Eggheads

Eggheads
by Mark Plimsoll
        My mother's parents came from England without the benefit of a twelve-step program for the children of the English, and believe that people who suffered colonization thank God if the English did it to them. At Granny's for breakfast, we kids stared at the smiles drawn on our eggs as they nestled down in a little wooden chalices. Our eggs wore little woolen caps to keep their heads hot, the yolk inside soft and runny. For me, this became a potent symbol for humans.
        The English love animals; they count birds and identify individual wild geese, designed a plethora of utility dog breeds over generations, in spite of the costumed cruelty of foxhunts. Our six to fourteen house dogs served as conduits of our familiar affection. We pet them and coo, then pass the dog along to the next person, as if affection and brotherly love traveled with cooties. People say use French to talk to lovers, Spanish to converse with God, and English for dogs. We didn't go in much for small talk. Family get-togethers offered plump opportunities for rapturous excursions into forbidden territories, like religion and politics, even with a Devil's Advocacy that masked everyone's earnest desire to bump Granny into new heights of outrageous exasperation until her teacup clattered against its saucer. We all felt proud of our Egghead tradition; the Grandfather a "walking encyclopedia", the oft repeated stories of other's stupidity or groups that noticed a family member's intelligence, and the family's after-dinner debates around the coffee table (and a laugh at Granny's "Half-cup" of coffee that always needed a bit more-or-less) which allowed us to attack and cut to the quick so we could all sit back and relish those comic facial expressions at that delicious moment when old wounds reopen in confirmation of what makes each Egghead tick.
        All of us Eggcrate grandchildren shared anxiety toward outward signs of affection, which we diligently avoided. Once in a while the hard white blank shell of an Egghead cracked; down on one knee in hands-clasped declaration of incessant slobbery devotion and runny-nose commitment to shameless neediness, the sincere face covered with egg white and salted with heartfelt faithfulness, peppered with promises of eternal love and abject servitude from now to forever. Later we could wipe the egg off our face with the English Humpty-Dumpty plan- a secret postscript to whip all that spilt egg into an insubstantial froth with a stiff upper lip the minute we regained our Anglo-Saxon composure and sense of personal worth.
        When the Sixties happened, the recently interconnected Egghead youth of the world collectively lost their innocence: New musical instruments and ideas, The Pill, the Viet Nam war, drugs, government repression, and actual deadly war against civil disobedience. This forced some young Eggheads around the world to examine other Eggcrates; cultures, philosophies, religions, lifestyles, alternative realities, drugs, meditations, countries, languages, and psychologies. This led some to an idea of the Universal Yolk.
        Us egg-crate siblings eventually awoke to the inappropriateness of our interpersonal style. Not a pretty process. After the third or forth time one hears "Didn't your mother breast-feed you?" it cracks your eggshell a bit. We compared notes in our eggcrate, incubated the results, and sat a long time, blank and unmoved, shoulder to shoulder, until one Egghead muttered "It's like God uses us to practice juggling." We resolved to become Born Again, get in touch with our hot and runny Universal Yolks that need other human beings, although the thought repulsed us at first, but it must be done before age hard-boils us.
        Now mature, we recognize the Eggheads who never examined their own Universal Yolk; those that react defensively in the face of contradiction and try to crack the egg and kill the messenger with personal insult, backed up by community gossip. They cannot see the fertile germ of the idea itself that exists in the Universal Yolk and will never go away.