The Case of the Purloined Spoon

I searched all the usual places around the house where you might lay your spectacles. I even went out to the car in the biting cold to run my hands under and between the seats.

I contacted the director of the conference center and told her I must have left my glasses behind, probably in my room.

In due course she got back to tell me Housekeeping had searched my sleeping room, the meeting room in which we held our poetry sessions, even the laundry room to see if my glasses had been swept up with the bedlinens and towels.

It was about this time I opened a drawer in my office to get a paper clip or something. The glasses were nestled exactly where I had put them when I unpacked after my trip.

This incident was fodder for my daughters, who have been making veiled references lately to confiscating my car keys.

The tipping point might have come a few days ago – the case of the purloined spoon.

It’s not just any spoon, but a stainless steel beauty with a one-tablespoon measuring scoop at one end and a stirrer at the other end. It’s long, too, a good ten inches, designed specifically for tall French Press coffee pots, what the French call a cafetière à piston. It’s been in my possession more than a decade.

Why do I refer to it as the “purloined” spoon? Because it went missing after my housekeeper’s last cleaning.

Now, my housekeeper and I have a relationship going back at least three years. Maybe four. She cannot abide anything out of place or left in the open when it could be secreted in a drawer or cabinet.

So I texted her and asked where she had put the spoon.

“In the drawer to the right of the fridge,” she replied promptly.

You know what’s next, don’t you? 

I tore the kitchen apart at least three times. Every drawer, every cabinet – even the cabinet above the fridge that I need the stepstool to reach.

Nichoho. (That’s Ukrainian, by the way, not Russian) 

I could only deduce that she either threw the spoon out with the trash or clipped it. 

I couldn’t believe my sweet young housekeeper would pilfer something as trivial as a spoon. Then again, as the father of two daughters, I know how young women are attracted to shiny things.

You know what’s next, don’t you?

On her next cleaning day last week, as we stood talking in the kitchen, she asked if I had found the missing spoon. 

“No,” I said forlornly, “I had to buy a new one.”

“Hmm,” she answered, going to the drawer to the right of the fridge. “I put it in this drawer.”

As she spoke, she opened the drawer, lifted out the missing spoon, and handed it to me.

“Now you have two spoons.”