The Egg Journal
By Charley Kempthorne*
Kansas Senior Press Service
A project of the KU Center on Aging
One of the delights of keeping a journal is interacting with your own mind. If journaling is a solitary activity, that doesn't mean there can't be a lot of dialogue and sociability going on in your head.
I write that I had eggs for breakfast, and then I smile to think of all the eggs I've eaten. If laid (pun intended) end to end, would they stretch to the moon? Probably. I was raised to love eggs, and still do. Eggs over easy, scrambled eggs, poached, boiled and even baked eggs...I don't know that I've ever eaten a roast egg. Not being a chef, only a consumer, I can't even guess what a roast egg would be like.
I remember going to a farm auction with my mother during the War. This was back in Indiana. I was five or six years old. I was fooling around and went in a hen house and found an egg. I took it. As we were leaving the auction, I innocently showed my mother what I'd found.
Eggs were valuable--and rationed. "That belongs to the owner," she said. "You'd better go give it to her." I ran back to find the lady. She was in the crowd, watching the auctioneer. Maybe I was a little embarrassed, or maybe I was just lazy, but I came up behind her and without a word slipped the egg in her pocket. Then I ran back to the car. As we were driving off, my mother asked me if I'd found her. I told her what I'd done. She laughed and laughed.
And now I laugh, too. I laugh at what the poor lady must have wondered when she found an egg--probably broken--in her coat pocket, I laugh at my innocence, I laugh at hearing again my mother's laugh. I can see her, then a young woman of 35--and I can hear her merry laughter, "Oh, Charley!" she said, slapping her forehead. "No! You didn't!"
I don't laugh out loud much as I journal, but now I'm smiling broadly. It's five o'clock in the morning. The world is asleep. I'm here in my little study hearing that laughter made nearly fifty years ago. Oh, the mind, the memory--what a wonderful thing!
And if I wanted to stay with the eggs, I could remember other things. The memories parade out almost on demand, like performing animals in a circus at the behest of the ringmaster. The time as a hungry teenager I stayed over at a friend's house and, on a dare, ate a dozen eggs. The smell of rotten eggs caused by burning sulfur, which we put in a teacher's desk in high school one time. (How did we keep from setting the desk on fire?) My brother showing me how you could clasp an egg and squeeze it in your hands as hard as you could and, if you held it just right, it wouldn't break.
The tiny eggs of new pullets. All the years we have raised chickens. We still have our own chickens, we have fresh eggs nearly every morning. My father, a doctor, learning at 70 that eggs were high in cholesterol and were bad for you, announcing that he had had two eggs for breakfast every morning of his life and he wasn't going to stop now. I can still see the sunlight streaming in the window on the morning he said that. He was getting ready to leave for the office. I can remember his deep blue suit.
This is my mind, my head. It may be something from heaven or it may just be a cloud inside a chunk of meat, but it has been given to me to roam around in. I take it with me wherever I go. Sometimes I'm sick of it going, going, and I lie down and sleep, though occasionally even in sleep it rattles on. Whatever it is, it's mine. And I'm going to record what I can of it, for it is a mind like no other, it is unique in human history.
Pascal said, “Man is only a reed, but he is a thinking reed.” He is a writing reed, too.
*Charley Kempthorne
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