Dishes are so expensive these days! With the rising cost of products being imported from other countries, I find replacing broken dishes is a very expensive chore, one I cannot afford once a week.
My mother used to say I “was an accident waiting to happen”. Grumpy agrees as each time I handle a glass item, it slips out of my hand and ends up on the floor, multiplying itself into thousands of little chards. I don’t do this on purpose, it just happens.
Grumpy loved the 6 white bowls he bought for $5 at a garage sale; it didn’t take long for five of them to slip out of my hands all at once and end up on the floor in multiple white pieces, leaving me with only one bowl. Months later I still find small slivers of glass trapped under kitchen equipment.
In my need to cover up my misdeed, my fingers were doing the walk on the keyboard looking for the identical type of bowls. After hours of research, I found what I thought it was the exact type of bowls and ordered the set, hoping Grumpy would not find out about the breakage before the new bowls arrived. The day the UPS delivery came to my door, I was delighted; to my chagrin, the new bowls, although they were expensive, were about 3 inches smaller than the original set.
Not knowing what to do about the size of the bowls, I renamed them “ice cream” bowls; Grumpy did not mention the new size and I did not reveal the error either.
My fingers did the walk one more time on the keyboard after looking at the bottom of the one left intact where the manufacturer had imprinted the code number and voilà, found the exact size, made in the USA! Hooray for me, I can now replace the five I broke. The price was double than the smaller ones I ordered by mistake, but at least they were the right ones.
A few weeks later, I find we are short one bowl, as once again, it slipped out of my hand, this time filled to the brim with hot soup. Cleaned the floor, picked up the remains of the bowl and hoped Grumpy would not find out what I had done.
Grumpy doesn’t get angry, he doesn’t accuse me of being careless, he just smiles with a slanted grin and looks straight at me; I try to avoid “the look” every time, because he’s right, I am, what my mother used to call me “an accident waiting to happen”.
If you remember Corelle, “the glass plates which bounced”, they didn’t, because I also broke those. No plates or cups are safe when I’m in the kitchen. And you must look at the wine cabinet, where there is not one complete set of wine glasses as some have ended up on the floor, broken.
If you invite me to your house for tea, keep the china cups and bowls away from me, because I will dispose of them unintentionally as they slip out of my hands and end up on your newly cleaned floor.
For more stories, go to www.elvaweber.com