most beautiful when unbroken

I am (nearly) forty years old and I still rarely make eggs without getting a teeny bit of shell in there somewhere. My friend says cooking, for her, is like editing for me: a compulsion. And here I am leaving grocer's apostrophes of eggshell all over. Hopeless. This morning for breakfast I had zucchini and eggs and potatoes; the crisp edges of properly fried zucchini mask the eggshell, though I think miraculously this morning I made an omelet without breaking any more egg than was absolutely necessary. I was singing while I stirred in the potato: "Any weird you can cook, I can eat weirder, I can eat any food weirder than you!" and I'm sure Ethyl Merman rolled over in her grave, but maybe she was dancing along.

Yesterday, I think it was yesterday, I made rice. "A scant cup. A scant cup. A cup that is scant. That cup's scant. That cup can't." WHY. Some people talk all the time to prevent their brains from starting that pesky business of thinking but it's like I'm treading water in my brain sometimes to stop myself from floating.

Since I don't walk Squire to school anymore, I am no longer terrorizing the neighborhood with my early morning outbursts, standing in the middle of the sidewalk laughing because I remember something outrageously funny or chatting myself up in my phony French accent. I'm sure everybody's much happier. Nobody needs to see my particular brand of crazy before eight a.m. On Mondays when I go to the high school, the old ladies on the tram all love me 'cause I give them my seat when the pig men don't, and then they (the ladies) always want to talk to me, with their gold teeth and purple tints and whack makeup. They know they've spotted one of their own in the making. Last week one of them was nodding at me the whole way home, in other words giving me much more positive feedback than your average high school senior, and I wanted to give her my cheery smile but frankly it was all too awful in my head and I just couldn't. When she got off the tram she patted my hand and I realized I was crying. Oh, my old ladies, the mascara is roping down my cheeks and I am closer than I think.

Last week was entirely too long. If the weekend hadn't come when it had, I think drastic action would have been taken. I have high hopes for this week, though. Not least because the Teletubbie House of Pain video makes me confident there must be some real good in the world.

subject line from "White Dwarfs", a perfect poem by Michael Ondaatje.

Comments

[Elkit]

How odd, I read this - "My friend says cooking, for her, is like editing for me: a compulsion" as: "My friend says cooking, for her, is like editing, for me: a compulsion."

And I wondered if cooking was like editing for me. And it's not too far from the truth, actually.

[tuckova]

Elke: A good editor would have worked on that sentence longer, but I cannot write and edit my brain. A sensible person would have re-written it as for example: "My friend says that how she feels about cooking is how I feel about editing: it's a compulsion." And even that isn't right: I participated in the conversation and I feel wrong re-writing what made perfect sense to me at the time.

[bstewart23]

I'm just struck by the beauty of "And here I am leaving grocer's apostrophes of eggshell all over." Perfect.