuts around!” she says, and it’s true – the little fork always snagged them so pertly.

We went looking for another. I took her to the city, and while I attended to my philanthropies she went up one side and down the other and asked in all the stores for a three-tined fork. None of them had one. None of them had anything even like it, she said, but in one store she bought a two-tined fork because the man was so nice. It is heavier and bigger than the favorite, and she hoped it might do – but it doesn’t. No character.

Then one day I had a chance, so I made the rounds of the stores she missed, and I saw about every kind of fork currently available. They run heavily to a three-tined picnic fork with an extension shank on them, So you can thread on a hot dog and cook it over a fire six feet away. That’s no kind of a fire to cook a hot dog on, anyway.

I became alarmed at the situation among our storekeepers they would hear me ask for a small three-tined kitchen fork (holding my hands about so) and they would beam and come trotting back with one of these barbecue spits with the long handle. It proves they are disposed to trade and friendly, but I can’t say it is evidence of deep powers of comprehension. I looked at about fifteen of these forks, and couldn’t fight it any longer. I went home.

It is just a little three-tined steel fork with a wooden handle, about like a dinner fork – and two tine’s are no good and four tines are no good. You must take my word for it, I don’t know why. It may be feminine logic, a phase of philosophy in which I am interested but not well versed. Anyway, that’s what it is, and I’d like to buy one. Just one.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe if you write a piece about it somebody will know.” She seldom, if ever, thus presumes on my extracurricular literary pursuits, and this shows how serious it is. If it works, I may get some scrambled eggs again without lumps.

I’d say, offhand, the monetary value shouldn’t exceed a dollar at the utmost, even with today’s expanded ideas. But when a family’s entire happiness and future security is at stake, price is no object.

[ Editor’s note: John and Dottie later received scores of letters from around the world containing dozens of forks. The missing one was discovered much later, stuck in a sink trap.]