In old age, Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" has become a bit of a regretful dirge for me, and it takes very little to make me go and recite "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference."
After countless detours in my life, there are no more forks ahead of me, except this one which I found on the way to the front gate. Padma must have dropped it on her way to the recycle bin, which is where she goes every so often with a box full of what she deems to be surplus stuff.
On closer inspection, I recognised is as the small fork I had kept when I flew Egypt Air. At the time I thought it small recompense for the ordeal of sitting aboard an ageing Boing 707 which, judging by the broken food tray and hanging arm rest, should never have got off the ground in the first place, let alone with so many homeward-bound Egyptians nursing television sets and sewing machines on their laps as "cabin baggage".
I took the airline less travelled by and, luckily, survived it.
