The knife is wrapped in aluminum foil when I receive it. I don’t know why. My grandmother had peculiar opinions on how to store things, how to transport things. Those opinions often involved obscene amounts of plastic wrap and foil. I’m used to this sort of thing. And this knife had come straight from her home. I unwrap the gift and ask no questions.
“Be careful,” she says to me. “It’s very sharp.”
I wield the blade with near reverence. It’s small with a black plastic handle. How small? You might imagine yourself cutting a carrot with it. Maybe an avocado. Certainly your finger, without proper caution. Not an onion though. It’s not big enough for that.
I treat that knife like an heirloom. I wonder with each cut what varied vegetables my grandmother sliced while wielding that same tiny blade in her own hand, in her own time. In which of her renowned recipes did this singular tool play a small part?
Months pass. I see my grandmother at a family event. “I’ve been careful with your knife,” I say. “It’s a good one.”
“What knife?” she asks.
I gasp inwardly. The knife, I want to yell. But outwardly, I’m calm, measured. Sharp. She’ll remember, with a little prodding, I’m sure. This is important.
“With the black handle,” I offer. “The little one.” It’s going to come back to her. My heirloom.
“From the casino?”
“What? No. The good knife.”
Hands on her hips, eyes narrowed. “That little black one? That’s from the casino. It was a freebie. We got it for —” She waves her hand about in a way that can only mean because of how much money we’ve spent there.
“But I thought it was special,” I say, wind rushing out of me like a sad balloon.
My grandmother shrugs. I keep it all the same. It slices up carrots nicely, after all.
And when my grandmother dies some years later, that knife continues doing what it’s always done. It rests quietly in the wooden block on my counter, waiting its turn to cut and carve.
I still hold it with an undue degree of reverence. Casino or no, it came from my grandmother. It was garbed in her pristine aluminum foil. It came wrapped in her warnings.
And it reminds me of her: of the sacrosanct meals she prepared in her tiny kitchen, protected from wayward red sauce by a well-worn apron, her own collection of cutlery clattering about in one of the few wooden drawers.
She never wielded my knife, never sliced a carrot with it. And yet, that nimble blade cuts through time all the same, reminding me of her, hands on hips, eyes narrowed.
I wonder about the meaning simple objects amass. I wonder about how their significance changes as life marches inevitably on. How is it that such an ordinary object with no discernible value when placed in my hand brings to mind my grandmother?
And, more importantly, how many of those similarly forgettable objects do we have lying about the recesses of our lives? Where do they transport us? Who do they call to mind?
What stories — nay, legends — have we thrust upon them? These silly little things that remind us, and only us, of moments greater than this. Of people long gone. Of hopes and dreams and possibilities.
But these ordinary objects must rest in our hands. I must hold that knife. For me, it conjures the ghost of my grandmother. For others, it’s a simple sharpened trinket from the casino. How quickly an heirloom tumbles into trash when not bound in the protective wrap of story.
