Alison McGhee

If Chops Tick had a Facebook page and decided to join the rest of the Facebook world and write a 25 Random Things About Chops Tick list, this is what that list might look like.

1. I can be made of many materials, including plastic, jade, wood and ceramic.

2. I am sometimes connected by a rubber band or other type of hinge, the better to train small children into using me.

3. The wooden version of me is easiest to use.

4. The plastic version of me – not preferable – often can be found stacked in tall containers on restaurant tables in Taiwan and China.

5. I can be used to retrieve burnt toast from a plugged-in toaster when the owner of said toaster is too lazy to unplug it.

6. I can be used as a bun-holder by longhaired people skilled in bun-making.

7. If necessary, I can be used to poke out your eye.

8. Grown people have been known to toss me onto tables in frustration and demand a “fork instead of these damn sticks.”

9. I do not appreciate being referred to as “damn sticks.”

10. At one time, the jade version of me could be purchased for five yuan at a certain department store in Guangdong.

11. The jade version of me breaks easily, leading jade-version-owners to conclude that I may not be real jade. (What did you expect for five yuan?)

12. Do not run with me. You could poke your eye out (instead of someone else’s, which – again – may be necessary in times of extreme bodily danger).

13. In an emergency, the slender tip of me can be used to plug a tiny hole in a dike.

14. The slightly bigger end of me can be used to plug a slightly larger hole in a dike.

15. Chinese food should only be eaten with me, as it will not taste the way God intended it to taste with a fork, and why would you want to mess with God?

16. I can be placed inside nostrils to simulate walrus tusks.

17. In a pinch, I can be used to clean out an ear, but that is only if you are an ear-cleaning obsessive, and anyway, don’t you know that you should never put anything smaller than a finger into your ear?

18. You can find internet images of “chopstick bras,” a phenomenon not understandable to me.

19. You can use duct tape or super glue to attach hundreds of chopsticks to a long coat and go to a Halloween party dressed as Super Chopstick Coat Person.

20. I can be used as a bookmark if you don’t mind permanent damage to your book, and many of you don’t, which is unfortunate, but a comment on the age in which we live.

21. If you paint a tiny face on me, and then do the same to several others of me, you will have a little Chop Sticks family, and think how much fun you could then have playing Chop Sticks House.

22. If you cave in to  your inherent laziness and put the wooden version of me in a powerful dishwasher, expect that I may emerge bent, warped, or broken.

23. I can be used to stir cream into coffee.

24. Lazy children have been known to use a single stick to stab a dumpling through the middle rather than make the effort to learn how to use chopsticks as nature intended and nimbly pluck said dumpling up.

25. In a pinch, famous orchestra conductors can use me to conduct symphonies.

Once, a Redwing pottery mixing bowl was given to a young woman by an older woman she loved, respected and feared. At first the young woman didn’t much care for the bowl; it was thick, uneven, hairline cracks here and there. This was a long time ago, when the young woman didn’t appreciate thickness and unevenness – Redwing pottery-ness – the way she does now, in her middle age.

But she used the mixing bowl anyway, because she didn’t have many bowls, and she was both a maker of pancakes and a baker of cookies. After a few years the green bowl became her bowl of choice, to the extent that she didn’t enjoy baking nearly as much if the green bowl were dirty or already in use. The green bowl had grown on her, and she realized that she loved its uneven thickness, its heft, its muddled green glaze.

The bowl was used, always, for salads, and the mandarin oranges and toasted sliced almonds of a particular salad – the salad of choice for six or seven years in the ’90’s – were beautiful against its sloped green sides. When the woman had to move suddenly, and then moved again, and then again, the green bowl was transported carefully, wrapped in newspapers, carried by hand.

One day the woman looked at the green bowl and thought, “This will be a bowl that I pass on to one of my daughters.” Not because it had great monetary value, but because it had held so many batches of cookies, so many pancakes and so many salads.  Thousands of times, a wooden spoon had beat against the sides of the green bowl with that soft, soothing wooden sound. The warmth of kitchens, one after another, had always been with the green bowl.

Fifteen years after the bowl was given to the then-young woman, she mixed up a batch of chocolate chip cookies in it. When  the cookies were all baked, she left the bowl on the countertop, to return to it later and wash it. An hour later, a crash was heard from the kitchen, and she went running.

The dog of the house, butter-crazed, had managed to paw the bowl off the counter. The bowl fell to the tile floor and shattered. Shards of green lay under the table, the refrigerator, the oven.

The woman is not much of a crier, even at funerals and hospitals and in the face of heartbreak, her own or that of someone she loves. But the green bowl brought her to her knees. She doubted that her children would remember it at all.