Excuse me, do you have a...

In Your Drawers

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

C’mon, I know you’ve got one. We all have one.

OK, OK, I’ll go first. But then you promise, right?

Here’s how it happened.

On Thursday, we ran out of propane. When the guy came, he had to relight the pilots on our old Vulcan range. One of the burners had been giving me trouble. He said to check the holes on the side of the burner unit.

I should have thought of that. It had happened before, on our even older Vulcan in Kensington. That time, the nice guy from the Gas Company gave me a set of little reamer-like tools to get into the holes and get out the gunk.

I keep the set in the kitchen drawer. Not just any kitchen drawer, THE kitchen drawer – the one we all have, the one where we dump EVERYTHING!! You have one. I know you do.

Here’s what’s in mine – in addition to the set of reamers which I found after about 20 minutes!

• 7 clips that hold snack bags – all virginal -- does anybody ever USE these things?


• 1 cup to measure green coffee beans for roasting


• 1 brush for cleaning the coffee roaster


• 1 brush for cleaning a coffee grinder that burned up in our last house


• 2 coffee measuring scoops for roasted coffee


• 1 melon baller -- the rest of the set is somewhere else, I think.


• 5 packets of flower freshener


• 3 magnet clips for refrigerator – why aren’t the ON the refrigerator?


• 16 (count ‘em!) rubber Vacuvin wine stoppers – how many bottles of wine do two people ever have open at one time? Why do we need 16 of these things? How did we ever GET 16 of these things?


• 2 Vacuvin pumps to get the air out of wine bottles


• 3 champagne bottle stoppers


• 1 fancy rosewood wine stopper


• 1 old fashioned hand can opener – for when all the fancy ones can’t be found or don’t work


• 1 slightly more modern old fashioned hand can opener


• 1 really modern hand can opener that cuts the top off beneath the rim


• 3 church key bottle openers – for the two times a year when we open an imported bottle of beer without a twist off cap


• 1 antique bone handled bottle opener


• 1 silver plated bottle opener


• another silver plated bottle opener


• a faux ivory bottle opener and thing to punch holes in beer cans – sort of a fancy assed church key


• 1 wine stopper with an elephant on top – and we’re Democrats!


• 2 wine drip catchers


• 1 six inch Finnish fish filleting knife in a leather sheath


• 1 ratchet jar opener


• 1 wrench-like jar opener


• 1 metal strap jar opener


• 1 old kind of poultry shears


• 1 new kind of poultry shears – ergonomic!


• 8 pairs of scissors


• 5 tail pieces of a four foot long wooden snake puzzle


• 1 baster (with assorted attachments)


• 1 citrus reamer – the other three are in another drawer. Why do we have/need four citrus reamers? Don’t go there!


• 1 vegetable peeler – don’t know how that got in here!?


• 1 knife, the sole purpose of which is to score chestnuts


• 1 gold tassel


• 1 specialty shears to trim and crush the bottoms of flower stems


• 1 Japanese scissors for trimming Bonsai -- of which we have zero!


• 1 permanent marker


• 1 meat fork


• 1 souvenir coffee spoon my mother brought back from Russia 30 years ago


• 1 souvenir coffee spoon my mother brought back from Salzburg in 1964


• 1 appropriately tiny souvenir pickle fork my mother brought back from Liechtenstein in 1956


• 1 lemon-lime tea bag


• 1 silver salad servers


• 1 plastic champagne bottle opener


• 1 metal champagne bottle opener


• 1 gold plated champagne bottle opening tool


• 2 crumbers – you know, the things waiters use to scrape the crumbs off of table cloths before dessert


• 1 tin of Stick-Um Candle Adhesive


• 2 prong type cork removers


• 1 egg pricker (been looking for that for two years!)


• 1 screw on thing that holds the cartridge for a seltzer bottle


• 1 cribbage pin!


• 2 waiters’ corkscrews


• 1 silver spoon – not quite long enough for an iced tea spoon but too long for coffee or sugar – in other words, useless


• 1 extra screw for a Screwpull cork screw


• 1 old family recipe for a black walnut cake


• 1 Scripto butane “match”


• 5 packs of paper matches


• 4 boxes of wooden matches from various restaurants – the other 117 boxes are in the living room!


• 1 set of pumpkin carving tools


• 1 wire baskets designed to “organize” the drawer -- Ha!


• 1 wrench to tighten the bolts on a cedar roasting plank -- I had to think for a few minutes to figure this one out!


• 1 two cup insert for an espresso machine we threw out three years ago


• another champagne stopper


• 4 very large pot sized tea ball infusers – one with a Christmas tree on it so that it must have been meant for mulled cider – all but one virginal


• 1 suction cup used to unscrew the light bulbs in the range hood -- I knew it was in there somewhere, but couldn’t find it the last three times I looked


• 1 pack of popsicle sticks for some stupid gadget I bought last summer


• 1 plastic dog food can cover -- for a dog who won’t eat canned food!


• 1 sugar scoop --why this is not in the sugar, I do not know


• another church key


• yet another church key


• the plastic top of a broom handle


• 2 wine foil cutters


• 17 foil caps off the tops of wine bottles -- why would anybody throw those into a DRAWER instead of the trash? I don’t know, but I guess I did it!


• a glass thingie you put into boiling soups, stocks, etc. to keep them from boiling over – virginal!


• one lip balm


• one rubber ring to a Mason jar


• one rubber ring to a French canning jar


• a meat injector with extra needles


• 27 little plastic tie thingies that come on loaves of bread


• another fancy rosewood wine stopper


• 12 nails, six screws, twelve rubber bands… and,


• 54 wine corks! That’s FIFTY FOUR! Why? I mean two or three, maybe. Corks come in handy once in a while, but FIFTY FOUR! Why?

OK, that’s it for me. All of this fit (and may again) into one kitchen drawer, and not a great big one – only 3 ¼ inches deep and 19” X 16.” That’s 988 cubic inches or .57 cubic feet – not very big at all! Here it is:

Now show me yours.

If you want to have fun some evening, take your kitchen drawer. Yes, that one, THE kitchen drawer. Dump it on the kitchen table. Gather everyone around, and play “What is it?,” “Whose is it?,” “Where did it come from?,” and “Why is it here?” Beats watching golf.

Then send me your list.