Are toothpicks interesting? Can a person actually write six hundred words about a sliver of wood? I don't know, but I'm going to find out.
In my top kitchen drawer, I have a box of 250 toothpicks. This box has lived in my house for at least a year and a half. I haven't used many of these toothpicks. I'm not going to count, but I guess I've used about thirty of them. That means I'm going to have the same box of toothpicks for a long, long time.
I've always thought of toothpicks as a crafty item, along the lines of glue guns and play dough. Sometimes, in my daydreams, I've wondered, "Could I build a miniature house out of toothpicks?" It's a neat idea. So I took out about twenty toothpicks and started taping them together to make a "floor" for my mini house. This took me nearly a half an hour. That's when I decided that I am way too lazy to build a house from toothpicks. I renamed my "floor" a rafting device and tried to feel a sense of accomplishment.
But there are people who do build things out of toothpicks. My favorite is a man from Ligonier, Pa. He carves toothpicks. Keep in mind that toothpicks are skinny and fragile and not much longer than two inches. I don't know what tools this man uses, but he carves little baseball players and aliens and sea captains on the top third of a toothpick. You have to go to his website (www.shamey.com/tooth/tooth.htm) to believe what I'm talking about. One of his toothpicks is even in the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum.
Okay, now that you are done looking at unbelievably small toothpick sculptures, let's talk about people who collect toothpick holders. Maybe you already knew about the National Toothpick Holder Collectors' Society, but I am in awe of them. They have 700 members! They charge a yearly fee of up to twenty-five dollars. And 700 people still want to be a part of the toothpick-holding fun. I can't get four people to come over to my house for free cake. How do these 700 people find the time and the money to talk about toothpick holders?
Moving on, I'm actually partial to plastic toothpicks. They tend to be more whimsical. I like purple toothpicks. I like flamingos sitting on top of my toothpicks. And I'm not sure if this qualifies as a toothpick, but I'm still fascinated with those little umbrellas you get on a very expensive summertime drink. I love to open and close them. Up Down. Up Down. Up Down. (You can only open them about three times before they break, but they're still more fun to play with at dinnertime then your soupspoon.)
As I was surfing the web, I saw a lot of people using toothpicks to teach math. This sounds cruel to me. I think teaching math in any form is cruel, but that's for another essay. Toothpicks in math are just going to gum up the works. I had a hard enough time learning to divide 56 by 7 when I was in grade school. Just imagine if my teacher would have dumped 250 toothpicks right on top of my notebook? It would have taken me fifteen more minutes to figure out what to do with the toothpicks. Maybe I would have wanted to build a miniature house? And the teacher definitely would have yelled at me for not paying attention. Then she would have ordered me to clean up all 250 toothpicks off my desk. And by the end of class I still wouldn't be able to divide 56 by 7 because my math-challenged brain would be melted like Velveeta cheese.
Wow. Can you believe I've written an entire essay on toothpicks? I didn't think I'd succeed. But it was so much fun that I might go write an essay about the many uses for a peach pit.
On second thought---I think I'll just go play with my toothpick "raft".
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