Looking for Eggs in All the Wrong Places

“They have Easter egg hunts in Philadelphia, and if the kids don’t find the eggs, they get booed.”

                                                                                        - Bob Uecker

I can only remember going on one Easter egg hunt, and I was in college at the time. The egg hunt was the day before Easter, and since the weather was rainy and many students went home for the weekend, I don’t think anyone showed up. I did not live on campus. Since I worked my way through college, I drove the 12 winding, hilly miles of country roads to school each day and then drove back down the same roads to go to work after my last class of the day.

Anyway, when Monday came around, the weather was still cloudy, damp and cool. I parked by the practice football field, which was very near the fine arts building. I noticed that there was a colored egg in the grass just a couple of feet from the paved parking spots. Looking more closely, I found another. When I shared this information with a classmate, we decided that we would examine this phenomenon further during an open slot at noon.

At noon, we began searching the practice football field and learned that apparently no one had attended the Easter egg hunt that weekend. Eggs were everywhere, including all of the plastic eggs that were redeemable for prizes. We left the dyed eggs on the field, focusing instead on the prize eggs. Not to appear overly greedy, we limited ourselves to four prize eggs each, and left the remaining winners in a neat little heap at the 50 yard line. 

Ah, the spoils of victory! At the student union, we redeemed our winning eggs for Wham-O Frisbees, college ball caps, and student union gift certificates. That was a half hour well spent!

When I was a kid, Easter meant my dad boiling a mixture of water and vinegar, then pouring that into small plastic cups that remind me of modern deli containers. Since plastic cups like these were uncommon back in the 1960s, I’m not sure where they came from. A few drops of food coloring went into each container, and the egg dyeing began. A spoon was used to lower the egg into the color (no fancy wire egg holders for us), and the colored egg, dye still wet, was placed on a towel to dry. The towel used was an old, raggedy one specifically designated for this function. The towel had years of blended egg dye stains, and must have been stored with the plastic cups. The dry eggs were put in a large, clear glass mixing bowl and displayed on the kitchen table.

These eggs sat out on the table until they were all eaten. The dark blue ones that had been left in the dye too long were eaten first, since they were the least attractive eggs. The last to be consumed were the fancy double-dipped eggs. These were dyed by hand, with one half held submerged in one of the cups until the desired tint was achieved. Once dry, the opposite end would be dunked in a separate color. Sometimes a white band would be left undyed to create the coveted tri-color egg! In my young mind, they were almost too beautiful to be eaten. Almost.

Blending dyes created colors Dr. Frankenstein would be proud of. I ended up with purplish bruise- colored eggs, some that were tinted mud brown, and one memorable egg that was a pitiful blackish-gray color. There were a few successes though, including a nice orange shade and a pleasant pinkish color one time. Those pleasant tones were the outliers. As a whole, my dye blends were an eyesore.

How we survived certain death from consuming non-refrigerated boiled eggs is beyond me. It must be the same way we managed to avoid the grim reaper as we played in the dirt and rode bicycles without helmets. I do know that all of those eggs were eaten every year, either as a snack with a little salt, or sliced on the hard boiled egg slicer and eaten as a sandwich with some mustard on top. No one ever became ill from eating them. 

Maybe we were just lucky. Nowadays, TV news reports tell you to get those in the fridge immediately after dyeing them, and eat them within two days. This year, I saw a news report warning that the only way to be sure you and your loved ones would safe was to use plastic eggs. I don’t know… they seem like they would be hard to chew up and would cause a lot of damage as they worked through your digestive system. Plus, I’m sure they don’t taste as good as real eggs.  

My wife and I make deviled eggs every Easter, though it seems a little sacrilegious. We just like deviled eggs, and Easter is egg time after all.

I have heard that one of the benefits of getting older is that you can hide your own Easter eggs. No matter if you hide your own this year, or watch your kids, grandkids or maybe perfect strangers seek hidden eggs, please don't boo them like the folks in the City of Brotherly Love do. 

I hope your Easter is truly egg-cellent!       

Out Of Time

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.”

                                                                                                                  - James Joyce

Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it? Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? Wow, there are a lot of questions, and yet to fully answer all of those we would just scratch the surface. We could listen to the Chicago song, but that really wouldn't answer the question, would it? It is a good song, though.

Time is really a rather intimate subject. Most of us deal with time on a planetary basis, dictated by Earth's axial revolutions and associated wobbles, in conjunction with its seasonal orbiting of Old Sol. That alone is a fascinating subject, once you realize that the data from over 50 atomic clocks representing 58 countries are analyzed in a laboratory near Paris in order to create the standard known as Coordinated Universal Time. UTC is its popular title. Yeah, I realize the anagram doesn’t match up, but we are talking about Europe. And here you thought Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was the standard. Sorry, Great Britain – your Greenwich Observatory is nice and all, but GMT is so 1960s.

I have always been fascinated with time. It would be so cool to travel in time. Would you like to time travel? You can, you know. Let’s do that right now, weather permitting. Look up at the sky on the first clear night you encounter, and you will see light that was generated by billions of stars, some possibly centuries ago. 

Look out your window on a sunny day. It took 20 minutes for that light to reach your backyard. Shadows should be an object of loathing! That light from our very own sun traveled nearly 93 million miles to give brilliant illumination to our world, only to have it blocked by a tree, or a telephone pole, or maybe even YOU!  I bet you feel guilty now, don’t you?

I really enjoy a discussion of physics, as long as the required math isn’t involved. The question of time was explored more than once in the wonderful Science Channel series “Through the Wormhole,” hosted by Morgan Freeman. If you are so inclined, here is an entire episode about time on YouTube: 

My concern in this blog entry is more with the psychological aspects of time. It is the concept of time  that most of us answer to. It is the circadian rhythm, it is the biological clock, and it is the social expectations of the ever-moving hands of time. Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives. Sounds like a good name for a TV show is in there somewhere.

For me, 50 years old me has faded in the rear-view mirror, and the big six-0 is visible within my high beams. Each new year is a but a blur of days turning into a blur of months, with my wife and I usually wondering just where the heck the past month disappeared to. While an easy answer isn't forthcoming, just why this phenomenon occurs is easily explained.

When I was a kid, I LOVED Christmastime. Didn't most of us? It seemed like it took forever for it to finally arrive. The fact that my very old-school parents wouldn’t put up out REAL Christmas tree until Christmas Eve made time seem to pass even more slowly. 

Summer vacation was similar. It took forever to arrive. While I liked school, I loved the freedom of summer vacation!

As we age, time seems to pass quickly. My 30 year teaching career came and went with ever increasing velocity.

Okay, I am finally getting to that explanation I mentioned four paragraphs ago. As you age, each day, month and year becomes an ever smaller part of your overall life experience. To an eight-year-old, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas seems to take forever! Well, it really is to him or her. Clearly, 1% of an eight-year-old’s life has passed between those two holidays.

Now, let’s look at your run-of-the-mill 59-year-old. That same 30 days (yeah, I know it isn’t always 30 days) between Thanksgiving and Christmas is barely 1/10th of 1%! It is such a tiny part of his or her lifetime that the perception is that time has flown by.

This isn’t always the case. Adults can experience the perceived slowing of time. Early in the fall of my last year of teaching, I lost one of my students.  He was killed in an automobile accident. During that horrible week, time seemed to slow to a crawl. I just wanted to get it over with, but my perceived time painfully moved at a snail's pace.

Time and I have usually been on speaking terms. During my teaching career, I liked to arrive at school by 7:05 AM, or else I felt rushed all day. It was great to arrive early, make whatever copies I needed for the day, get all of my material ready, and then have the opportunity to socialize with the other staff members as they arrived at school. The staff wasn't required to be there until 7:50 AM, but that was far too late for me and for several others. I cherished that social time with my fellow teachers and other staffers.

Let's shift mental gears, though mine are sometimes stuck in park. Anyhow, I love all of the shows in the Star Trek TV series except for the original. Hey, I DO appreciate that the original series paved the way for all of the others, and for all of the movies, but the original Star Trek just wasn’t that great. If you watched it back in 1966, it was awesome. However, by today’s standards, it was… well, kind of lame. BUT...the spinoffs dealt with temporal anomalies and even a “temporal cold war.” Like we really needed a NEW cold war! The big difference here was instead of nuclear weapons, we had to deal with time travel, time spies, and even scarier weapons.  

Still, the concept of alternate realities is tantalizingly plausible. Maybe all of time past, present and future exists around us in different time dimensions. Each one results from decisions we make in our individual lives. Every decision then branches out into brand new time lines. Hey, it's just a thought.

Since time is of the essence, the older we get, the less time we have left on this planet, I highly recommend that you not put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Quit reading this, turn off your computer, and go interact with people you enjoy interacting with. I also suggest that you let loved ones know that they are indeed loved. What could possibly be a more important use of our time than that?