Mom's Owl Collection, Volume 4!

Mojo's Favorite Mother's Owl Collection, Volume 4:

Owl Salt and Pepper Shakers

Mojo does not know or remember or particularly care if her Favorite Mother's Owl Collection was something her mother actually wanted to collect, or if it was intially or subsequently foisted upon her by a large family desperate for ideas for holiday gifts to give her. All she knows is, now her Favorite Mother no longer wants or needs or desires her Owl Collection. So Mojo's Favorite Mother cunningly foisted these things on her Forgotten Middle Daughter, in a pretense of supporting the Craptacular, but we all know the reality is, it saved her a trip to the dump. And now these things are cluttering Mojo's house instead of her own, heh heh heh. Now you see where Mojo gets her cunning, cleverly wrapped as it is in a verbose folly of ineptitude and greed. And you can also see, perhaps, that Mojo is no match for her senior when it comes to wheedling manipulation and distraction techniques while foisting crap upon a gullible subject.

This item is pretty straightforward, which is often Craptacular-Speak for "deadly dull" if it weren't for Mojo's inspired ability to wax poetical about the most mundane of Life Experiences. One would not think that salt-and-pepper shakers, even ones shaped like fat little owls, would even raise so much as an eyebrow unless you were one of those radical salt-and-pepper shaker collectors. But the simple fact is, salt-and-pepper shakers reminds Mojo of a Childhood Memory, which is Craptacular-Speak for "skip along to the end of the item description if you value your time on this earth".

For one gift-giving event, Little Miss Mojo found what she was utterly CERTAIN was the most bestest gift she could EVER give her Favorite Mother. It was a set of salt and pepper shakers, along with little cruets for oil and vinegar, cleverly disguised as little ceramic baskets being lugged by a smiling, stout little Mexican-type burro, also done in ceramic. I don't remember how much it cost, but if a child could afford it I'm guessing it wasn't anything earth-shaking. The salt and pepper shakers hung off little hooks on the pommel of the burro's pack saddle, and the oil and vinegar hung off the back near his flanks. To the taste-challenged eyes of wee little Mojo it was the greatest gift a child could ever give her sainted mother.

Mojo's mother, to her credit, heaped lavish praise on her little tyke and put the little burro on the table, where we used him for a few years. (Except at Christmas time, when we used these odd little holly-leaved lumps with the red berries on top.) Of course being the suburban Wonder Bread types we had no use at all for having oil and/or vinegar on the table...nor even pepper, for that matter. Plus I heard my mother once complain that she felt bad for the burro since she felt he was laden too heavily with spices and condiments. (Now you see where Mojo gets her Loving Concern for All of God's Creatures.) Since all we ever really used was salt, eventually the little burro was retired to the back of the cupboard and we took to using a cheap plastic salt shaker we had gotten out of the camping equipment and forgot to put back. The pepper, along with any other even more exotic spices, was eventually left by the stove to gather dust, since none of us ever used it anyway.

Fast forward about a decade, when my eventual Favorite Husband first started mooching food off of my family. He was invited to dinner, and we were all behaving and everything, and my Favorite Mother was being oh-so-charming in her efforts to kick Mojo out of the house, when all of a sudden my eventual Favorite Husband asked, "Could someone please pass the pepper?" The entire family just looked at one another in utter consternation and someone said "Pepper? Who on earth uses pepper?" Mojo resigned herself to a life of spinsterhood and regret, until my Favorite Mother saved the day by going to the stove, wiping the cobwebs off the pepper shaker and offering probably twenty-year-old-pepper to our bothersome guest. Somehow it didn't kill him, and it all ended happily except that occasionally my Favorite Husband throws my family's lack of pepper usage in my face as if it is some sort of Glaring Deficiency of Intellect and Moral Character. He thinks it is incredibly odd that an entire family does not use pepper. But again, I digress.

These fellows have never known either pepper or salt, to my knowledge, for their sole purpose up to now seems to have been to sit in my Favorite Mother's owl collection. At least, Mojo does not recall ever seeing them on her Favorite Mother's table while mooching food from the Parental Units. Perhaps that will change now, depending on what evil schemes you might have in store for them. Maybe they will sit in YOUR owl collection, or maybe they will actually contain salt and/or pepper. It is not for me to judge. They are exactly the same, except of course one has two holes in his or her head while the other has three. Traditionally the one with the most holes is the salt, I think. Why is that? My theory when I was a child was that if you poured too much on your food you would much rather have a pile of salt than pepper, but perhaps that is my anti-pepper bias showing. Whatever the reason and whatever the use, this rotund pair comes with their Certificate of Craptacularity, which I suppose you could laminate and use as a placemat. Whatever. It is out of Mojo's hands, no matter how much she desires to control the world. And, incidentally, Mojo herself hardly ever uses salt or pepper anymore. She just stopped using it sometime in her teens. I might use a bit of salt on a baked potato or some white rice if there is no other flavoring to be had, but that's about it. It's not a health issue; I just got out of the habit. Perhaps I should see if my mom still has that burro set, just to show you how awful it was. But she's probably gotten rid of it by now....