Off the Grid: The mystery of the tiny gasket
Sunday mornings in my house are sacred. I do not like them interrupted by anything but the percolating of coffee. While my family sleeps in, I make myself a single cup of coffee with an exact amount of cream. I give my dogs a stern look that sends them back to bed. Then I fill line after undisturbed line in my journal. Usually about how much I love coffee.
But last Sunday, something was out of place. As I was shuffling about in an obnoxiously pink, fluffy robe, I found the tiniest little black gasket sitting on the counter.
“Odd,” I thought, “I wonder what this belongs to.”
I started checking the nearby appliances for missing parts. Maybe it belonged to my prize blender. Or the brand new coffee mill we just had to buy.
This reminded me of how resentful I was of the new coffee mill. I had a perfectly good coffee mill for years – a beautiful, heavy piece of machinery built to last decades. I loved it almost as much as coffee until one day the dense whir noise it makes suddenly became an irritating buzz.
It seemed reasonable to think that a part could break after only a decade and a half. The mill was disassembled, the cogs assessed, and after much research on The Source of All Things, it was discovered that this small part could not be replaced. For nearly the same price I paid, however, (plus inflation, fuel surcharge, delivery), I could buy the new model, which only weighs half as much and is mostly plastic.
The new model has lights and timers and settings and cup sizes and a bunch of ridiculous “features” that have no business associating with my morning cup of coffee. Now I’d probably have to replace the mixer or the blender with some shiny piece of mechanical trash, too.
Growing more irritated by the minute, I set the tiny gasket in a tiny bowl on the window sill so it wouldn’t get lost. I was tempted to throw it away, but once I threw away a screw that had been sitting on the sill for 37 months. It looked just like other screws I find around. The day after I threw it away, my husband came into the kitchen.
“Have you seen a screw?”
“Nope.”
“Weird. I special-ordered a screw that had to be hand-forged by a craftsman in Germany with a particular machine that uses a kind of alloy sourced from a mine in the Alps that has since collapsed and I am sure I set it right here.”
“Yeah? Weird. It’s likely there somewhere, keep looking.”
I have never seen that sill so clean.
Probably that blasted screw was the essential part in a thousands-of-dollars whirry-tool that is now defunct. Now we are single-handedly responsible for stuffing an entire landfill with our fancy appliances that look good but don’t work anymore (I’m talking to you, KitchenAid).
I looked over at the mystery gasket on the window sill, wrote a paragraph about my guilt at being a poor recycler, then returned to rummaging through machinery to find the home of the little black ring.
I realize it is difficult to not leave an impact on this planet, but I would at least like to try to do more good than harm. Clearly, it is time for me to ban single-use plastics (I don’t even know if we consume them or in what form), find a small-motors mechanic who can make new cogs (a craftsman in Germany, his name is Hans, he makes watches on the weekends), and do much more by hand. If I ground my coffee by hand, maybe I’d be less wound up about errant gaskets floating around my kitchen.
By then, my pen was leaving deep grooves in my journal as I contemplated the red marks in my karmic ledger. I decided I should eat some breakfast. I wandered over to the fridge and was pilfering through some leftovers, when, out of the corner of my eye, right next to the mozzarella and the pizza sauce, I saw an entire container full of little tiny black gaskets.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammimarie@gmail.com