Little Stories: The Special Fork

How I sent coded messages while setting the table for dinner.

Little Stories, focusing on memories from my youth, is a recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption. You can see more Little Stories here.

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When I was growing up, our family had two sets of silverware. There was a fancy set, made of real silver, which was reserved for holidays and special occasions, and a stainless set for everyday use. The five utensils shown above are from that stainless set. They were made by a Swedish brand called Wallin, whose name is stamped into the underside of each piece:

I don’t recall how or when these five pieces were passed on to me, or why I ended up with such a random assortment. Why only one fork? What happened to the knives? I don’t know. But I do know that these implements feel instantly familiar in my hand — the size, the weight, the balance. I always make sure to use one of the large spoons when having my Cheerios each morning, just as I did when I was a kid.

My favorite implement, though, is the fork. This is in part because forks are just inherently better than spoons (forks are like odd numbers while spoons feel like even numbers, and everyone knows odd numbers are superior). But it’s mainly because this particular fork has a little detail that played a key role in my childhood.

If you look again at the header photo, you’ll see that the utensils have a pop-art design at the base of each handle. I’ve always thought that the pattern looks like blades of grass, although I suppose you could also interpret it as rays of light, or maybe just a playful abstraction. Anyway, if you look closely at the fork’s handle, you can see that there’s a little black mark between two of the blades of grass. Here’s a close-up:

That’s not a stain; it’s a bit of pitting where the metal’s finish has slightly corroded. But as a kid, I viewed it as something more like a birthmark, a little bonus adornment that made this fork better than all the other forks. I have no idea how I came to that conclusion. I just know that this fork became my favorite fork, the best fork, the Special fork.

For many years it was my job to set the table for dinner every evening, and I would usually give the Special fork to myself. A perk of being the table-setter, I figured. But if one of my parents had been particularly nice to me that day, or if I was just feeling magnanimous, I might give the fork to one of them. I never discussed the black mark with them, so they had no idea of the gesture I was making by giving them the Special fork. Sometimes I thought about telling them, but I decided I liked keeping it a secret. It was fun to know something that they didn’t know.

The assigning of the Special fork wasn’t the only coded message I sent while setting the table. Most of the time, I positioned the knives so that the sharp edge faced away from the plate — not because anyone told me to do it that way, but because it just seemed intuitively nicer to have the sharp edge facing away, sort like how we’re taught not to hand someone a pair of scissors with the blades pointing at them. But if I was mad at one of my parents for whatever reason, I would sometimes have the sharp edge of the knife facing their plate, as a secret expression of hostility. Again, I never discussed this with them, and I’m sure they never noticed or cared. (I later learned that the rules of proper etiquette call for the knife blade to face the plate, so my passive-aggressive gesture was actually backwards, at least by Emily Post standards.)

I’ve never cared about owning a fully matching set of silverware, so the five surviving pieces from my childhood set are now mixed in with a hodgepodge of other mismatched utensils that I’ve accumulated over the years. This indifference to cutlery consistency probably explains why it had never occurred to me until a few days ago that I could probably find vintage pieces to fill out my childhood set. And sure enough, eBay has lots of sellers offering vintage Wallin cutlery, including several listings for the design my family used. I could get a few more forks, a couple of knives (oh, right, that’s what they looked like!), or even a full 24-piece set, among other offerings. But as I looked at the various eBay listings, I quickly realized that owning and using someone else’s utensils wouldn’t be as satisfying as having the five pieces I grew up with, so I’ll just stick with those.

My assortment of mismatched cutlery, which I keep in a vintage bar caddy instead of in a drawer. The Special fork is at far left.

I live by myself these days, so I don’t often have to set the table with multiple place settings. But when I have dinner guests, I usually give the Special fork to myself — in part because it’s my favorite, but mainly because I don’t want to risk offending anyone by giving them a utensil with a corroded spot.

A Different Kind of Sign Language

I stopped in the other day at Jack’s Bait & Tackle, an 80-year-old shop in the Bronx. As you can see in the photo above, they have a series of signs hanging from the ceiling. What I found interesting about these signs, which look to me like they’re from the 1960s or ’70s, is that they’re rendered in an amusing “sign within a sign” format. Check this out:

There’s something very endearing about these signs. I would love to see the vintage catalog in which they were listed! (For more IC posts about signs, look here.)

Categorically

I’ve created a new page, called “Article Categories,” which lets you see all the IC articles about signs, or collections, or package design, or any of the other category tags I’ve assigned to the various posts. There’s also a link to this new page on the toolbar of the IC home page. Enjoy!

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.