The Institute

The Institute-2

Ralph held the bowl even closer.

“Hey,” said Penelope. “Look at it on your own time. There’s a dinner at stake here.”

“Oh, right,” said Ralph. He tossed the bowl aside and kept digging. I went to the box of spoons and took out a fresh one. I saw that there were only about five left.

“I don’t think we brought enough spoons,” I said.

“We could make a new rule,” said Naomi. “We work until all the spoons are broken.”

“Wouldn’t that mean it would be to a team’s advantage to purposely break spoons if they were ahead in the digging?” said Naomi.

“What’s wrong with that?” said Penelope.

“It changes the nature of the competition,” said Grant. “Which we could do if we were all in favor of it. Although I’m guessing none of us would be.”

He looked around at every face. We were a mess. Dirt on our knees, hair unkempt, sweat on our brows, and foreheads. We had all ruined clothes. For some of us that didn’t matter since our clothes were rather shabby to begin with. I’m thinking of my team, mostly. We were creative types, after all, used to wearing funky clothes and thrift store bargains.

The suits team, on the other hand, they were dressed much more expensively. I was sure that they didn’t want to do this in their nice clothes, but the idea only came to me this morning. Naomi, as administrator, has always recommended that the suits go along with whatever the creatives come up with. Barring, of course, overt criminal or antisocial acts which might get the institute into trouble. Her philosophy was that the institute exists to make the creatives happy, and everyone should do whatever it takes to make the creatives happy. After all, our thoughts and ideas are the product of the institute.

“Grant’s right,” said Naomi. “We don’t want to change things in the middle of it.”

“Oh Naomi,” said Ralph. “You would accept the moon being made of cat brains if Grant said it.”

Naomi put down her spoon. “Excuse me,” she said.

“I’m just saying,” said Ralph. “You know it and I know it. We all know that whatever the slobs say, you will go along with it.”

“Slobs?” said Sylvia. “We’re slobs?”

Ralph turned red. You could actually see his face melt into panic. “Not you,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean you.”

Naomi laughed. “And what if Sylvia said the moon was made of cat brains?”

Ralph turned redder. An uncomfortable silence descended on the scene. It didn’t look like anyone was about to rescue Ralph. I thought about it, but then decided the entertainment value that would be lost was not worth it. Ralph finally came to a semblance of dignity, bent his head, and began scooping out dirt from the hole.

Grant had an amused look on his face. Naomi and Sylvia looked frustrated and ready to toss in their spoons. I wouldn’t have blamed them. I was ready to do the same. This was not turning out to be one of my more inspired ideas.

We all worked quietly for a few minutes. Eventually a pleasant blending of scraping noises filled the air. Grant cleared his throat. “I looked into the history of spoons just before we began this,” he said.

No one answered.

“I discovered a few things.” He left the statement hanging in the air like bait. None of us wanted to get hooked on that particular line.

“I could tell you about them, if you wanted to hear them.”

Naomi coughed.

“Okay,” said Grant. “I thought you’d never ask. I found out that they have been made of all kinds of things. Wood, originally. In fact the word is actually old English meaning chip or splinter of wood from a larger piece. But they have been made of shell, ivory, flint, slate, bronze, silver, horn, brass, pewter, and latten.”

“What’s latten?” said Penelope.

“It’s an alloy of zinc and copper.”

“You forgot plastic,” said Penelope.

“Of course,” said Grant. “Plastic. Wooden spoons were considered so useless after other material came in that Cambridge professors used to award wooden spoons to those students who got the lowest grades.”

“Oh,” said Sylvia. “That’s just cruel.”

Grant nodded. “Silver spoons were a mark of prosperity. They became very important for a while. Almost a measure of your wealth.”

“Don’t forget spooning,” said Penelope. “I love spooning.”

“Right,” said Grant. “The term is used for all kinds of things.”

“Greasy spoon,” I said.

“There’s playing spoons,” said Naomi. “I heard someone play the spoons once, they were incredible. I never knew it could be such a beautiful instrument.”

“People like to put spoons on their noses,” said Grant. “It makes them feel silly in a good way.”

Ralph stopped digging and looked at his spoon. He wiped off the dirt and applied it to his nose. It hung there for a split second, then dropped to the ground.

“Try breathing on it,” said Sylvia.

Ralph picked up the spoon, and held it front of his mouth and slowly expelled a puff of air on it. He put the spoon back on his nose. This time it held.

Everyone clapped politely. Then we all wiped off our spoons, breathed on them and put them on our noses. We looked at each other, grinning.

“Why is this so much fun?” said Penelope.

“Don’t ask why,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Everything matters,” said Naomi. “Everything.”

The spoons began dropping from our noses. We picked them up and returned to our digging. A kind of seriousness seemed to descend on our group. The grins were gone. The good feelings were evaporating, as though the spoons on the noses interlude used up all of our humor. Grant glanced at me with an expression that seemed to ask What happened? I didn’t know what happened.

“I like to spoon jam out of a jar,” I said. “Standing at the fridge, with the door open. Just spoon up a big helping and swallow it down.”

No one followed up on that. I sighed.

“Ever notice how a word loses its meaning after you say it a lot?” said Sylvia. “Spoon spoon spoon spoon. It’s just a noise to me now. I can hardly make it mean what it’s supposed to mean. My brain won’t do the work.”

“Spoon spoon spoon spoon,” I said. “Huh.”

Penelope repeated spoon several times. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s like your brain gets tired.”

Ralph threw down his spoon. “I’ll tell you what’s getting tired,” he said. “This. This is stupid. I’m done.”

“No,” said Naomi. “You can’t quit now. We’re winning.”

I looked at the holes and the piles of dirt. She was right. The suits were winning. “If Ralph wants to quit,” I said. “It’s his right. We shouldn’t make him stay against his will.”

“Easy for you to say,” said Naomi, “your team is putting in a poor showing. If we went down to only two diggers, you’d probably start winning.”

Ralph was sprawled out on the ground, with his pile of dirt next to him.

“Hey Ralph,” said Grant. “Can I have our spoon?”

Ralph waved his hand dismissively. “Go ahead,” he said, and tossed it towards Grant.

“What a minute,” said Naomi. “That’s our spoon. You can’t have it.”

“Ralph gave it to me,” said Grant.

“But Ralph is on our team. He can’t just give away our team’s equipment.”

“Nope,” said Grant. “Ralph isn’t on anyone’s team. He quit. Therefore he is a free agent, as is his spoon.”

“No way,” said Penelope. “Naomi is right. The spoon belongs to our team and the other team can’t have it.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Grant. He reached for the spoon on the ground and picked it up. “I’ve got it. Possession is nine tenths of the law.”

“I’ve always wondered what that meant,” said Sylvia. “Surely it can’t mean that if you have something in your possession, there is a ninety percent probability that you own it.”

“Actually,” I said, “that’s probably about right. I suspect that only about ten percent of objects are ever in a state of being stolen at any one time.”

“You have no basis for that statement,” said Ralph, languidly, from his base on the ground.

“Just a gut feeling,” I said.

“Gut feelings are not arguments.”

“But I’m often right about these things.”

“Everyone is right about their gut feelings some of the time, but you don’t use them as a basis for reliable predictions of reality.”

“Bring it back to the present, boys,” said Penelope. “The spoon. We should retain the spoon.”

“I think we should distribute the remaining spoons evenly between the two teams,” said Grant. “That’s the fair way.”

“An excellent idea,” I said. “Does everyone agree?”

“What about Ralph’s spoon?” said Naomi.

“We’ll deal with that after we have distributed the remaining spoons.”

Naomi seemed doubtful but murmurs of assent arose from everyone else, including Ralph, who, it seemed, was beginning to revive his interest some. He tilted his head up for a better view of everyone and held it there with his hands interlaced at the base of his skull.

Naomi got the box and counted. “There are eight here,” she said. “Four each.” She handed four to me and kept four for herself.

“There,” I said. “Now that each team has their own spoons, there is incentive to take care of them and try to keep them from breaking.”

“Hear hear,” said Ralph. “Possession is nine tenths of responsibility.”

“Wait,” said Penelope. “There’s still the question of Ralph’s spoon.”

“Uh uh uh,” said Grant. “I believe you are referring to my spoon.”

“That has not been determined,” said Penelope. “It’s still an open question, although we have the greater claim.”

“Not to me,” said Grant. “Possession, remember?”

“I always thought that saying about nine tenths had more to do with the number of laws,” said Ralph.

We turned to him. “Do tell,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Ralph. “I bet if you categorized all the laws in the world by what they addressed, like ownership, assault, killing, buying, selling, contracts, wills, speeding, and so on, I think you’d find that ninety percent of them would have to do with the ins and outs of possession. Stuff. Who owns what, under what circumstances, and for how long and so on.”

Grant nodded. “The man makes a good point. I bet almost all law is about possession.”

“Enough with the abstract theorizing,” said Penelope. “That spoon is ours. Hand it over.”

“Let’s be fair about this,” said Grant. “I claim the right to possess this object. You claim the right to possess this object.” He took the spoon between his fingers, held it up for all to see plainly, and coolly snapped it in two.

Sylvia laughed. Ralph clapped his hands. Penelope and Naomi shook their heads. I didn’t know what to say. My team member had done a completely unsportsmanlike thing.

“Grant,” I said. “I expected better from you.”

“My rebel streak,” said Grant. “It comes out at odd times.”

“You wouldn’t have broken it like that if you thought you had a legitimate claim to it,” said Naomi.

“Rebels do crazy things,” said Grant.

Naomi wanted to press her point. “Just admit it,” she said. “You destroyed it because you couldn’t own it. At least not legally. Thieves are much less likely to care about objects they steal than the people they stole it from.”

Ralph held up his hand. “I would have broken it,” he said.

“Ralph,” said Naomi, “you’re not helping. And you’re not on this team anymore.”

“I can still have an opinion,” said Ralph. He had apparently grown tired of supporting his head, since his hands were now at his sides and his head rested on the ground so he appeared to be talking to the sky.

Penelope had returned to digging, as had Sylvia. They were both industriously piling up dirt and making their holes bigger by the second while the rest of us were waylaid on this side issue.

“No matter what Ralph says,” said Naomi, “we have a legitimate claim to that broken spoon.”

“It’s all yours,” said Grant. “I’ll even let you have our half, just to show you there are no hard feelings.”

“An intact spoon,” said Naomi. “You need to hand over one of your good spoons.”

“Now wait a second,” I said. “No one has established anything yet, much less a claim to one of our intact and unused spoons.”

“We can consider it a punishment for destroying property,” said Naomi. “Grant needs to pay some kind of restitution for purposely destroying a spoon which did not belong to him.”

“The question of possession is still undetermined,” I said.

“Not to me it isn’t.”

“You know why I came to this?” said Ralph.

We looked at him. “No,” said Naomi. Irritation dripped from her voice.

“I thought Sylvia and I could work in close proximity and I could ask her out.”

Sylvia, who had been scraping along patiently and industriously, stopped for a second without looking up. The absence of sound was unnerving. We were all embarrassed for her and for Ralph. Then she resumed her scraping.

I glanced at Grant. His eyes were wide, but he said nothing. Did that mean it was up to me to guide the discussion back to things that didn’t matter, like the spoons?

“Be that as it may,” I said, “the issue at hand is who is entitled to our spoon? Our good spoon. Not the one that Ralph had been using and scraping up and turning into something second hand.”

“Oh stop it,” said Naomi. “A used spoon works just as well in this enterprise as a new spoon. They are completely equivalent.”

“Are they?” said Grant. “A used spoon is likely to have a weakened shaft and be more likely to break.”