Edith’s Paring Knife Dilemma

A Creative Workaround

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Topic: Thriving (6)

The pork chop refused her. Edith sawed at it with the dull table knife, the tines of her fork pressed flat against the meat. The chop slid politely across her plate as if it had somewhere better to be.

Around her, the dining room of Oakwood Senior Living hummed along: Harold tipped his soup bowl to his lips like a man drinking from a canteen. Marge gnawed a chicken thigh held in two hands.

In fact, the whole room was conducting itself with the easy manners of people who had decided, somewhere past 80, that society’s established guidelines of fine dining were no longer useful or necessary.

Edith had once taught three decades of grade school kids which fork to use for salads. She no longer remembered why it had seemed worth the trouble.

She set down the table knife, reached into her purse, and produced a small paring knife, folded in a sandwich bag she had wiped clean with a sanitizing wipe before dinner.

She had it halfway unwrapped when Darnell, the culinary director, appeared at her elbow with the particular smile of a young man about to deliver a policy.

“Edith,” he said, “I have to ask about the knife.”

“It’s mine,” Edith said. “I bring it for the pork. Your table knives are very nice for spreading butter and very poor for everything else.”

“We don’t allow steak knives at the tables. For safety.”

Edith looked at the paring knife, then at the chop that had bested three of her best teeth, then back at Darnell. “This isn’t a steak knife,” she said pleasantly. “And I’m 84. If I were going to do something rash with a blade, I’d have done it during faculty meetings.”

Darnell laughed before he could stop himself, then rearranged his face. “It’s a policy. Somebody could get hurt.”

“Somebody is getting hurt,” Edith pointed out. “Me. By the pork.”

But she rewrapped the knife and handed it over. She had learned in 30 years of teaching that you do not win a war by losing your composure at the first skirmish. She ate the green beans, which surrendered easily, and left the chop where it lay.

That night she did the thing she had taught her students to do whenever a rule seemed to have questionable value. She asked herself who the rule was actually for.

The policy, she suspected, was not really about her. It was about Al, who usually sat three tables over. His hands sometimes took unpredictable turns, due to Parkinson’s.

It was a rule written for the most fragile person in the building and then applied, flatly, to everyone — including a retired elementary teacher whose hands were steadier than a busboy’s.

That was the thing about getting old in a place built for older people, Edith thought. The rules were sized for the frailest within the group, as if frailty were the only thing the word old could mean.

The same logic that took her knife, she reasoned, could, given time, take her stairs, her stove, her front-door key, her say in her own bedtime — each one removed not because she could not manage it but because someone in some building somewhere once could not.

So the next morning she did not file a complaint. Complaints invited a committee, and a committee invited a form, and a form invited the lawyers who had started the whole thing.

Instead she invited Darnell “for coffee.”

“I’ve been thinking about your knife,” she told him. “You’re right that some people here shouldn’t have a blade at the table. I’m wrong in thinking that the rule is stupid. We’re both a little wrong, which usually means there’s a better answer underneath.”

Darnell, who appeared braced for a fight, set down his pen.

“What if the kitchen cut the meat?” Edith said. “Not for everyone. For anyone who asks. A quiet thing — a little card by the plate, the way you mark the salt-free trays. Then nobody has to announce to the room that the pork won. And nobody has to smuggle in a paring knife like contraband.”

It was, she pointed out, less work than confiscating cutlery and far less work than a lawsuit. Darnell said he’d take it to the director. Three weeks later a small line appeared at the bottom of the dinner menu: “Ask your server if you’d like any item cut in the kitchen.”

No fuss, no announcement. Harold still drank his soup from the bowl. Marge still used her hands. And Edith ate her pork chop with the regular table knife, because the kitchen had already done the hard part, and the knife only had to manage the easy.

She kept the paring knife in her purse anyway. Not for the pork. For the principle — that a sharp thing, handled by someone who knows how, is not a danger but a tool, and that the trick of aging well is to keep being trusted with your own tools for exactly as long as you can still use them.

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Jim Hasse, ABC, GCDF retired, author of “52 Shades of Growing Together”
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