Just a cage of rib bones

In my ongoing efforts to win a Daytime Emmy award, I am hereby converting what started out as a simple post about my quirky love for a food conveyance into my shot at a treatment for a Lifetime Original Movie.

Towards that end, I have provided a suggested soundtrack by the inimitable Ingrid Michaelson, which seems to currently be required for all such entertainment (with good reason):

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[Background music: The Way I Am]

When I went to load a bowl into our dishwasher the other day, I was struck with the memory that I'd broken the matching bowl a month or so ago, so I didn't have to leave a spot for that one right next to the other (I have a tried-and-true arrangement for loading our dishwasher). I love these bowls, because their nearly ideal shape and the fact that they're ceramic makes them the most versatile dishes we have.

I say "them" because we started out with four, but as we are now down to one, I suppose I should get used to saying "it" instead. Forget about those other two that were broken long ago, though, because we've only had two for a long time, and that makes the loss (or murder) of one that much more poignant.

[Background music: Breakable]

I'll pause for a moment to allow you to wipe away your tears, because if you're like me, this all seems exactly as tragic as someone setting a place at the table for the recently deceased before realizing there's no longer a need for it, and then finding themselves unable to take the place setting away because it seems so final and cruel. The only real difference is that in my story, the protagonist is the place setting itself.

On that note, I felt a little sorry for the bowl, and then I felt a bit guilty for robbing it of its life partner. They nested so perfectly together, quiet and content in that cozy cabinet, except when one or both of them went out to work or on vacation to the counter by the sink. Absence always made its heart grow fonder, so now it can grow fonder forevermore. At the same time, I have to think that it is now left to live in terror of the day when one of us drops it a little too hard or loves it a little too much, a la Lennie from Of Mice and Men.

For the icing on this maudlin cake, I had broken the dearly departed bowl by dropping it just a few inches onto the dishwasher rack, of all places, and this surviving bowl had to sit there watching in horror. And every time I put it back into that cursed place, it has to relive that awful moment. I believe the cause of death was that the victim had been brittle from a case of thermal shock, but that's all in the past and there's no sense in torturing myself any more than I already have.

So as this Last Bowl Standing now lay in that same dishwasher rack where its lover met its end, waiting for the ax to fall while facedown and trembling in fear, wracked with regret, horrible flashbacks, and post-traumatic stress, it became clear that these bowls are subject to the same whimsies of fate as the rest of us.

[Background music: Keep Breathing]

What makes them so special then, you ask? Nothing much, I guess. I just like the way they hold my cereal up like a gift each morning, making a healthy amount seem like the excessive quantity I might otherwise pour. Plus, they fit so nicely in our little dishwasher. (Sorry... too soon? They/it really do/does, though.)

So this bowl, just like those before it and every one to follow, is not much more special than any others, and it has little choice but to do whatever it is it does while it can, because it can never know which day will be its last.

Aaaaaaaand scene.


Footnotes:

• If need be, we can add a little coda about the last bowl moving in with one of the other set of bowls we have.

• That leaves open a sequel about the two renegades bucking the conventions of the society in our cabinet, and making their own way towards being happy again in the short time they have, and so on.

• The widowed bowl must be voiced by Valerie Bertinelli, or there's no deal, and I believe Dennis Haysbert was born to play the broken bowl. Suggestions for the widow's possible love interest include Vin Diesel or Pierce Brosnan.