Once upon a month of October about one year ago I was engaged in my favorite Halloween candy replacement of pumpkin cookie creation. The thing about pumpkin cookies is the recipe usually calls for 1 cup of pumpkin mix. Pumpkin mush comes in 29 ounces cans. So you are faced with a terrible dilemma, do you use only 1 cup of pumpkin and get left with 21 ounces of unsealed pumpkin mush to deal with or do you double or triple your recipe to use up all the pumpkin? Anyone that knows anything about me would quickly realize that when faced with a choice between more cookies and not cookies there WILL be cookies. So I did the math and scaled up the recipe 3.5 times to match my pumpkin supply. Naturally this resulted in enormous amounts of cookies. Life was good. Especially when properly glazed.
Okay, the story. So I didn’t have enough eggs to complete the task. The kitchen was in disarray, my elbows covered in flour, and I was without a car. However my roommates were conveniently attending a dinner group. So I messaged the roommates and asked them to borrow five eggs. This they did. Cookies were made and a plate was delivered to the egg donors’ apartment as payment.
Some weeks later Mandi, the girl who owned the eggs, mentioned in passing that she wondered when we were going to return the eggs. Knowing they had received a plate of precious cookies I fumed over it for a few hours. How could they not accept that as proper payment? I determined that I WOULD return the eggs if that was how they felt about it. So, knowing they were hosting a dessert night I proceeded to carefully poke a hole in an egg with a fork and remove the contents. I wrote a lovely thank you note on the egg and brought it to the party. As they were very busy I showed it to them and placed it in their fridge with the others.
It took a few weeks for them to notice the egg was naught but shell. They reminded me, with some laughter, that I had borrowed five eggs. Well. The year was young.
They soon came over for a dinner hosted at my house. Because of some urgent activity they hastily put their leftovers in our fridge. I saw the opportunity and inserted a whole egg into the bowl of cooked spinach. When they discovered it a few days later (we had it returned to their house) they were shocked enough that they dropped the egg which ejected its contents across the floor. Oops.
With Christmas approaching I had acquired a robot (robo sapian to be precise) to give away as a Christmas present. It has large robotic hands just the right size for an egg. I secreted myself outside of their apartment with the remote and proceeded to send in a roommate as a distraction. He left the door open and I sent in the robot, clutching the prize egg. Amidst the laughter I initiated the programed dance sequence. The robot patted its legs twice and began to dance in a vaguely Latin style; naturally this meant dropping the egg, which fell 6 inches to crack over their floor.
I took a few weeks to devise the next delivery. By this time they had come to expect that five eggs would come. Not knowing yet what I would do I collected pieces of this and that until after Christmas break. I was thinking puns. Eggs are eggy, they are excellent. What else is excellent? Having celebrated Guy Fawkes Day I was thinking about effigies so I devised a body for my egg using a toilet paper role and chunks of newspaper. I drew a face, eyebrows, and a nice tie. I decided this egg was executive material.
So, I attached my somewhat morbid Eggcellent Eggecutive to some tape and eggecuted him on their front door at eye level. He was taken into the house and hung in their hallways for some weeks until gravity and frequent collisions ended his life as a splat on the floor.
With that sort of buildup I knew the last one had to be the grandest of the lot. I called up nearby farms looking for turkey eggs or goose eggs. Apparently such things are seasonal and frankly somewhat rare. I wanted to give a large egg that was not an egg. I returned to my childhood skills of papier-mâché and used a large balloon as a mold. For days I applied layers of newspapers to make it strong. I then covered the newspaper with a layer of eggshell colored napkins to color and texture my egg. I decided to fill it with five real eggs but had a problem of protecting them. So I inserted them into balloons then filled the balloons with water. The five egg-and-water-filled balloons entered the paper egg along with a chicken coin bank and enough air-filled balloons to keep things stable.
I wrote on the outside of the balloon, “I wanted to ask you to be my Valentine but I was too Duck, Chicken, Turkey. I then wrote in red sharpie all over the egg little Valentine messages. I picked up a bag of shredded paper from an office on campus and snuck over on Valentine’s Day and made a nest of the paper for my egg on their doorstep. I never figured out what happened but apparently it was rather messy for some time, probably because of the paper. With my duty fulfilled I relaxed. I could rest at peace with the world once again.
Except for one more thing. Kimber was the most vocal of the girls as I proceeded through this egg return and so became the target of most of them, even though the eggs had belonged to Mandi. (plus, Mandi was engaged and thus less fun to prank). Kimber may also have been responsible for eating the cookies which were intended as payment for the five eggs initially. Around this time she began the end of her college career by student teaching at various schools. I discovered that she would spend a few weeks teaching at Bingham High School, the school where my sister was a senor. I discussed options with my sister who proceeded to acquire an egg and write a note of encouragement on it. She found the temporary desk of Kimber and left it there her first day teaching.
After a morning of buzzing about her first day in a new high school and dealing with less than helpful mentors and cranky teenagers imagine her surprise to find a chicken egg, that was more than an egg, sitting on her desk.
As I review the proceedings in my mind I realize that I may have mixed up the order to some degree but I’m not sure it matters. What does matter is that I maintain honor in my dealings with others. So, a moral: if ever someone asks you to borrow a cup of flour or a bit of egg, go for it. You never know where kindness will end or what might become of an egg.
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