Anita Garner
The dog ate my favorite Tupperware bowl. Several times a week I reached for it – the biggest one Tupperware made – but it wasn’t there anymore and it hadn’t been there for years. That bowl could do everything. I had a sense memory of it and kept reaching for an imaginary replacement.
It was bigger than a breadbox, bigger than any of my cupboards, which is why it lived on top of the fridge. Then we got our sheepdog, Emily, who destroyed it. She ate my beloved Tupperware Jadeite Fix N Mix Bowl. My fault for putting leftovers on the patio for her in that bowl. She never outgrew the chewing stage, and how much of a challenge was a plastic bowl when this dog could chew a corner off the house?
I’m not the only person who’s a little bit crazy about my favorite Tupperware. My mother threatened to make my brother and me sign a contract before we could take home leftovers in one of her prized pieces.
So decades after Emily ate my bowl I still hadn’t replaced it, and one day I spotted a duplicate in a thrift shop in Mill Valley, California. This one isn’t the greenish color, but it’s identical in every other way. It’s now on top of my fridge where it belongs and when it’s not working, it holds bags of chips and snacks.
One Christmas, I wanted to get my granddaughter her own giant Tupperware bowl and fill it with cookie cutters, but when I glanced at the catalogs I found they’d changed. I didn’t wait to see if they were better, I just determined to find an old one. There they are on ebay under “vintage.” I bid on one in the original color and I lost, bid and lost, bid and lost, grew weary of the chase and finally gave up and overpaid in a “buy it now” column” and got one of the original Tupperware bowls in a mustard color.
Now my daughter and her daughter have their own behemoth bowl that doesn’t fit into any of the cupboards in their city apartment in. They’ll thank me later.
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