DUTCH'S SPOON
“At suppertime it was my job to set the table—we used Dutch’s dishes and his sturdy, plain utensils—and he was always there to help.”
When I was a boy, my mother’s father was my BFF. My earliest memories of him go back to 1963, when I was two and my family moved in with him after my grandmother died.
I called him Dutch. Everyone did. It was a signature name, like Elvis or Cher, because there was only one Dutch in Spencer, Massachusetts, and he was the chief of police. He picked me up in his cruiser after half-day morning kindergarten, and when we got to our street he’d put on the flashers and siren until we reached our driveway. Some days he had a bag lunch for me and we’d go to the station. If no one was in the lockup, he’d let me eat my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in a cell while he did paperwork at his desk.
At suppertime it was my job to set the table—we used Dutch’s dishes and his sturdy, plain utensils—and he was always there to help. He helped me in other ways too. Whatever meal my mother cooked, the vegetable was always mashed potatoes. That sounds like an exaggeration, I know, but that’s how I remember it. I hated mashed potatoes and pleaded with her not to give me any, but every night she’d slap a mound of them on my plate as she called my father and sisters to the table. One night, after she’d turned back to the stove, Dutch quickly took his spoon, scooped up my potatoes and ate them for me.
Of course my mother noticed at once.
“Who ate those potatoes?”
I stared at my plate, not wanting to tell the truth and get Dutch in trouble, or lie and get me in trouble. But Dutch knew a thing or two about interrogations. “Tim, you don’t have to answer that question,” he said. Then the arguing started. I wanted to run to Dutch’s side of the table and hug him.
Life went on, and the two of us continued having fun—playing checkers on the screened porch; nailing together lumberyard scraps to “make things”; Dutch driving fast around corners when we went to visit my cousins so I’d go sliding across the slippery vinyl backseat; Dutch asking me to pull his finger to help his farts come out, and me belly-laughing every time—which was every time—it worked.
Two months after my tenth birthday, Dutch died. He was in his bedroom getting dressed for breakfast. A “saint’s death,” they said: quick and unexpected. I sat in the yard sobbing, asking my mother why God couldn’t raise Dutch from the dead the way he raised Jesus.
Eight years later, while packing for college, I grabbed this old spoon of Dutch’s, one of the few that hadn’t been lost to the junkyard of time or replaced by a newer, shinier, gaudy-looking set. It has survived multiple moves, a marriage, four children and a divorce. I’m now in my mid-sixties and I still eat with it every day. If a visiting friend or a family member helps set the table and puts the spoon anywhere but at my place, I move it to its rightful location. In an invisible world only I can sense, Dutch is in his rightful location too, directly across from me, still my BFF, the two of us always first at the table.
—Timothy Loftus
Tim Loftus is a retired environmental chemist and a 2025 graduate of Bay Path University’s MFA program in creative nonfiction. He has published in Yankee Magazine, Boston Magazine, The Write Launch, Wanderlust Journal and londemere lit.
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Makes me choke up. So tender. My husband and I have begun listening to these over breakfast, an antidote to the news.
Love this-such a humble and important artifact, the spoon. Dutch came across so well in this piece.