The Man With Two Forks

In the sometimes minimalist world of men who live alone, Clark Memminger probably isn’t too much out of the ordinary in a lot of ways.

Clark is a confirmed bachelor, a status that he and every woman he has ever met seem determined to perpetuate.

Not that he’s complaining. At 57 he has pretty much come to grips with the fact that he’s never going to get married. There are worse fates he reasoned, like having a giant wart growing on the end of your nose or not having cable TV.

So Clark happily exists in a house that he sees no urgency to clean, with underwear lying around that he has no real calling to pick up, with a toilet seat that is pretty much perpetually up, with a toothpaste tube squeezed in the middle, and with a stick of butter in his butter dish gouged out instead of neatly cut on its end.

But even this man so satisfied with being out of the mainstream had something he preferred no one else knew. It seems Clark only owns two forks.

This was something he wasn’t proud of. Even Clark knew that you don’t enhance your stature by anyone’s standards when you reveal that you only own two forks. Unless of course that person has only one fork, and we can be at least fairly certain there aren’t too many of those folks around.

It’s a pretty safe bet no prospective employer is going to say, “Mr. Memminger, I see on your resume here that you own only two forks. I find that fascinating. Please tell me more.”

A way to impress women? “Clark darling, I love you more than any man in the world. I’m the luckiest woman in the word to have found you, and to think you only own two forks too.”

And it makes it impossible to have a good dinner party: “Okay Al, you and Len eat first, and when you’re done, Lou and Jack, it.ll be your turn.”

How Clark came to this point has never been pinpointed. He claims he at one point in life had a respectable amount of forks, but over the years that number has somehow dwindled to the current pair.

It was this shortcoming that probably had as much as anything to do with the perpetually-looking-for-work Clark losing his job as a salesman in a store that sold dishes. A man who lives in a virtual flatware wasteland had found himself selling flatware.

Of course, he probably didn’t help himself when he admitted to a customer he had no idea that silverware was also called flatware. And when he expressed astonishment to the store manager that there were forks made just for eating desert, even Clark knew the jig was just about up.

So they let him go, and Clark returned to his home and his life with two forks.

And he continues to answer to pretty much no one but himself.

A lot of people would take that along with two forks any day.