Have you colored them yet? Whaddya waiting for? Easter is here. You don’t want your kids and grandkids holding baskets full of fake green grass and plastic eggs. Aren’t fake politics bad enough for you?
Do you have enough eggs? I’m sure you’ve been aware of the the new “Egg Scare.” It seems to have eased, but the prices haven’t.
It was toilet paper and paper towels three years ago. Now it’s eggs? Tomorrow it’ll be bottled water.
I was standing at the egg section in Hannaford’s this morning, trying to get at my very expensive, delicious, extra jumbo eggs at $7.19 a dozen, when a nice, little, old lady poked me with her cane.
“Where are the cheap eggs?”
She was referring to the antique eggs of yesterday, it seems.
“My husband did all the shopping, and now he’s gone, and I can’t get any cheap eggs.”
I tried to explain to Madam that the “cheap eggs” have gone along with her husband.
“I’ll just have to stop buying eggs,” she concluded.
No, she won’t. No one is going to stop buying eggs. It just ain’t gonna happen.
Eggs are as important to our way of life, even in 2023, as coffee, gas and toilet paper — not to mention, iPhones and TikTok. You can’t cook without eggs.
Eggs for breakfast alone is the American way of starting the day. Of course, it’s France’s, Germany’s, Russia’s and central Maine’s start as well.
It goes back so far, you’ll go blind researching the tradition.
They say the cave people ate pigeon eggs. We’ve got a lot of pigeons, so relax.
A little research tells us that the slaves in ancient Egypt started the day with beer, bread and onions, (which, by the way, is how my grandfather started his day in Ireland,) while Tut and his gang were eating grapes all day. Nothing has changed.
Breakfast: Sister Rosanna explained to us every day what breakfast meant. She took the chalk and split the word up on the blackboard.
“Break” and then “Fast,” she wrote, which simply meant you were “fasting” and then you broke it … with a bowl of Rice Krispies.
The French break it with a glass of red wine, and the Irish with a stout. Get it? You can look it up or ask your grandma.
My father started his day with six strips of bacon and three cheap, wonderful eggs.
“Cheap” in those days was 18 cents a dozen, and a loaf of Wonder Bread that went for 5 cents. FIVE CENTS!
Even today eggs are the most important words scrawled on the menus of diners.
It was not that long ago that diners dotted the American landscape. You can still see them all over Maine, plentiful as potatoes.
Over easy, sunny side up, hard- or soft-boiled or poached, or omelets.
In the movies, they were the language of the street:
“He’s a good egg.”
“She’s a bad egg.”
“Well, that joke laid an egg.”
In literature, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler used eggs as props. They put their heroes and killers in diners with the two eggs “over easy” and coffee in a white mug, the kind they got in prison.
Even the movies made us hungry.
“The Egg and I”
“Death Laid an Egg”
“Operation Egg”
OK, get the dye and get those eggs colored. But save two for my breakfast. “How you want ‘em?”
“Over easy.”
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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