Issue #1

Proud to be an igg

My three daughters like to call each other eggs, or rather iggs, which they say with a New Zealand accent, as in “Hallo, igg,” and “Yer such en igg.” It’s an affectionate insult, one they got from Taika Waititi’s movie Boy. Asked how they’d describe a person who’s an egg, they name each other. Pressed, they say being an egg is the opposite of being cool. Pressed further, they tell me an egg is “a friggin moron.”

I’ve discovered eggs can mean all kinds of things these days: internet trolls, good people, trans people who don’t know they’re trans yet, mountain ridges (when attached to the end of a Swiss town name). You can be a good egg, a bad egg, an egghead, and in Germany, a soft egg (a pitch-perfect term for wimp). But from my vantage point, here in what can only charitably be called late middle age, being an egg means being full of possibility. An egg is a beginning. A becoming. I’ll gladly be a Friggin Moron if I can lay claim to all that.

Once at a farmer’s market I saw an old woman with a guitar singing, “I’m still alive! I’m still a—liiiiive!” She wasn’t very good and no one paid any attention to her. Had she sang upright from a coffin or sang drenching wet, her guitar covered in seaweed, her performance might have earned her a crowd; but she was dressed as you might imagine, in hemp and a fringed scarf. “I’m still alive!” she sang, over and over, with great conviction. She was an igg for sure. But she was singing her own song, she sang with passion, she sang without care, and for that I salute her.

I feel like that old lady sometimes. Sending words out to into the void, I’m an igg. But also, like her, an egg. Still alive. Still becoming. Becoming what, I don’t know. The possibilities, if not endless at my age, are at least rousing. To be still alive! is to be a work in progress, is to have hope, is to have agency. We are all of us eggs, not done till we’re cooked.

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Overheard: 

Young woman working at a health food store, asked if a certain brand of toothpaste really does whiten teeth as advertised: “People have an unrealistic expectation of how white teeth should be.” That’s all she said.

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Welcome to the Department of Not Worth It:

From an October 2024 Martha Stewart Living article on how to shrink your jeans, here’s one of several recommended methods:

Put your jeans on and fill the bathtub with warm water. While wearing your jeans, sit in the bathtub for about 30 minutes. When time is up, get out of the bathtub and leave your jeans on until they're completely dry.

There’s only one thought you could have while wearing jeans and sitting in a bathtub filled with water and that is, “I have completely lost my marbles.” Unless you are drunk, in which case you might puzzle over how this situation came to pass.

But the bathtub is not the end of it, says the writer of this article. You must get out of the bathtub and keep your jeans on until they dry. She does not mention that this process could take at least a day, that you might even have to sleep in your wet jeans. And that you will be alone. Because who would come near you? No one wants to hug you. No one wants you to sit on their furniture. No one wants to hear you complain about your itchy thighs. So there you are, wandering around by yourself, wondering why loose-fitting clothing is to be avoided at such a cost.

And realizing that you are a victim of a feature writer’s assigned word count.

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Take this book, please!

Short story collections are not my favored reading material, but a book of stories I read last summer has burned itself on my imagination and I want to press it on you, force it on you, get you as besotted with it as I am.

The story collection is Isak Dinesen’s Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard. The six tales are not fairy tales or folk tales or gothic tales because all the events are within the realm, the very expansive realm, of possibility. But they are strange. Dinesen writes with a traditional storyteller’s voice, elegant, confident, straightforward, and you will think, as you begin, that you’ll be enjoying a good old-fashioned romance or morality tale—but your imagining of where each tale will go is no match for her inimitable and peculiar imagination.

It's hard to believe this collection was published as recently as 1958, the same year as Nabokov’s Lolita and Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The stories all take place at least 150 years ago, the characters are old-fashioned, the dialogue unironic. But there is nothing stuffy about them.

“Immortal Story” is a standout. How to describe it? It’s a story about a story told by two people who do not even know what a story is. You will finish it with a shiver, as I did. You will want to re-read it. You will want other people to read it too.

Two of the tales, “Babette’s Feast” and “Ehrengard” have been adapted into movies. The only thing I can say about Babette’s Feast is that my sister fell asleep for most of it and woke up asking, “Did they eat yet?” Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction is a pleasant little comedy you can watch on Netflix, but it misses the point of Dinesen’s story, which is of course much better.

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Also proud to be an elf-ing egg

Some of you may know me by my first alter ego, Poem Elf, a name I’ve written under since  2010. Poem Elf is a blog about poetry written by someone who doesn’t write it and reads it only once in a while but who still believes in its power.

The idea behind Poem Elf is to pull poems out of books and let them loose in the world. My hope is that even people who don’t read poetry beyond ditties on Valentine’s Day cards might be enticed to read the good stuff if they find one taped to a park bench or stuffed amongst the oranges at the grocery store.

Now and again I’ll feature short selections from the Poem Elf archives in this newsletter.

I welcome new subscribers, but if you want to check out the website first, link here for a recent post about a poem I left in the Swiss Alps last fall. Here’s a picture of the poem, Jay Parini’s “Blessings,” sitting under a glass mug in the morning sun.

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Links:

Click here for a video with all the egg references in Boy. An outtake, below:

Here’s an Amazon link for Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard. (I’d planned to link to my favorite bookstore in northern Michigan, but they don’t have it listed in their catalog. Next time!) Please let me know if you read it or have read it and what you think.

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If you enjoyed this first issue of Restless Egg, pass it on to your friends! See you next Thursday.