Issue #13

Scrambling

Scrambled

My daughter is visiting and I’m happily distracted—too distracted, it turns out, to cook up a decent Restless Egg. Instead of an omelet I’m offering a scramble. Sorry to beat the meggaphor to death.

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His (egg) cup overfloweth

If the price of eggs is putting a dent in your wallet and ruining your breakfast, consider the problem of too many eggs. In a 1939 essay “Salt Water Farm,” E.B. White (he of Charlotte’s Web fame) lays out (pun intended) the downsides of egg abundance.

White was raising chicks for the first time and when more chicks than expected survived chickhood, he and his wife found themselves with thirty-six hens, “all laying like a house afire.”

For a few days, after the barrage of eggs started in the laying pen, my game wife tried to keep pace with the preposterous influx. She scheduled egg dishes daily—all sorts of rather soft, disagreeable desserts, the kind convalescents eat doggedly and without joy. We grimly faced a huge platter of scrambled eggs at breakfast, a floating island or a custard at noon, and at night drank eggnogs instead of Martinis. We even gave raw eggs to the dogs; it would improve their coats, we said. And once I saw my wife slip an egg to the pig when she thought nobody was looking. It was of no use. For every egg we ate, my pullets laid two. Secretly I was impressed and delighted, although I got darn sick of floating island.

White decided to sell the eggs.

. . . I timidly presented myself at the local store, bearing three dozen strictly fresh twenty-four-ounce fancy brown eggs, neatly packaged, to be credited to my account. I don’t know anything that ever embarrassed me more, unless it was the day in St. Luke’s Hospital when I misunderstood the nurse’s instructions and walked into the X-ray room naked except for my socks and garters.

White sold a dozen eggs for 60 cents. For comparison, last time I checked here in Hawaii, a dozen eggs were $9.99 and organic eggs were $15. Meanwhile all over the island chickens run free, clucking and squawking and keeping their eggs for themselves.

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Slipping into the sunset

I’ve been listening way too much to a song I found on Instagram. I play it before I go to bed and I hum it during the day. It’s driving my husband nuts.

Jude York, along with his mother, a former opera singer, released a cover of an old ABBA song, “Slipping Through My Fingers.” It’s the type of cheesy ballad I usually hate—a “they grow up so fast!” song—but in York’s rendering it becomes a wistful meditation on aging parents. He and his mother have sweet voices and the chorus is so pretty—

My kids don’t live nearby so we don’t see each other day to day or week to week. When we do reunite, however happy they are to see me, I often wonder if they are also saddened. They must notice diminishment, more droop above my knees, more folds on my face, less jumping, Metamucil on the counter. Do they see in my watery eyes the narrowing future, a future with walkers and diapers, a future with “YOU LIVE HERE” Post-It notes on the fridge, a future where I am gone for good? This song brings all those thoughts forward and even so I love it.

You can listen to the whole song on Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.

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Summer break

If cold February and unstable times have you longing for sun and simpler days, these two portraits of childhood summers might give you some respite.

The first is from singer Ricki Lee Jones from a 2021 New Yorker Radio Hour interview with David Remnick. (I saved it to my notes because I liked it so much):

So when I was little, I never had shoes on and the days were so hot and so incredibly long that I think I lived years in a day . . . When I think of that year, ‘61 when I’m six, it takes forever for the day to go by . . . So you could start out in the morning making mud pie and eating mint, watching the garbage men go by, then you’d go in and listen to the radio and then take a walk down by the well and find an animal, a live animal. Any animal was a thrill to me—if it was a frog or—I didn’t have any prejudice against the kind of animals that were magical to me.

Delightful to picture Ricki chasing down an animal and imbuing it with magic.

The second is from British writer Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000). In the opening paragraphs of her essay “Curriculum Vitae” she remembers her childhood in an East Midlands home:

I consider myself lucky because when I was four years old I lived in a house with a garden, and in the garden was a double rose hedge — two hedges, that is, planted close to each other, but with enough space between them, even now they’d grown thick, for a person of my size to sit there without difficulty. Into this space the briar roses shed pale pink petals and heavy drops of rainwater or dew, so that it never quite dried out. I collected the petals into small heaps, each heap representing one of the dozen or so other regular inhabitants of the rose-hedge space. I knew their names then, but now can remember only a few. (One of them was Fatty Arbuckle, which gives you the date but not the circumstances. I am sure nobody in the village knew anything then about the misfortunes of Arbuckle. It was simple a name for anyone fat, whether male or female.)

Is this just the cutest thing? Penelope in her hiding place, collecting rose petals and naming them? She goes on, explaining the all-important rules she made for herself in this dead-serious game—

Every day, of course, one or more of the piles of rose leaves perished, withered at the top, mouldering underneath. They had no fragrance while they were alive, but a curious smell when they were dead. I buried them where the ground was soft, at the foot of the hedge. Prayers and a hymn had to be said over them, but that was no problem to me; we were churchgoers and I knew plenty of both. After they were decently laid to rest, however, a new anxiety began. No empty spaces must be left by the time I was called back to the house. More fallen petals to collect, more piling up. And so Fatty and his companions rose again from the earth.

If you enjoy Restless Egg, even the scrambled version, please share with someone who might enjoy it too!