Super bowls

On Sunday, the forty-third Super Bowl football game will be played in Tampa, Florida. Millions and millions of football fans will be glued to their television sets to watch the Arizona Cardinals play the Pittsburgh Steelers (what ever happened to Lynn Swann and Franco Harris and Terry Bradshaw, anyway?). Millions and millions of dollars will be spent by advertisers to roll out new television commercials for their products to not only a captive audience but also a very willing one. Millions and millions of cans of beer and packages of pretzels and potato chips will be consumed in the process.

As Samuel Finley Breeze Morse tapped into a telegraph machine on May 24, 1844, “What hath God wrought?”

But I’m not going to write another word about that Super Bowl.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about a different kind of Super bowl. I’m referring, Mr. Speaker, to these:



Those objects in the photo above are not the rings of Saturn; they are “vintage Pyrex bowls®” that I found on the Internet. Mrs. RWP and I have the same bowls in our kitchen cupboard, plus the one that is missing in the Internet photo. They are a wonder to behold and always make me smile. The smallest bowl, the innermost ring, is bright blue. The second one is bright red. The third bowl, missing in the photo, is bright green; and the largest one of all is bright yellow. Their colorful exteriors and concentric appearance, Mr. Speaker, are nothing less than a testimony to their beauty and symmetry, their artistic design and utter usefulness.

We have used our four bowls for almost forty-six years now, ever since our friend Stanley M. gave them to us as a wedding present in 1963. Other wedding presents we received have been re-gifted (we received three irons), broken (I still remember the day two tall ceramic Chinese figurines, painted pale green to resemble jade, crashed to the floor), and forgotten (don’t look here for an example;
I told you they were forgotten), but these Pyrex bowls® have kept on going and going and going, just like the Energizer bunny, and have served us well over the years.

After forty-six years, I suppose Mrs. RWP and I could also be considered “vintage.”

Here’s hoping that all of us will be around for many more years.

(Photo of Samuel F. B. Morse
by Matthew Brady, 1866)