Okay, it’s a bit random, but Mir got me thinking about silverware today.

When I was growing up, my grandmother used to send the most peculiar birthday packages. She spent a lot of time in thrift shops. I remember one birthday box that contained a particularly odd assortment. There was a T-shirt that looked like an air mail envelope; a silver dollar; and an Effersyllium container filled with mismatched spoons.

I think I was eight years old. I loved my grandmother, but I really did not know what to make of this gift. We put the spoons in the silverware drawer, but it always vaguely offended my fledgling obsessive/compulsive disorder, because they didn’t all fit in the organizer, and besides, they didn’t match!

Over the years, I sneaked the mismatched utensils out of the silverware drawer, one at a time, and stashed them away in a shoebox in my closet. There they sat until I got my first apartment, when I pulled them out and proudly started using them once more.

When I met Sarah, she taught me about the critical importance of china and silverware. She already owned two sets of china, but the flatware was her roommate’s. I think she was actually relieved that I obviously didn’t care about such details, because when the time came for us to set up our wedding registry, she was clearly in charge. I timidly questioned why we needed to add a third set of china, but I knew it was a losing battle.

Now, I’m going to skip ahead here for a moment; bear with me. When we first looked at the house we ended up buying, we mocked the seller mercilessly. She had dried flower arrangements over every doorway in the house, on every flat surface, just everywhere. Crazy, I know.

After we’d been living here a year or so, I realized that Sarah had put ceramic fish in every single location that had previously held dried flowers. There is not a room in the house that doesn’t have some kind of fish decoration. We have fish drawer pulls, fish measuring spoons, fish light switches, you name it. If it isn’t fish, it’s nautical. When I mentioned it to her, she just laughed and said, “If you’re going to have a theme, you might as well beat it into the ground.”

Okay, back to the wedding registry. She had picked out Villeroy & Boch Switch 3. The serving dishes were fairly innocuous, with a quiet leaf pattern. But the plates had waves and fishes around the rim. The teacups had waves, fishes, and seashells. And there was one big platter that had waves, fishes, seashells, and a big picture of a sailboat in the middle.

So there we were, sitting with the wedding consultant at Ross-Simons. Sarah was deciding how many teacups we would need, and I was rolling my eyes at the abundance of fish. I tried to get the consultant on my side, but she wasn’t having any. Finally I snarked, “Thank the Lord there’s no such thing as fish silverware; your head would probably explode.”

The wedding consultant cracked a wicked grin, and said, “Actually, we just received a sample of a new pattern from Yamazaki. It’s called Gone Fishin. May I show it to you?” Sarah’s eyes almost popped out of her head when she saw these utensils. She started to hyperventilate, and had to sit down. Even I had to admit they were cute. The spoons and forks look like fish; the knives look like whales. I moaned and groaned and said I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut, but secretly I was delighted that these fishies would be coming to live with us.

As for my grandmother’s legacy, I’m pretty sure Sarah threw all the thrift shop flatware in the trash when we moved out of our apartment. I still have the silver dollar, though. I keep it in the Effersyllium container.

I wish my grandmother had lived long enough to get to know Sarah. I would have enjoyed seeing Sarah’s reaction when she started receiving care packages from Bizarro World.