The unexpected grief of losing a cheese slicer
Tony Bennett is gone. Dead since July 2023 after 96 years living on this planet.
What a stayer. Yet it’s a wonder the classy New York crooner managed that long.
Since 1962 he routinely used his safe and soothing baritone to remind us he’d left his heart in San Francisco.
But I know it’s possible to survive such cardiovascular-level forgetfulness. Over Easter I left my cheese slicer at a holiday home in Kuratau.
Even now, despite ordering two similar replacements and being aware of the impermanence of things and the significantly more serious issues I could be dealing with, I am grieving the loss of the slicer. I can’t explain it.
I had understood the risks of taking the slicer on holiday, but weighed it up against the convenience of beautifully sliced cheese and wrongly calculated it a risk worth taking.
The slicer, a 20cm long, plastic-handled device of exquisitely unassuming design, was a wedding gift.
It was an odd gift, we thought back in 2016. Until then I only had a vague notion cheese slicers even existed and had dismissed them as unnecessary in a world that had knives.
But over the years the slicer revealed itself as a gift of great value and thoughtfulness. It became an almost frictionless vector to everyday indulgence the family could not be without.
It was regularly pulled from the dishwasher mid-cycle, such was our frequent need for its infallible services.
It’s skill was that it effortlessly produced slice after slice of perfectly even cheese, relieving us of the knuckle and finger injuring risks of grating and knife slicing.
And so, our cheese consumption sky-rocketed.
With the slicer, having a piece of cheese was as easy as grinding salt or spreading butter.
It turned a block of Edam from a treat to be enjoyed when time allowed the use of a chopping board and knife, to a baseline expectation for any time of day.
In that respect the slicer was not doing us any good.
Despite my raised eyebrows of complete wonder and surprise when my doctor mentions the heart stopping qualities of too much cheese, I am well aware of its dangers.
I know, for instance, that it would be better to buy cheese in small 250g blocks rather than 1kg bricks to correctly reflect its proper place in an ideal food pyramid.
I am also well aware that a cheese and Marmite toastie is a quick and tasty work lunch, but the loss of cardiovascular health and reduced quality of life it could lead to negates any monetary savings.
Quality, I suspect, is at the heart of my grief over the loss of the slicer.
It was a simple thing and yet a thing of flawless function. It was made to last a lifetime, to be an ever present but undemanding partner for however long you needed it to be.
I admired it for that. Which made my leaving it in an Airbnb so far from home feel like I had let it down, along with the rest of the family.
Like Tony Bennett, it was an item of honest quality, you could always rely on it to do what it said it would do without too much flash, without too much hoopla.
And I have always been wary of hoopla, of flash. Slick hair, over the top confidence or impossibly perfect photos make me suspicious. They so often feel like a social sleight of hand.
I haven’t always managed to be genuine myself. I’m still prone to fall back on flash, on hoopla, when I am uncertain.
That’s even though I am old enough now to recognise being genuine is the most important thing a person can be.
Not just for the sake of themselves, but for everyone else.
We are at our best when we are our unvarnished selves, that’s obvious. But it’s also obvious there’s more varnish out there than ever.
Two weeks ago this column started in my head with a joke about Tony Bennett and an inexplicably deep hole left by the loss of a $20 kitchen implement.
Like so many other thoughts, I did not know where it would end.
It was a simple thing and yet a thing of flawless function. It was made to last a lifetime, to be an ever present but undemanding partner for however long you needed it to be.
Matt Rilkoff is the editor of the Taranaki Daily News.