The Art of Peeling an Egg
written by: Lisa H. Owens
I make hard-boiled eggs with bacon and honey-butter biscuits for the family breakfast this morning. It feels weird to celebrate Father’s Day without a father for the eighth time.
I stand at the sink, peeling the eggs, thinking about Daddy and how we had been at odds for a great portion of my life. We butted heads and I once went five years without speaking to him. I didn’t think he really noticed, for I was the one who always reached out, making sure to talk about the things that interested him.
There were two topics that never varied, the first being the most recent rollout of new car models, always a favorite. The ones that got the best gas mileage, and such, as he’d contemplated purchasing a new one for years—well as far back as I can remember, actually—but he always ended up with analysis paralysis, not able to pull the trigger, so he drove well-maintained clunkers his entire life.
The second topic, the stock market, was the topic I tried to avoid, but it had a way of coming up toward the end of our conversations, usually in the form of a question.
“How would you like to turn $100.00 into $1,000.00?”
I snickered and he’d act offended, because this time it was the Lord who’d given him the hot-investment-tip, and when had the Lord ever failed him? My answer to that would have been… always, where the stock market was concerned. But unfortunately, there would be no denying the most recent undervalued stock mentioned by the voices in his head. The Holy Trinity: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, did not lie, and of course I never confronted him on how many $100.00 had been lost when I’d gotten caught up in his madness. He had a short memory where our losses were concerned.
I think about the radio silence, not a peep out of Broken Arrow Oklahoma in all of those years, and am not sure how long it would have continued had my younger sister not intervened. As it turned out, she told me Daddy was devastated by the telephone call standoff, begging my mom to call me on his behalf to apologize for whatever had caused the standoff in the first place. I am sure neither of us really remembered, and one day I just picked up the phone and made the call. It was as if the five-year hiatus had never happened. The conversation started on a different note, however. Instead of diving right into the best new cars on the market according to Consumer Reports, something I had researched before making the call, he told me about his most recent epiphany regarding the peeling of hard-boiled eggs.
Having been a mechanical engineer as well as a rocket scientist for NASA in the 1960s, he thought about efficiency in design, and this translated into everyday things: how to make the simple things in life more efficient. He had put a lot of thought into this egg-peeling thing. Why did some eggs lump and bump and lose a great portion of the egg white in a peeling, while other eggs practically peeled themselves?
He thought about the shape of an egg, sketching it to scale, of course, on a sheet of the draft paper he always had on hand. A perfect ovoid with one wide end and the other end narrowing, almost to a point. He used some math I didn’t quite grasp to work it out. Where to start the peel? How could math and science make the peeling of an egg more consistent and efficient?
It had something to do with always starting at the narrow end of the egg and tapping the shell a certain number of times to ensure the membrane covering the egg white would be caught up in the shell, from the very start, continuing on, and like an apple peel done right, you would end up with one continuous strand of broken bits of shell still attached to the membrane. That was the key. Getting the membrane. He was onto something big. No more lumpy, destroyed eggs for us. Eggs so smooth, it was a shame to cut into them.
On this morning, I peel eight eggs, one for each year of his glaring absence in my life. Using his technique, all were perfect, except the one that cracked as it boiled. I wonder what science would have to say about that conundrum. I wish I could pick up the phone and ask him.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
A happy memory of my father, a genius with undiagnosed schizophrenia, who wrestled with the voices in his head for most of his 85 years on the third rock from the sun.
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