Living on the Edge

Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.  Well not really but maybe 1976.  It is the bicentennial of our country.  Every town across the USA is filled with American pride.  My town, Spencerville Ohio actually painted their fire hydrants as little minutemen.  I know, awesome.  Really, imagine yourself as my dad.  You live in rural Spencerville Ohio, okay Spencerville is rural, but we still live out of town.  Our neighbors not too close but close enough.  You are married and have 4 children.  You don’t lock your car or your house.  There has never been a break-in or theft in our neighborhood ever!  What a country!  You sleep like a baby every night dreaming of better meals and sports.  Your children are all tucked safe in their beds, not a care in the world.  You are awakened by footsteps in your house.  Is it one of your kids?  Is it your mother-in-law, your neighbor, a burglar?  You realize your only form of protection; i.e. a gun is in your son’s room at the opposite end of the house.  You have to improvise, MacGyver style.  If somehow you could sneak to the kitchen, there hanging above the kitchen stove were the knives.  You could fend off this would be thief and save the family from disaster and years of therapy.  Slipping out of bed and making your way across hardwood floors, no creaking , no sound, not even a whisper of noise.  In the faint light of the moon shining through the kitchen window, you make out the silhouettes, 5 shiny knives hanging; ready to do battle with the enemy.  There is only about 15’ between you and all the protection you will need.  Under the cover of the dark night you make it to the stove.  As you reach for the dagger of life a light turns on.  “Hank what are you doing?”  My mother asks.  “I heard footsteps in the living room” he replied.  With all the answers my mom says, “It is just the kerosene heater cooling down because it ran out of fuel.”  “Let’s go back to bed.”  Before you put the knife back on the hook, you flick your thumb across the blade ever so gently, then a bit harder, a bit harder.  At this point, or lack thereof, you realize there is no edge on this knife.  You check the others, with no difference, dull as a bull’s ass.  You think to yourself, how in the hell do we even get food on the table?  You know for a fact that there is no sharpener on the premises and we have no secret stash of good knives.  Could this representation of cutlery actually be for real or are they ornamental?  You go back to bed and think about the ironic situation in the kitchen.  I know it’s a knife, it looks like a knife, is it really a knife?  What if I really needed the knife to do some damage?  Could it have been used in self-defense?  Would the intruder just laugh at me like Vincent Price at the end of Thriller, knowing full well our cutlery wouldn’t damage a stick of butter?  Or maybe your thoughts would go down other avenues.  No wonder we buy everything pre-cut.  How come we never eat steak?  I know I’ve seen Marie use these.  Or did I?  Have I ever eaten a slice of tomato?  I know I have.  But was it here in my house or somewhere else?  You finally fall back asleep and go onto other more interesting dreams. 

There was never an intruder in our house.  I just think about our cutlery and how we prepped our meals.  No accidental cuts were witnessed in our house, no stitches, nothing.  Our knife set was as harmless and useless as false teeth sitting in a glass.  This makes me ponder.  Does every house possess decorative cutlery?  If so, how do they survive?  Check your knives boys and girls.  If they won’t cut through the skin of a tomato, they are not sharp enough.  Put yourself in my father’s shoes and think about this.  What if you have an intruder?  Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies.  No cutlery needed.