Basket Case
I'm waiting at the checkout. I’m not wearing any pants. It’s not that I’m trying to be erotic - I just need some eggs. I think people might be shocked to discover that in nearly forty years on this planet, I have never knowingly poached an egg.
In all pragmatism, trying to carry twelve baskets would be quite a trial. Besides, if you put all of your eggs in separate baskets, somebody would surely poach one.
Actually, eggs have always been a source of mild anxiety. I used to think that maybe we had accidentally trapped one of the sun’s babies and if the yolk broke, the sun would start leaking out of the sky too. Which would just scramble everything up. And the sea would turn all eggy. Or fill up with babies.
Other times I thought the yolk was actually God’s eye, looking up at you from the bottom of the jug or the pan. Which would mean God is actually an almost-chicken and so then, every time you see chickens running everywhere, it changes your whole outlook on life. And chickens. And God.
I once found part of a leg in an egg. Nobody wants to find a leg in an egg. It’s sort of an unwieldy thing to have to contend with at breakfast.
It reframes the big questions too: I mean, how long do you cook a leg for? Would it be too runny after 4 minutes?
Everybody gets so nervous and uptight about accidentally cracking eggs, don’t they? It’s like the Queen has slipped into your shopping basket and everybody is buzzing about in a whispery way around her.
Or maybe it’s God in there: and cracking the eggs would unleash the whole meaning of life in all its scrambled glory. Which would just be too much to take in in the queue at the checkout.
I feel the same way about pants. The elastic always itches. Besides, I did once wear two pairs to school. Just to be doubly sure. So it all balances out.
I might spend the afternoon sitting next to a window in a field. Searching for grass that isn’t yet dead.
Nobody ever dies in Disney films - except the grass.
But the eggs always crack in the end.
