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Life Among the Hostiles
| Article
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14418 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
1,370 Words |
| Author
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Kathryn N. Hardin
Kathryn Hardin's humor articles first appeared nationwide
thirty years ago. This Arkansas grandmother draws on her
life, past and present, for her current anecdotes. |
We have a kitchen pantry that is so treacherous it makes the Bermuda Triangle look like the Blue Lagoon. For a while we wouldn't venture into it after dark, even for a roll of toilet paper.
It wasn't always that way. It started out with a docile, gentle disposition, but over the years it acquired a personality not unlike that of Attila the Hun. Finally it reached the point where we sustained an injury every time we went into it.
One Saturday morning, within the space of an hour, it had jabbed my husband in the ribs with a roll of heavy-duty aluminum foil, dropped a plastic thermos on my head, and slashed the ankles of our cleaning woman with a bundle of shish kebab skewers.
Then we declared war on it... but several days of battle were necessary to bring it to its knees, and it was a costly victory. Our cleaning woman suffered a severe case of battle fatigue and didn't come back to work for three weeks. After its surrender we lived in a state of uneasy truce, until our younger daughter lost her job and moved home. She stored some of her household goods in there and the next thing we knew, it was back to its old vindictive self.
Let's face it. We live in a hostile world. Man's inhumanity to man is bad enough, but for downright hatefulness nothing can compare with hostile inanimate objects. Even children are aware of the perverse nature of some of the things we are in daily contact with.
When I had lunch with my five-year-old niece one day, I heard her fork hit her teeth as she was eating and I asked if she had hurt herself.
"No," she replied seriously. "I was lucky. It was a friendly fork."
She knows already that there are friendly and unfriendly forks, and I've known a few unfriendly ones in my day. An arrogant antique silver fork pierced my bottom lip at a bridge luncheon, and a mean-spirited oyster fork scratched the roof of my mouth at a Chamber of Commerce banquet.
Unfriendly chairs
I've also known a few unfriendly chairs over the years. The Victorian rocker in our guest room crunched down on my heel and nearly hamstrung me. A beanbag chair in my
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