A Spoon Of One’s Own, by Arianna Schioldager

I’ve grabbed a soupspoon from the flatware caddy in the center of the dining room table.  All around and across the gingham-patterned tablecloth hands are grabbing at necessary utensils for the evening meal.  They are passing bread and making small conversation.  They are taking note of the largest biscuits they – and I – have ever seen.  I hone in solitarily on my soupspoon.  The bowl of the spoon is deep; it has more breadth than most spoons these days, more so than the Crate and Barrel set that sits in the tray in my kitchen drawer.  This spoon is made of sterling silver and stamped 1913.  I float its profile in front of my face, flopping it up and down by its handle, but there is no buoyancy, and rather, it is sturdy, resolute, and replete with purpose.  The tip of the handle is engraved with a uniquely unembellished S.   Its composition is nestled in between these contrasting traits of depth and sparseness; it is a spoon with humility.

I wonder if this is something my grandparents think about, “Spoons these days,” they might mutter agitatedly at dinner, “They just don’t have enough depth.”  One nuanced gripe in their old sea of grievances.  This however, is one spoon where they could find no cause for complaint, a spoon with enough depth, both literally and figuratively, to nullify any bleat.

A woman’s voice echoes over my considerations. “Who wants chicken soup!” she says with exclamatory equanimity, followed by, “It is the best chicken soup ever made.“ She says the latter without humility, before then acknowledging that she has not in fact, made it.  She is like the spoon that I hold.  There is depth and an elegant sparseness to her words; the ones engraved within her, like the S on the spoon that I hold.  This is why she is a writer, I think.  She is a lawless creature, so stirring, like a visible imagination in progress.  Her demeanor is at times as brazen as her proclivity for profanity that has not yet left her.  Throughout her career these unladylike characteristics have been forgiven – better than forgiven, ignored.  They are integral.  They are wrapped up in the bowties she wears around her neck.  They are wrapped up in the stories she tells, when she writes, “There are too many mediocre things in life to deal with… Anything less than extraordinary is a waste of my time.” I try hard not to waste her time, and when she tells me, “Put it in fiction, you must always put it in fiction,” I do.

She tells me stories of her childhood and of her life now.  She writes what it is like to watch someone she loves, her husband, slowly pass a little more each day.  She writes it and she reads it to me.  She puts some of it in fiction, but she lays the heart of it on the table where I now eat.

I watch the story of his pending death as it happens, in a way that most people are not privy to.  I look at this woman and her story smashing all around me and I know that I am holding her story in my hand, in this spoon that has been passed through the Schary family; for generations it has been collecting the stories of those who it feeds.  It witnessed the Hollywood blacklist, was present for the burning of a KKK cross on her front lawn, fed her father as he ran a major studio, and watched her mother paint movie stars.  It is a spoon whose patterns and whorls connect generations of writers and artists.  A spoon whose very handle was once in the bear paw of Brando, the clutches of a boyish Redford, and the shaky hand of neurotic Hughes.  It was gripped in the hand of this woman in front of me as a child, and has now settled into my own.

At the corner 604 High Street and Court Street in Newark, New Jersey, the Schary family ran a Kosher catering company.  As America became involved in World War I army troop truck convoys were often routed across High Street and often stopped at Schary Manor, borrowing the catering facilities to prepare food for the hungry soldiers.  She has this silverware from Schary Manor framed in a wooden and velvet box hanging on the wall kitty-corner from me.  There are spoons of history all around me, and even more spoonfuls of stories. This is the story of a family that has been feeding bodies and serving stories for generations.  This is why she is writer, I know.

“You look like a writer,” she said when approaching me on the street, bow-tied as always.  This was the day we met.

She smiled at me before nearing closer, swinging her neck around for a good look. “You come to my house on Mondays, you bring three pages. No pages, no dinner,” she said. I had no choice but to oblige.

I still don’t know why me, as these writers before me now, grabbing for their bread and settling into her table, are not a group of my peers.  They are a group of storytellers who have lived rich lives full of tales of South African apartheid and the fall of the British Empire.  I am a child compared to them.  I am a novice.  So when she told me that I looked like a writer, in response I could only ask,  “I am?”

She skipped not a beat; there was no fluctuation in her decision.  “Yes, you are a writer.”  So then she is a hoarder of writers, I have decided.

Every Monday night, for a table full of writers, she makes dinner, and we, the hoard, write and eat, and we eat and read, from the same set of silverware that graced her tables as a child. It is a family in which no words are necessary and yet words are all that matter.

And this is what it means to be a writer.

I plunge my spoon into my soup bowl, I lift it to my mouth, and I sip from the fount of generations come and gone.  “Can I borrow this spoon?” I ask, without hesitation, resisting my natural shyness; I know I must hold it to write it.  “You can take it,” she says.  I place my spoon in my purse and I take it to its new home.