Women in Comfortable Shoes

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06/02/2003: "Melamine Memoirs"

Over the last couple of weeks, I have seen quite a few ads and store displays for a material I haven't thought about in years--melamine (aka Melmac). Up until I was in my teens, our everyday dinnerware was made out of this stuff.

Our regular dishes were white with a wheat sheaf pattern. Unfortunately, the white plastic-like stuff stained easily, especially when we ate tomato-based products, such as ketchup. Which was every night. Bleach would do the trick, but when you’re doing dishes and you’re 11 years old, you don’t really want to dunk your hands in bleach every night. I don’t want to do that now.

Because Dad was Dad, a grown man, the breadwinner, and bigger than we were, Mom always served him bigger portions of food than the rest of us. He even had his own special Dad plate--a monstrous pink melamine serving platter.

I hated that plate. It didn’t stack in the sink with the other dishes. It had to be washed by hand on those rare occasions when we lived somewhere with a dishwasher. Usually, the dishwasher was yours truly.

My preteen years were spent in a tiny town in the northeast corner of South Dakota, 11 miles from the Minnesota border. One of those years, we lived in a fabulous old, very large, two-story, four-bedroom house on South Sixth Street. I’m sure it had a fabulous heating bill, which is why the next year, we moved across the street to a not-so-fabulous, not-so-large, two-story house that had only two real bedrooms. (My baby sister was born while we lived in the not-so-fabulous house.)

In the fabulous house, my parents had a bedroom, my brother and I each had our own bedroom, and the fourth bedroom was the TV room. Though we had a dining room, we (I and my mother) generally would cook dinner and then take everything upstairs to eat in front of the TV. Of course, the kids (again, mostly me) would be responsible for taking everything back downstairs when we were through.

(I baked my first solo batch of cookies while living in this house. They didn’t turn out so hot. I still don’t know what I did wrong, maybe nothing, but they didn’t melt down at all. They were just big cookie lumps. Fortunately, they tasted OK, so it wasn’t a total loss, but I was so disappointed because I followed the recipe exactly.)

Back to the plate… One night, after eating, I was assigned the duty of carrying all the dirty plates and utensils from the TV room down to the kitchen. There must have been something really good on TV that Dad consented to let me watch, such as the Brady Bunch or Partridge Family, because I ran down the stairs to the first flight, reached around the corner, dropped everything on the stove, and ran back to watch television.

Unknown to me, someone had left a burner on low. A little later, we hear a cracking sound and a terrible smell. Ah, the sounds and smells of melting melamine. Pop's pink platter was cooked -- overheated and cracked in several spots. Dad was upset, but silently, I rejoiced. The hated platter was gone. I never had to wash it again. Woohoo!

Unfortunately, he had a yellow melamine platter waiting in the wings. Fortunately, a few years later, Corning came out with the Corelle line of dishes that cleaned easily and did not stain. Fortunately, my mother fell in love with Corelle dishes and got rid of the melamine. Fortunately, we finally moved into a house with an automatic dishwasher. Unfortunately, I broke the dishwasher doing something stupid with liquid dishwashing detergent.

But that’s another story.

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Addendum: As I was trying to find web links to Corelle for this story, I did a Google search on the word pyrex. I came up with a link for Pyrex glass dildos. Umm. No.

Posted by Timbrat @ 06/04/2003 07:35 PM CST