Object Lesson: A fork in the road
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Yogi Berra
The metal flashed over the asphalt, an easy-to-overlook glint like the pixie dust glitter that salts Los Angeles sidewalks. Had we been cocooned in a car, insulated from the city’s pulsing traffic arteries, I would have missed the twist of fate. But we were pedal-powered, bicycling toward some new adventure in a mostly-unknown Oregon city.
“Wait,” I insisted, halting the ride.
The boyfriend paused, knitting his brow in wonder.
He would have been justified to groan over what fits the folding bike, which seemed like a good idea until a 30+mile day trek, was giving me this time. Or to issue a firm giddyap, since I was, again, clogging the flow of progress.
Instead, he paused and watched while I backpedaled.
“Whatcha got?” he said as I grinned and scooped up my road-battered and tattered treasure.
“A fork!” I exclaimed and held it out for him to examine.
I liked the twisted and flattened look to it, which reminded me of pennies pressed over train tracks as a kid. Dad, who also passed on the art of making match guns out of clothespins and a rubber band, stopped his green MG near a Clovis, NM train track when I was a kid. A train’s whistle howled. Dad pressed a penny into my hand and showed me how to position it on the track. We retreated and waited for the clanking beast to rattle past. Then, track still warm, we fetched the penny.
The rumbling train had flattened and stretched the penny over its slick rails. The power that it took to smear the penny seemed, to me, unfathomable. Now, to my delight, I held a fork that had been morphed by a similar fate. Its head was bent to one side, tines flattened and drawn together at one end. It’s neck twisted like a crane’s. And it was pocked from the endurance test.
The boyfriend, amused by my amusement – and eagerness to fetch the fork – quipped the Yogi Berra line.
Then we both remembered Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”
Somehow, I don’t imagine that Frost had this fork in mind. Still, I took it.
-Christy
Filed under: Butterflies, Christy Lochrie, Object Lessons, art, conversation | Tagged: art, Fork, match gun, Object, Object Lessons, Robert Frost, Yogi Berra
