Somehow, someone has swallowed up all my forks

I had to eat my salad last night with a spoon. This was not easy, since I usually enjoy spring mix with big leaves of various types of lettuce I cannot identify without a chart.

The reason I had to eat with a spoon is that all the forks in this house have disappeared. Some of you may be thinking, “Time to call the police,” but I know there are people out there who are nodding right now.

See, I live with a very absentminded son. I’m often rather fond of him, but not when he throws away a frozen dinner — with my fork still attached to it.

This happens more often than you might think. I am personally supporting an entire village where they make cheap silverware because I have to buy it so often.

I buy massive sets of cheap forks, hoping they’ll last more than a few days. But they don’t. And I’m not sure why it’s the forks that are disappearing nowadays, because awhile back it was the spoons.

I’m thinking about getting a metal detector to go over the kitchen trash can, to alert anyone who might be tempted to discard a piece of flatware to have second thoughts.

Now, the good news about all this — because there always is good news — is that my son is throwing his leftover food in the trash, instead of leaving it in piles around his room to attract unwanted small furry creatures.

I just wish the flatware wasn’t going in there with it. The furry creatures don’t care about that.

I could actually go into my son’s room to hunt for spare forks, but I’m a little bit afraid to do that. I never know what I’ll find in there. For example, somehow the heavy door to his small closet got taken off its hinges. So, now, when you try to open it, it just falls on you.

The son claims he has no idea why the door is missing its hinges. Or I guess, technically, the pins that go into the hinges. But no one ever goes into that closet anyway, because it’s piled so high with clothes and random detritus, like the karate trophy he won when he was 6 years old, that no one can find anything in there anyway.

It’s entirely possible that most of my missing bath towels are at the bottom of that closet, but I have no desire to mount an archaeological dig to go through it. I remember when his sister moved out last year, and I found seven pairs of scissors that had been lost for years. I kept insisting that they were in her room, and she kept insisting they were not. But when she left, gee, there they were. It was like the miracle at Lourdes.

When the kids were younger, it was always the towels that went missing. It was easy to tell when they were gone because you could actually see the bathroom floor.

Since we live in Southern California, the kids were regularly invited to go swimming at friends’ houses, after which they would come home without their towels. Sadly, since we don’t have a swimming pool, I never collected random free towels in return, so I had to actually go out and pay to replace them.

In a sad and fruitless attempt to fix the problem, I would take a permanent marker and write our names in HUGE LETTERS across the towel, hoping this would mean they would make their way home. Nope. Didn’t matter in the slightest. If you have one of our towels, I hope you’re enjoying it.

I actually resorted to buying big “hospitality industry” packages of white bath towels, like the kind you get at Motel 6 or the Days Inn, thinking that at least when they disappeared, they wouldn’t cost so much to replace.

But, of course, those towels never disappeared. Only my 100% Egyptian cotton jacquard bath sheets that I was given for Christmas went missing.

At one point, I even decided to color-coordinate the towels. The son was given gray towels. The daughter had blue ones. I had tan. “Now, you are only allowed to use your own color towel,” I told them sternly. “That way everyone will always have one available to use.”

Yeah, that lasted 15 minutes. Some of you are rolling your eyes and thinking that I just don’t have enough backbone to enforce my own rules. And you’re absolutely right.

But what was I going to do? Tackle my son when he walked out of the bathroom with the wrong color towel? That’s the problem with good ideas. In our house, they seldom work.

Meanwhile, I figured out a solution to my fork problem. I’m going to buy some new forks and keep them in my bedroom safe. Seriously. I’m not kidding. That way, I will always have a fork. And, if no one else does, well, that’s really not my problem.