There it was. Mine for the taking. No one would be the wiser.

I thought about it. Boy, did I think about it. I wanted it. Boy, did I want it.

I looked down at my bowl of Pad Thai from Trader Joe's. It was just out of the microwave, steaming hot, begging to be eaten. It was decision time.

I reached into the drawer. I touched it. I gingerly grabbed it with my thumb, index, and middle finger. And then, as if it were attached to live electrodes, I let it go. I let it sink back into its home. I left it there for one of the children, perhaps even for my wife, though I know her well enough to know she probably would never even dream of touching it, never mind using it.

In the end, I suppose I'm just a good father. A good husband. One who puts others ahead of themselves. I patted myself on the back, grabbed my bowl of Pad Thai, and took some crappy-ass fork to eat it with.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I left the fancy fork -- nay, the Fancy Fork -- alone.

What?

Your family doesn't have a Fancy Fork? Really? Just us Edelsteins? We're the only ones with a Fancy Fork? Hmmmph. That's weird.

But yes: We have a drawful of spoons, knives, and forks. Probably 20 of each, purchased over the last 25 years or so. A matching set, it is not. Some are from Walmart, others Target, some Amazon. They come, they go. Their one defining characteristic is that they are cheap.

I don't mean they're inexpensive, although they are certainly that, but they are also cheap. I suppose they are made out of some sort of metal, whatever the opposite of Vibranium is, I would imagine.

They're light as air, supremely unbalanced, and if you dip one of the spoons into a pint of ice cream, it comes out bent like a question mark.

But we have a single, solitary piece of silverware that is King Shizz. This fork -- oh, this fork! -- it's got heft. It's got texture. The tines? You've never seen such tines. Long and thin and strong and mighty.

Our forks are couch-surfing sloths with ketchup stains on their shirts; this fork, on the other hand, is Brad Pitt and Cindy Crawford and Farah Fawcett and Humphrey Bogart. It is royal. It is supreme. It is the Fancy Fork.

I am not joking with you when I say this: The children have on occasion literally fought -- with words -- over the Fancy Fork. If it is clean and in the drawer and they see it, they will take it.

My wife told me once she sent the Fancy Fork in a school lunch as a reward to one of the kids. I spent the day worrying it would get lost.

How we came to own the Fancy Fork is a mystery. We have no idea. We assume someone brought it over with a dish or something, but everyone we've asked -- and we've asked basically everyone that has ever been to our home -- refuses to claim ownership.

If this were Biblical Times, the Fancy Fork would probably be seen as a miracle.

Heck, I -- despite, or perhaps due to, my raging agnosticism -- cannot rule out Divine Intervention.

Long live the Fancy Fork -- which, for the record, is exactly what everyone in my family calls it.

"I've got the Fancy Fork," you might hear at the dinner table, or "Has anyone seen the Fancy Fork?" is also famous around these parts.

Of course, we could buy a whole set of Fancy Forks -- we are lucky in that regard -- but we choose not to. One, because it seems silly to spend money on Fancy Forks, but mostly two: If all we have are Fancy Forks, then they all just become ... fancy forks.

There's a profound lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure of it.