Hard-boiled eggs and Metaphors

Have you ever felt like a specific action or event could be a metaphor for your entire life or wherever you are in life at the moment? (How you got to Memphis - if you will) 

Sunday morning, I woke up craving hard-boiled eggs and toast. (Sometimes I get these cravings, much like a pregnant woman, and I will spend an hour searching for it in stores and preparing it.) I got some nice rolls at a bakery and returned home to boil the eggs. I had never boiled an egg before, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I placed three eggs in a pot with some water and set the pot on the stove. In the back of my head I seemed to have remembered that eggs need ten minutes, so I set the timer on my phone and went to the living room to read. 

When my phone rang, I went to the kitchen, took the eggs out of the water and put them into cold water, just like I saw my father do it numerous times before. I left them to cool down for about three minutes, during which I cut the rolls in half, buttered and toasted them on a pan. Once I was done, I cracked open one of the eggs and, to my surprise, the egg was between a hard- and a soft-boiled egg. The yolk was relative hard, but the white still hadn’t properly solidified and the sides stuck to the shell. I cracked open the second one. Same result. I didn’t crack open the third one, because I didn’t want to seem crazy (by the definition of the word), so I figured that I’d start over with three new eggs.

This was the moment that I figured, maybe the ten minutes started from the moment the water started boiling. So the second time I waited for the water to boil and then started the timer. When the timer went off, I sauntered to the kitchen to check on my eggs, like a mother who was checking if all her kids were all right, and I was sad to see that one of the eggs had cracked open, consequently making pieces of poached egg swim around the boiling water. – Oddly enough, this was the moment that I thought of the scene in Amadeus where Salieri says to the priest “it wasn’t Mozart laughing at me; it was God.”

Four ruined eggs and half an hour later than I had planned, I ate brunch and thought about how this exact experience could be a perfect metaphor for my life at the moment. I can cook gourmet risotto and tomato sauce that will knock your socks off, but I screwed up a task as simple as making hard-boiled eggs. It’s the little things in life that remind me that I’m still young and have much to experience before I can call myself a full-grown adult, and I don’t mean that in the legal sense.

A.D.