Today’s post is rather…unusual, I guess you could say. It’s as much a surprise for me as it is for you. It’s a guest post by my big little brother Rylan.  He’s three years younger than me but I’m very quickly beginning to feel like one of  the few shorties around here.

Perhaps you would like to know what inspired him to write the following story. It is strictly for humour and there’s a chance that it’s so blonde you might not even get it! You’ll have to read it and find out for yourself.

To put a long story short, it all started on Family Day when we were out for supper and little sister comes out with the most random question: “What if everybody would walk out of here with their silverware?”

Perhaps she was inspired by the memory of this past summer when Dad accidentally smuggled a spoon home in his shirt pocket after visiting some relatives of ours while on vacation in Ohio. We ended up stopping at his cousin’s workplace on the way home to try to return it but ’twas all in vain. He was nowhere in sight and we didn’t exactly feel like hunting him down all over the premises of their paving company with a spoon in hand so we gave up and headed home.

Whatever the case, we began brainstorming the lamest, most sarcastic mystery in history. This is what he came up with when he wrote  his own version on the way home. I was provided with some amusement when I read it so I thought I’d share it and perhaps you will be too. If you know him at all, you might better understand the peculiarity of it all.

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Mystery of the Missing Silverware

by Rylan Gingrich

“Hey, Wilbur! Got any spoons left in the cutlery tray?” Wanda implored.

“Only three,” I moaned.

“What can be happening here?” she pondered.

“I thought it was a smart idea to spend a fortune on such extravagance as pure silver cutlery, but now I’m having second thoughts,” I reminisced.

It all started when my wife, Wanda, and I had one of those light bulb moments and decided to start up a cafe in our backyard garden shed. With a bit of determination and a whole lot of creativity, we had a neat little cafe in business.

We had been having a growing problem with disappearing silverware ever since we started our garden shed cafe. We had about three main customers and the occasional new one. We were holding up well with a weekly income of almost twenty-five dollars. It was sad that almost all that money was going towards new silverware. We were considering switching to plastic cutlery but we knew how much our regular customers enjoyed the silver cutlery.

My homemade bell above the door rang as Donald, our most faithful customer, waddled in with his usual long, baggy jacket on the hottest summer days. He always sat at the same table and wasn’t very sociable. He always asked for extra silverware. I always granted it to him. Another strange feature of him was how he entered and exited the building. He always walked in silently, but would exit with a slight tinkle to be heard.

We had almost given up on the matter when our own customer, Donald, saved us from despair. He lived only one block down the street from us and he was holding a garage sale! How nice! This was a perfect chance to spend all the extra money we had made in the last year with our cafe business.

On our way to the garage sale we wracked our brains to come up with a solution to our problem, but we just couldn’t make ends meet whatsoever.

“Surely the silverware will show up eventually,” I soothed.

“I’m not so sure about that. Where could it possibly be getting to?” she complained hopelessly.

As we walked into Donald’s driveway, we were welcomed with a pleasant surprise! Among the other items he was selling, he had nicely laid out an array of beautiful silverware! It was just like ours! We could now purchase silverware one block away at half the price the kitchen store charged! What a deal! We were so delighted to have our cutlery collection restocked. The missing silverware remains a mystery, so please notify us if you have any idea what could be going on here. Thanks in advance.

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