Spoon Girl

Laura told me this great story in an email and I thought I'd share:


A woman who I work with told me the other day I should just ask for a full-time position in the Justice Building.. as I have been there enough in these last few months that I might as well have one. And you know, I might just get it too. I mean, I am the only part-time employee there who even has a repore with the security guards. They call me the "spoon girl" because one time, in haste for leaving to the job (I always leave in haste to go there, mostly because Voter Reg lets me make my own hours and this makes me always feel late), I grabbed this giant silver serving spoon, which I mistook for a teaspoon, to eat my soup lunch with. Well, upon arriving to the building, which has a million steps and holds both the jail and the courts inside, you have to go through a security checkpoint. This is where anyone who has baked a cake with a nail file inside is arrested. Well, I throw my l.l.bean backpack through the x-ray machine and the security guard laughs outloud and says in a bellowing voice, "Is that your giant spoon?" For some reason he and the other men, all ranging in ages that featured gray hair, found this to be strange and alluring. Possibly in a world of fancy pens and spiral bound notebooks that they see pass through the gates, a spoon is like a fucking golden nugget. One of them even motioned for me to come behind the x-ray machine and view my bag with the spoon inside myself because he thought it looked so absurd in a sea of unidentifiable nonmetal shapes. Now when I come in these men make comments such as, "What's for lunch today?" or the classic, "If it isn't the one with the spoon!" It didn't help the matter that I forgot the spoon, post-soup, in my bag for the next three days in a row - always forgetting to take it out and wash it, its x-ray image now smeared with minestrone.