Say Hello To Our New Bakelite Flatware

I'm 33 years-old, soon to be 34 (get your gifts ready, we're talking 2/18), but no moment has made me feel older than the moment I found myself, on a Friday night, spending hours on E-Bay looking at flatware. "How did this happen?" I asked myself when I realized what I was doing. "I used to be a vital young person with my whole future ahead of me and now I'm comparing forks and knives on a computer screen when I could be out there shimmying to the sounds of hip young musicians like The Jonas Brothers!" After I calmed myself, though, I accepted my new role as senior citizen. In fact, sometimes I feel like my whole life has been barreling towards this moment. I grew up loving "The Golden Girls." I had more fun eating bagels with my grandmother, as a teenager, than going to concerts with my high school friends. Maybe searching for flatware on E-Bay on a Friday night has always been my destiny.

It was also a rite-of-passage: everyone who moves from their 20s into their 30s must upgrade their flatware from Ikea (which we'd been using up until this point) to something nicer. Usually that happens when you get married and you can register for a fancy set from Williams Sonoma. And though it's possible that Craig and I could get married in several states, neither of us has popped the question yet. Which is why I had to turn to E-Bay: my Ikea days were over, it was time to move up in the world.

I started by searching "vintage flatware," looking at old dusty, rusty forks and knives that were several thousand dollars. Then I looked at Parisian flatware, almost going in for a set of Laguiole forks and spoons that would perfectly match the steak knives Craig's parents bought us for Christmas. But then, on a whim, I searched "midcentury modern flatware"--or something to that effect--and boom! Like love at first site, I saw the flatware you see above. It's called Bakelite, which you probably know by its proper name: polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride.

I love the various colors and shapes of the handles--the Chicago Tribune refers to it as "kitchen jewelry"--and the fact that it's vintage American (it had its heyday in the 30s and 40s, when Bakelite was a new kind of plastic). So if all my youthful vitality has been squandered, at least now I have flatware with a youthful vitality all its own. And as I cut up my frozen Salisbury steaks while watching "Wheel of Fortune," I'll look at my flatware and remember what it was like to be young.