Salad Bowl

I had a salad bowl I loved. Loved. There was nothing overtly special about it. Simple white porcelain. It was a wedding gift, and the givers of the bowl assumed it would be used for hospitality--bunches of purple grapes, perhaps, or dinner rolls hot from the oven. It could serve co-workers at a potluck or cousins on Thanksgiving. But instead it only served me. 

After the crunchy, curly hearts of romaine went in, there was plenty of room for the cherry tomatoes and half of a perfectly ripe avocado. Maybe a few olives. If, after that, I found myself slicing a sweet red pepper, there was room for that, too. The feta cheese could crumble its way down, followed by the sunflower seeds. When it was time for the Balsamic vinaigrette, there was still room in that blessed bowl for tossing with fearless abandon. The curve of the bowl kept everything tumbling back on itself until it was perfectly dressed. Heaven.

And then. When one of our children, who shall remain nameless and blameless, was five or six, he/she ran past the bowl when it was sitting at the edge of the table.

As I was picking up the pieces from the tile floor, I consoled myself with the thought that a bowl is replaceable. (I didn’t know, then, about the Japanese technique of kintsugi—using gold to repair ceramics, creating even greater beauty out of brokenness.) I would just get another one. 

I looked at the store where I thought our wedding guests had purchased the original bowl. I looked in my favorite kitchen store--two meandering floors with dishware of every color, iron skillets of every size, tea towels, copper cookie cutters, eight styles of measuring spoons, pepper grinders, egg slicers, and bowls of almost all shapes and sizes. Even salad bowls. But not my salad bowl.

I looked at my second-favorite kitchen store. I looked at department stores. I looked at Target and even (I know, I know) that other store. I didn’t care whether the new bowl looked like the old one, I just knew that when I saw it I’d know it was The One.

But somewhere along the way, I noticed I wasn’t looking for a salad bowl. I was looking for wholeness. I was looking for peace. I was looking for the feeling I thought I would get when I took the perfect bowl home and put it in the cabinet. Life would finally be complete. 

But I knew that wasn’t true. I would get the bowl, and I’d feel very pleased for a little while. But once there was contentment in the Salad Bowl Realm, it would begin to bother me more and more that I don’t have any decent black shoes to wear for occasional events like funerals. And if I found just the right shoes, it might start to become more and more unbearable that everyone I know seems to have a better phone than I do. And if I got the iPhone 47, I might feel that life was on the cusp of being perfect . . . just as soon as we could replace our older car that I cleared of snow one year with a snow shovel instead of a broom and made tiny scratches across the trunk that are starting to rust now. Maybe we’d pull together the money for the new car and have it sitting triumphantly in the driveway, and the new salad bowl would slip from my hands in the sink one evening.

So I haven’t replaced the salad bowl. I still look, just for the joy of it. Every so often I find one that would serve admirably. I pick it up, feel its weight in my hands, take in the ratio of depth to width, evaluate whether the curve of the bowl would make a spinach salad with sliced strawberries and toasted pecans into true poetry or not. And then I put it back on the shelf. If there’s a hole that thinks it can be filled by something out there—that believes wholeness will be achieved “as soon as I have . . .”—then I’d might as well be forever in need of a salad bowl and let the other things sit and wait like dominoes behind it.

(Example of kintsugi mending. Potter unknown. Photographer unknown.)