I Don't Wanna Play

I usually participate in the Five Minute Friday linky party over at the Gypsy Mama’s blog. Today, I just did not want to play. The topic for today is “relevant”, which stumped a few people, I can tell. I did a random sampling of the entries and most of those needed to define “relevant” before they could type coherently about it. That took up the better part of their 5 minutes right there. That’s not the reason I didn’t want to participate, though.

I have had a bad week. Just pathetic, really. Most of it I cannot tell you about because it involves other people’s stories as well as mine. And that is fine. I’m not sure I would want to tell you anyway. There needs to be a reason to rehash the yucky things in life, and I don’t have one.

Anyway, I just want to take my toys and go home. I want to yell at imaginary hooligans (I’m not sure we have real ones in my neighborhood) to GET OFF MY LAWN!!! And I don’t want to define or discuss “relevant”. I’ve been discarding irrelevant things all day long, so I’m headed in the opposite direction right now.

One of my now-seven loyal readers might be wondering what I’m doing here then. I’ll tell you. I want to talk about sporks. Well, one spork in particular. Yes, just one spork among sporks.
The story goes like this:

Somewhere around 1995, a friend of mine had to go out of town for a week on business. She asked me if I could stay at her house with her fifteen-year-old son just to make sure an adult was available if needed. Her son was an absolutely perfect kid with nice friends, so I agreed.

One night during that week, Perfect Kid and I went and rounded up a few of his friends. We then went to one of the fancy restaurants in that neighborhood, Taco Bell. The 79-cent menu there meant that we all got to eat instead of some eating and some watching. I did not realize it at the time, but when we left Taco Bell, Perfect Kid brought a spork with him.

Back at the ranch house, Perfect Kid found a Sharpie marker and drew a face on the spork. I have tried to recreate it here, but my rendering is not nearly so lovely as his original artwork.

(Original image from Sodahead.com. Face affixed by me with help from Fotoflexer.com)

Once he got the face drawn, Perfect Kid handed the utensil to me and said, “Luke, use The Spork!” This was especially relevant to me (<<< my two-bit effort to play nice today) because I have always suspected that I might be one of Darth Vader’s love children. Being around kids who understood the power of The Spork was just priceless.


I’m pretty sure I still have that spork somewhere, although I would have to dig around to find it. Maintaining a connection to Perfect Kid after all of these years helps me maintain the belief that not everyone has gone over to the Dark Side.

So that is what I wanted to tell you. I’ll be going now. I have to straighten up the garden gnomes in our front yard so that they are all facing due north.