IT'S GOTTA HOLD SOMETHING

On my dining room table is a bowl.  The one presently there is a crock bowl, glazed brown on the outside and cream on the inside, that my oldest sister gave me for my birthday some years ago.  You might think it an odd gift to give someone, a bowl, but not to me.  I love bowls with a bit of a fetish and an overly fond fascination.  My bowl collection has dwindled over the years from its peak since breaking a couple, giving a few to my daughter, moving, etc.  I swap out what I put in the middle of my table from time to time, but presently Jeanne's bowl presents well. 

The function of any bowl is to hold something, right?  If it didn't have a bottom or sides it would not have been designed to house various things like; soup, salad, tapioca pudding, cereal with milk, ice cream, jello.  Bowls serve us things at holidays and meals like; mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, gravy, glazed carrots. 

Bowls just seem more intimate than do plates.  You cradle a bowl in your hand and sometimes, if not eating at the table, actually lift the bowl closer to your mouth.  I just think bowls are far more appealing and beautifully displayed than are plates.  Plates are used to place things on - things that don't necessary splash, drip, melt, move, require a sidewall to help saddle a load on silverware or need space to be piled deep.

It seems since there is an unwritten design code of bowls - that they hold things - I utilize that in the middle of my dining room table as well.  That empty bowl beckons, by design, to be filled with something.  That something much of the time is an accumulation of papers and mail that needs to be filed.

I do my best on the weekend to file all mail, take care of that stack that has started on Jeanne's bowl in the center of the table.  It seems to no avail though as by Tuesday night the stack has reappeared.  They are new papers, new things that need to be taken care, filed or sorted through.

Every weekend I tell myself that the next week I will not stack things on that bowl.  That I will take care of the papers each day creates on that same day.  Every week I fail miserably at that goal. 

Today, as I looked at the bowl with a stack of mish mash papers relating to all different subject matters and purposes, I realized that my bowl is not the problem.  Though that bowl taunts me to be filled with something, that is not what is wrong.  Despite the fact that I am horrible at keeping up with the papers, that is not the problem either.  The problem is there are just too many papers that life creates every day.  No human can keep up with the onslaught much like Lucy from "I Love Lucy" couldn't keep up with boxing the chocolates as they came off the factory conveyor belt either.  Hopeless.