What are my grandma's souvenir spoons trying to tell me?
What was she hiding?
Spooning for the truth
When my grandmother passed away 13 years ago, I inherited dozens of collectible spoons.1 I assume she amassed most of her spoon souvenirs over decades of traveling across the country, perhaps on family roadtrips, or getaways with her husband.
Or perhaps… it was something else entirely.
As such, my grandma’s spoon collection represents a cryptic record of her enigmatic adventures. Maybe for her, a little silver spoon from Mississippi was a sly confession to a second life. I wish I knew. I’d ask her if I could. I’d ask her what she was trying to hide. Alas, all I have are the spoons.
These spoons had been sitting in storage at my parents’ house, but recently I was able to relocate them to Ryan Email Club’s corporate headquarters in Seattle. There are tentative plans to display select spoons in a permanent exhibition in the art gallery/room where I smush pretzels into my face hole and binge-watch “Geography by
” videos on YouTube.2Because the REC is now in possession of these enviable relics, I think we should open the spoon vault and decipher my grandmother’s latent history. Let’s take a look!
“Seven Falls”
mfg. in Japan (year unknown)
The little crest on this spoon’s handle says “Seven Falls” and features a crude illustration of what is clearly just one waterfall. I guess spoon technology was limited in its capacity to depict multiple waterfalls, though evidently trees were no problem. In fact, I count nine trees. This spoon would more accurately say “Nine Trees.”
The internet says Seven Falls is a place in Colorado. It’s billed as “Colorado’s Most Majestic Waterfall.” Sounds like the perfect venue for a clandestine rendezvous with a secret confidant. But who?
“Illinois”
mfg. in Japan (year unknown)
My grandmother lived most of her adult life in Illinois, so this spoon is obviously meant to throw us off the scent. Having been born in Illinois myself, I know everything there is to know about the “Land of Lincoln.” So it flusters me that I don’t recognize this lustrous man in the field of blue.
Who is this bearded stranger? Did he know my grandmother? Was this spoon an expression of his romantic advances? Surely my grandmother, a mated woman, was immune to such dalliances. Or was she?
“West Virginia”
mfg. in United States (year unknown)
My grandma managed to gather spoons honoring a majority of America’s 50 states. Each one features slogans or imagery that best emblematize the state. So naturally, this West Virginia spoon features a shitfaced bumpkin passed out next to a jug of moonshine.
I find it hard to believe this is an image with which West Virginia wants to be associated. So again, I must infer a personal significance here. Was my grandmother, unbeknownst to her closest friends and family, engaged in a lucrative cross-country bootlegging operation in partnership with a romantically-interested desperado? The evidence, while indistinct, is difficult to ignore.
“Gen. Jackson”
mfg. unknown (year unknown)
This is a spoon of a different sort. The handle’s raised insignia renders a riverboat of some kind — likely the sleek watercraft my grandma used to smuggle hooch across state lines. Gen. Jackson is a peculiar name for a boat because it’s presumably the name of a man, and everyone knows that boats are ladies.
But wait. Maybe Gen. Jackson is a lady. Maybe the namesake of my grandma’s brew cruiser was her quixotic partner in crime: a bearded woman named Gen. Jackson. My god. What if my grandmother fell in cahoots with a bearded lady and they became rotgut river runners?! The more I look at these spoons, the more it all makes sense.
“McDonald’s”
mfg. in United States (circa 1970s)
At first I thought this was just a random coffee stirrer from McDonald’s accidentally stowed away with my grandmother’s spoon collection. But according to a Facebook post from the DEA Museum, these were discontinued because they were “ideal for inhaling cocaine.”3
Obviously my grandmother’s booming booze bussing business led her into a tailspin of dangerous excess. In the early days, she and Gen. Jackson looked down on the giggle-juice guzzlers they so skillfully exploited. They rationalized that they must be better than the lot of them, by wiles or by nature, and that’s why she and GJ are up high and the rest are down low.
You see, there are two types of people in this world: There are the needy, and then there are the needed. And my grandma, oh she liked to be needed. It didn’t matter what the need was. She had something people needed, and she brought it to them. And the more she brought it, the more they needed it — the more they needed her. Gen. Jackson was the only other person in the world who understood this about my grandma. She sensed her unquenchable thirst for power, and she enabled it because she was enraptured by the personage it conjured. Their shared rush of ascendancy felt like a fingertip’s brush away from divinity, and the only thing that could bring them close enough to grasp the almighty’s ethereal fringes was another coke bump from the McDonald’s coffee stirring spoon. Little did they know, reaching so high would merely make the fall that much deeper.
“Niagara Falls”
mfg. unknown (year unknown)
As far as Gen. Jackson knew, this was going to be a routine drop in Buffalo. But as my grandma steered the steam vessel past port and into the mouth of the Niagara River, GJ nervously stroked her beard.
“What about Buffalo?” she asked.
“Forget Buffalo,” my grandma replied. “We have a new drop to make.” Her face was stony and unpersuadable.
“A new drop? Where?”
My grandma didn’t reply. She pushed the control handle to full speed.
GJ’s heart was racing. “Snoggy, where are you taking us?”
“This has to end,” my grandma said, picking up her McDonald’s coffee spoon and snorting a perfectly scooped mound of pure cocaine. “Now.”
As the riverboat approached the foreboding roar of the falls, my grandma sprung from the helm and leapt over the starboard railing. GJ gasped. She ran over to the side of the ship and looked down. My grandma had landed in the vessel’s only lifeboat, and was already untethered and drifting toward the shore.
“I’m sorry Gen. Jackson,” my grandma wailed through the cutting wind and mist, “I really mean it. I never meant for any of this to happen. I apologize a trillion times. I need my life back. I need to go back to Illinois and raise my boys the right way, so that one day one of those boys can raise a son who writes a weekly newsletter for his friends that basically wastes their time. I hope you’ll understand.”
My grandma revved the lifeboat’s motor and sped away. Gen. Jackson turned her frantic gaze to the inescapable abyss.
Safely ashore, my grandma hoofed away from the scene of her betrayal. Along the way, she happened upon a small trinket shop. She furtively poked inside. Something caught her eye, something she couldn’t pass up.
“How much for this souvenir spoon?” she asked the store clerk.
“Adair, Iowa”
mfg. United States (year unknown)
I think my grandma probably just bought this at a truck stop off I-80.
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