Born with a Silver Spork
By: Judy Mclain
Tags: 233, The Weekly Knob, Fiction, Bullying, Suffering

Eliza Josephs — savior.

photo by author

She may have been born a child of privilege but she never exhibited even an ounce of entitlement. Her nature was sweet and pure, kind and empathetic.

She was not a healthy baby and in addition to some issues with her stomach she also had a cleft palate which required surgery to repair. Her surgeon did her best but Eliza’s cleft was deep and she was left with a significant scar at the midsection of her upper lip. When she smiled the upturned corners of her mouth made two parallel lines, the scar a third.

Thus, when Eliza smiled, the area under her nose looked like it had been smacked with a spork.

She was beautiful, nevertheless.

Eliza’s father, Benry Josephs was the inventor of the spork. He marketed his novel approach to plastic take-out-restaurant flatware by manufacturing the first quarter million spork prototypes and donating them to Kentucky Fried Chicken to try out as a part of their boxed chicken lunches and dinners. Each dinner came with a small cup of mashed potatoes and gravy. The spork proved to be the perfect tool for eating the mashed potatoes and gravy. People were reluctant to use a spoon, like a baby might, and the spork made them feel less infantile while at the same time allowing them to enjoy the gravy while they ate their potatoes.

You can’t get much gravy onto the tines of a fork.

The new fangled eating utensil was an immediate success. Even more than for its novel utility, fans of the spork were charmed by its name. It made such perfect sense. Part spoon, part fork. What a fork can’t do the spoon can.

And visa-versa.

People didn’t know that Benry, in naming the spork, was following a precedent set by his great-great grandmother who, in order to honor both hers and her husband’s families, named her children with a combination of names from both families.

Benry was named after his maternal great-great-great grandfather Benjamin and his paternal great-great-great grandfather Henry. Benry considered naming his daughter with a similar sort of name such as Jacquelary or Marilydia but after he invented the spork and named it the desire to create mash-up names subsided.

And also, it should be noted that Eliza’s mother wouldn’t allow her husband to give her some sort of name nobody ever heard of.

Because of her facial differences, Eliza was teased by bullies as a child but her patience with their taunting often caught them off guard. She never let them see that they upset her. Instead, she smiled and nodded, maybe looked at her hands or picked some lint off of her blouse to gain placid composure, then looked them square in the eye and blinked. There was something mesmerizing about her eyes.

The ability to make a son-of-a-bitch feel like he’d gone too far was one of her many gifts. When you think of it, what really is more awe inspiring than changing the mindset of a bully? Without any sort of magic, utilizing only her sincerity and her smile, Eliza moved people.

There was a side effect to Eliza’s changing of hearts and minds. The people she affected revered her. She didn’t want the adoration but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

She knew, intuitively, that a bully doesn’t want to bully. They only want unconditional love. Once she gave them this love they wanted to be around her as much as possible.

Often Eliza would find a long line of men waiting for her when she left her home. She had a little dog named Ladybug, a chihuahua crossed with a French Poodle, all black except for her four white paws. When she stepped out to take Ladybug for a walk each morning, there were many who had previously teased her and called her Spork Face, on their tiptoes, waiting to witness Ladybug and Eliza descending her front steps. Each waited to see what they could do to help her. They would wait for hours in hopes of being closest to Ladybug when she did her business, hoping upon hope to have the honor of bagging up the dog’s tiny poops.

Some of the men brought large overcoats with them in case there were puddles in their path. He would lay the overcoat over the puddle for Eliza to walk on.

The first time Eliza saw one of the men do this for her she asked him what on earth he was doing.

“I saw this in a cartoon once. We can’t have you getting wet feet, mi’lady.”

Behavior like this only made Eliza want to do something more for her admirers.

She was an extraordinarily giving person.

She wanted the people who followed her to be giving too. Since these folks started out being bullies she felt like she would have to be very clever to really change their inclinations.

Was her smile really enough?

She called her father and asked him if she could make minor changes to his spork design. Working with Wallace Silversmiths she came up with a spork featuring her favorite silver pattern, Wallace’s Grand Baroque.

There is no more elaborate pattern made by Wallace. The sporks were dazzling!

She pre-paid Wallace for fifty sterling silver sporks, each in their own velvety blue presentation bag, the kind that keeps silver from tarnishing. Each of the bags were boxed and Eliza presented them to those who previously bullied her and then later did something kind. Inside the lid of the box was a folded paper with the following message:

You have been presented with this sterling silver spork for committing an act of kindness towards me. When I was a baby I had a birth defect repaired which resulted in my face looking like I slept on a spork. What you might not know is that my father, Benry Josephs, was the inventor of the spork. I used to think I had this facial deformity because my father and I were being punished due to the riches he gained from his simple invention. I was wrong about being punished. I was simply born the way I was born. I think you, the recipient of this special spork, have had something standing in your way too. I’ve learned that my face isn’t who I am. I want you to learn that you don’t have to follow your inclination to be cruel to others. Please pass this spork along to someone who might need it. It’s worth about $100.00. Maybe the person you give it to will be able to sell it and use the money for something they need. You might be thinking I could just give you the $100.00 to pass along. I could but I think it is more meaningful to have you think of how you teased me over something I had no control of. Be sure to remember I forgave you because I knew you. Be kind to others, be gentle with yourself.

It made Eliza sad when she found out that about sixty percent of the spork recipients didn’t pass them on. Some even used them to eat with. Some sold them and kept the $100.00 for themselves or used it to buy something they wanted. Sometimes what they wanted wasn’t so great for them. Eliza understood their human frailty but she was so optimistic it always came as a surprise to her when they didn’t do the right thing.

Sometimes, after reading her note, the person receiving the spork gift would ask her why she didn’t preach her message to the masses. Some offered to put her on stage with a microphone and to bring in thousands of people. Eliza preferred to keep living her life and touching one person at a time. She was changing roughly 40% of those who teased her.

It wasn’t a bad turn around.

Above is an easy link to another piece of my fiction. I hope you’ll give it a read.