SUMMER BOWLS

The grocery stores around here are beginning to sell off their “summer bowls” for fifty cents or so. They only sold for a dollar in the first place. I’m talking about those pressed-plastic big mixing-sized bowls that are so handy for potato salad or ears of corn on picnics or at a big harvest table. They’re good for gathering bulky stuff from the garden -- carrots or squash -- and then good for the discarded pods or peelings when you carry them out to the compost. I use them to scrub or sort or snap or strip.

Most of them are round, imitations of the real mixing bowls of earthenware thrown on a wheel. When I really mix something like bread, I use a Pyrex bowl but in the past I’ve used stainless steel “spun” bowls that don’t break. Of course, the choice antique ones are wooden. I have one so big that it was hard to store, so I drilled a hole in the edge and hung it from a thong, Indian-style.

The ones I liked the best so far were distributed a couple of years ago: the clear ones tinted green and imprinted with fantasy lettuce leaves. I have a favorite one that is smooth but clear, tinted green, but it’s getting so many cracks in it that it’s not really even good for popcorn. The point of these bowls is for them to be so inexpensive that they can be discarded with no grief, but I get attached to the objects I use.

Some of this summer’s bowls are relatively shallow and have a pouring lip on one edge. I suppose they are more for liquids or maybe even for changing the oil in a car -- they’re about that size. I keep one full of water in my driveway and animals of many sorts come to drink, but mostly Crackers who seems to be marginally diabetic. This leads to the occasional cat/spat with Casper, the white cat with gray ears from across the street who is bigger and meaner and thinks he owns this whole end of town. There is almost always a “daddy-long-legs” drowned in the bottom of the bowl. One. Only one.

When I see photos of starving Africans, I see that the last possession many of them have -- after even the tattered t-shirts have disintegrated -- is a cheap bright plastic bowl or jug. Hunter/gatherer equipment, even when the food is relief rice arriving in sacks. More than ten thousand years ago it would have been a calabash gourd or maybe the stomach of an animal, blown up like a balloon so it dried hollow. I don’t see metal bowls -- maybe too heavy, maybe too hot, but one could cook in them. Maybe there is no fuel for cooking anyway, or maybe the mother is holding onto the metal pot.

They sell "summer tumblers" too and this year's was tall ones, clear with incised circles and double-walled for insulation. Last summer's were short, clear, intense blue or green with soft hobnail-type bumps on them so that they have a fascinating nubbly quality.

In the Fifties when aluminum was still new, cottage cheese came in aluminum tumbers colored metallic blue, green, rose. We collected enough for the family and used them at the supper table with the plates my mother had “hunter-gathered” on our trips across the US. Each plate was out of the same mold but commemorated a different state. I was surprised to see reproductions of these tumblers show up in that “Yankee” catalog of disappeared candy and original-formula Vicks. There must be nostalgia for them. In summer they were great for cold drinks.

Maybe years from now I’ll think of this summer and orange, yellow or bright green plastic bowls will pop into my head. There are always color-coded and related place-setting dishes to go with these bowls but I only buy the bowls. I have the idea that I might go to casting plaster and they would be perfect for that since they’re slick and flexible enough to crack the left-over plaster out afterwards. The amount they would hold would be just about right for a small bust or figure. When I think of the Scriver studio, one of the strong sense memories is the enameled washbowls we used for mixing plaster. The shallow white bowls with a red rim and a hole for hanging out on the porch by the pump.

Summer bowls are almost like eggshells: useful -- even arguably vital -- and yet ephemeral material culture, cheerful expendables like the foods they carry. The one on my kitchen counter right now has been collecting used coffee filters with the grounds still in them. When it’s full, I’ll tear up the filters and dump them along with the grounds in my flower beds where the alkali reading is a little too high. Good mulch. And I’ll enjoy swinging the empty bowl on the way back into the house.