Silverware, Silver Wars, Silver all the way…
- « They’re the kind of people who “shut the barn door after the horse has run away”, said my fellow passenger to his wife while lenghtening and buckling his safety belt.
- “All these new security rules don’t make any sense to me,” replied his chubby wife in an irritated tone.
The air-conditioning system blew frozen air in my face. I reached for the air control and, … my neighbor took over our shared armrest with his plump limb. The plane for Paris was packed and had already been delayed thirty-two minutes.
The aircraft took off. After stabilization at twenty-two thousand feet, the fellow passenger in front threw his seat back without warning. I received his back on my knees and cursed in French (“Merde!”). I pushed insistently against the seat ahead to make the careless chap know that “the sky was the limit”. I received only a dark look in return. Comfort comes first; there’s no sense in being uncomfortable! There’s no sense in being courteous either! Nothing new! The usual painful games for tall people in “sardine can” planes. Between the sore knees, the aching back in the lavatory bent over the sink, the cramped legs crammed beneath the forward seat, a tall guy has no hope of sleeping, or even resting in a plane. He can only feel like a worm wriggling on a hook. Since I was near the aisle, luckily, I could stretch my legs a little bit.
The steward announced a single option light meal according to the new post-September-Eleven’s belt-tightening strategies, a choice between chicken and salmon steak. Contrary to my neighbor the gourmet, still covered with cracker crumbs and syrupy cinnamon doughnuts from breakfast, I had not eaten since the morning and was ready for a bite. The headset jamming with supermarket music was getting on my nerves, about the time I felt a huge pain in my tibia. The stewardess mumbled an apology and handed over an aluminum container filled with chicken bathed in reheated carrots and peas. The silverware was wrapped in two plastic bags. I opened the carriers and discovered two kinds of materials: the fork was metal but the knife was plastic. As I paused, puzzled, my neighbor winked and said – his mouth filled with pink flesh salmon meat between the teeth – “Dun wan yo to take the plane over! Hey! Harry! … They’re removing anything dangerous from planes. They’ve confiscated my wife’s nail clippers!” I gazed at his nodding wife swallowing a chocolate cookie and tried to imagine her hijacking the plane with nail clippers!” …
- “Nobody moves or I cut your nails, or worse…!” Somehow, I had a hard time picturing her in that circumciser role, unless she was in front of a colony of dumb chickens!
I plunged the knife into the white skin surrounding a chicken wing and … it broke! I began to regret that I had not been as smart as my fellow citizen who as a good patriot had taken salmon! My man laughed at me and offered his own fake knife covered with oily salad dressing.
- “No, thanks!” I replied with a forced smile. I felt like using the metal fork to plumb his upper left decayed molar! And there, it struck me that the fork was a far more dangerous instrument than the round-ended classical knife found in previous silverware setups. Whoever had made the new regulation was as dumb as a chicken. When I was a teenager, my mother sent me to Switzerland to work for two months in a chicken house, in the yodeling mountains close to Neufchatel, “To restore your heath, my little cabbage”[1], as she said after a bicycle accident and a broken clavicle! What’s wrong with this picture? 2,347 hatchling birds in chicken coops of 15 inches by 15; four per cage. Cackling in a ridiculous mimetic way every time ones turns on the light, and resting in peace (do I wish!) when the light goes off. Pecking their own eggs and using their crossed pointed beaks to hit each other. That’s the place to hijack with nail clippers! 2,346 chickens and a dead body in my aluminum container. Send all these beauticians, chiropodists and podiatrists corralled in the airports with their “dangerous” tools to the fowls!
During the Second World War my father was in Brussels, then under German occupation. To survive the harsh time and the food restrictions, he was an opera singer during the day; a podiatrist (thus a nail clippers’ man) during the evening and… a mushroom breeder in the basement during the night. He used to send his first son into the streets to run after the horses with a basket in order to collect the manure as a fertilizer for his fake fancy Champignons[2] de Paris! (It might as well have been Brussels sprouts!) The Germans one day arrested him running after a German mare and drove him to the Gestapo where they discovered that he was circumcised. Not fashionable in those days! My father – the nail clippers man – had to prove that he and his son were good Catholics just as was Pope Pius XII (and not Jewish fellows) in order to escape deportation! Consequently, when I came into the world later, I was not circumcised! Inch Allah!
The Swiss sojourn was almost free. The cheese and raclette were great, but definitively not a poultry product. The farmer – of the materialistic kind – had the genius idea to collect the piles of dejections falling beneath the cages to produce some compost. My daily mission for sixty-two days minus Sundays – Praise the Lord! Alleluia! – was to scratch and shovel the ammoniac droppings to the manure area. I can still smell the stinch today, like my half-brother the mushroom fertilizer! All I need to do is to close my eyes like Marcel Proust with the Madeleines. As my eyes are closed, I would rather think about something else! But now, it’s a gang of hijackers taking over the plane with their forks!
The fork is a recent addition to our table’s array of utensils. Most people were still eating with their fingers in the beginning of the twentieth century. Introduced in the fifteenth century in the Italian court, the fork (from the Latin furca) was at first regarded by the church as a “satanic” instrument because of its shape, too close to the demoniac pitchfork. Today, the demonic fork has become the sign of a blessed overweight nation! We tend to disregard people eating without it (specifically if there’s some couscous in the partner spoon). Furthermore, our modern world is divided between two trends: the forkless and the fork-wealthy people; the strong metal forks versus the weak plastic knives …
Erasmus of Rotterdam was living in a forkless time. Happy fellow! This is what he wrote in his Treaty of Civilities[3], in 1530,
lt is a kind of great rudeness, for one to have his fingers dirty and greasy, to carry them to the mouth in order to lick them, or to wipe them on one’s jacket […] It would be more honest to do it on the tablecloth…
Apparently on the airplane, given the different stains on his jacket, my neighbor had not read Erasmus as I contemplated. But I cannot imagine my very distinguished habitual hosts smiling with tenderness if I use their tablecloth as a napkin! (I have a friend – and I won’t say from which country this gondolier is – who uses the curtains as handkerchiefs.) Reports on Louis XIV showed him “rummaging with his hands through the served plates.” Can you see the American president bathing his fingers in plate and double-dipping with French president? King Henri III of France was the first king to introduce forks in his country, in 1574, but ancestral nobility immediately despised it because of Henri’s new mignon’s entourage. Thus the fork was rebuked as a gay instrument! However, the use of forks made sense in a time when fashion carried a fraise (or ruff) collar around one’s neck! Those refined Italians and courtesans were not so much in vogue as today in French cuisine! French culture is attentive to the table’s etiquette. The stewardess tibia’s hit reminds me of the numerous kicks that had blessed my legs – under the hypocritical disguise of tablecloth – when my mother believed that I was not behaving correctly at the table! “Tiens-toi correctement”[4] she kept whispering, at home or at restaurants. “Don’t put the elbows on the table” ; “Put your hands on the table!” French, with their long tradition of seduction, like to know what you are doing with your hands, while at the table! The Sunday’s 2-3 hours at the luncheon table were a torture for a wriggling worm-boy like me. I had to wait until “the conversation of the grown-up people” had reached some level of privacy to be excused from the table.
Somehow, I found a way to rebel against the system. The official position of French etiquette says:
A fork always needs to be held by the left hand [but] if some foods are difficult to put on a fork and cannot be stabbed, it is acceptable to help with a piece of bread taken with the right fingers in order to push the food on the fork, held with the right hand then …[5]
I am left-handed when I eat, which means that I grasp the pitchfork with the devilish right hand. Every time I am invited out to dinner, I need to reverse the fork and the knife’s position. As well-mannered acolytes watch me with disapproving glances, I ought to elucidate my eccentric behavior. I explain that I belong to the rare population who applies the full benefits of physics to daily conduct. Archimedes’s law of the lever finds an effective application on a beefy pressure applied by the strongest hand (right in my case) on the stitching fork. This having been discovered by the pre-quoted Greco-Sicilian scholar, in a public bath, naked, 2,207 years ago, and more modestly, by me in tender years, during my own personal fight with beefsteak in gravy: ”Give me a fixed point on my fork and I shall lift any food to my mouth.” People watch me with admiration, as science has such a profound impact on modern dialectic! Strangely enough, I am right handed when I write! But that is no one’s business!
On the plane, the chicken wing was left uncut in the aluminum container. A piece of the sharp bone overhung the plate now. At that stage, everything could serve as a weapon: chicken bones, laptops, cellular phones, pens, and pencils. How about removing the arm of your seat to knock out the crew? Maybe we should duct tape all the passengers to their seats? Or force them to carry magnetic underwear to keep them attached to a new iron seat. We are back to the middle Ages, unfortunately one that forks out!
As my neighbor fell asleep with his heavy head bouncing on my shoulder and his aggressive snoring reaching my ears, I heard, far away, in the supermarket music headset on my lap, Christmas carols being performed: “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way …” Strangely, the words were transformed in my mind and became: “Silverware, Silver Wars, Silver all the way…”
[1] ‘Mon petit chou’ in French.
[2] Mushrooms.
[3] De Civilitate Morum Puerlum.
[4] Behave correctly !
[5] LAROUSSE-BORDAS. Le Savoir-Vivre.
