Proof
Pepper Scott
Do you know Corelle dinnerware? Terry did. He liked it for all the sensible reasons a man in a powerchair might like dishes. They were light. Easy to handle. And, according to the writing on the back, they were supposed to be nearly indestructible.
Break & Chip Resistant.
Those were the words.
I remember looking at the back of one of the bowls and saying, “Wow. They must be pretty confident to actually print that on their products. Must be true.”
Terry just laughed.
He had a healthy appreciation for proof. He was not the sort of person to simply accept that something was true because somebody had printed it on a package, put it in an advertisement, or said it with great confidence. He wanted evidence.
One day, he got some.
We were getting ready to leave the house for a date with friends. We were dressed, organized, and almost out the door when Terry suddenly called out, “Honey, look!”
I turned around.
And there he was, holding one of our supposedly Break & Chip Resistant Corelle bowls.
I barely had time to wonder what he was about to do before he casually dropped it onto the floor.
It exploded.
Not broke.
Not chipped.
Exploded.
Thousands of tiny pieces scattered across the floor as if the bowl had been secretly waiting all its life for its moment to become confetti.
Terry could not move.
I could not move.
For one second, we just stared at the evidence.
Then the problem became immediately apparent. Terry was sitting in his powerchair, surrounded by a sea of broken Corelle, and if we wanted to go anywhere that evening, I had to clean up every last piece.
Otherwise, his tires were going to have a very bad night.
And so, our romantic evening with friends began with me crawling around the floor, hunting for microscopic shards of the very bowl that had promised, in writing, that it was Break & Chip Resistant.
Terry, meanwhile, was delighted.
He had proof.
For days afterward, he could barely mention the incident without laughing. Every time I looked at the bowl cabinet, I could almost hear him saying, “Honey, look!”
And then, of course, came the inevitable question.
“Do you suppose they meant resistant in a very technical sense?”
Because Terry would have appreciated that.
Maybe the bowl had resisted breaking for a few seconds.
Maybe it had put up a valiant fight.
Maybe it had considered its options before dramatically surrendering to the floor.
Whatever the explanation, it certainly had not lived up to the spirit of its advertising.
That was Terry, though. He liked to test things. He liked to know for himself. He believed in proof.
And every now and then, he was willing to risk a perfectly good bowl in the name of science.
I have to admit, I miss that kind of ridiculousness.
Not the broken dishes. Definitely not the broken dishes.
But the laughter.
The way an ordinary moment could suddenly turn into a story we would tell again and again. The way Terry could find the humor in something as simple as a bowl meeting a floor. The way he could take the most mundane part of a day and turn it into something memorable.
We spent years collecting little moments like that.
Some were big.
Most were not.
But sometimes, all it took was a man, a bowl, and a little too much confidence in the fine print.
And, as Terry would have been quick to point out, proof is proof.
The bowl broke.
The evidence was conclusive.
And I never again trusted the words Break & Chip Resistant quite the same way.
