Geezer chronicles: how the day of exploding eggs saved us from gloom
“The mouse is back,” I groused from the kitchen, where a hundred tiny lick marks pocked a block of butter left out overnight. That small invasion made it more likely we might turn on each other, as if it had to be decided who was to blame for the ruined butter, the unmanaged rodent. We were raw and as frayed as old papyrus.
A mouse was just a venial threat, but a distasteful way to start the day.
The cold drizzle of a late spring morning smeared the usually bright kitchen windows, fogging our view of red finches at the feeder.
It all exaggerated our mood. The agitations of aging and depression have been stalking us. My husband, about to turn 80, propped himself on the counter and took a breath. He confessed that as he’d struggled down the stairs for breakfast, his incorrigibly unstable right leg almost buckled. Again. He caught himself, but proceeded with the caution — a way of being very careful in the world — that has become a fact of life. He said he was “way down.”
Moving to re-examine the mouse butter, somehow we awkwardly bumped into each other. It exasperated us both — how could we not even move around this beloved room without getting in each other’s way?
Almost out of despair, we turned the collision into a hug. Almost accidentally, we gripped each other top to bottom, in front of the stove where I’d put some eggs on to boil. “I’m down, too,” I told him. “I love you,” he said.
I scooped up the chunk of butter and tossed it away.
We decided to try to start the day again, taking our mugs of coffee to the den, where our side-by-side easy chairs, much seasoned by the months of pandemic cowering, awaited us.
We settled down and poured out our hearts.
He summarized his litany of diminishment. His traitor body is “road kill,” he said with a wry smile, his body cumulatively constricting his world. He’s got issues with hearing, seeing, walking; his prostate is acting up, as are his kidneys; he’s got essential tremors and at night he tosses and turns with restless legs. All this is inexorably making his world smaller and smaller, reducing it,, he says — what is clear to both of us — reducing it, he repeated, to claustrophobic proportions. He said it’s like a TV screen gradually growing dimmer, the volume muted.
I dipped my head in guilty sympathy. I’m in better shape and eight years younger: my challenges ludicrously simpler — recurrng gut issues, deteriorating feet, necessarily thick trifocals, most of all anxiety and depression — chronic ailments of the heart and mind. But it is his aging that breaks my heart and keeps me awake at night. My husband sometimes says, “I’m so sorry to be the one who makes you see what is ahead for you.”
The perimeters of our life are narrowing.
I said I think we are in mourning. In addition to a host of external losses, we are in grief for ourselves — for the dreams we know will not be realized, for our own inevitable invisibility.
We did not think old age would be like this.
(What did we think? That we’d breeze along like when we were 35 and suddenly get raptured up at maybe 102, leaving behind only our New Balance sneakers?)
We agree we are angry, too, but as we feel our energy begin to ebb, so too does our ability to fight back. Like mice crowded in a too-small cage, we’re sometimes miserably inclined to attack each other. Like when the mouse gets into the butter.
I am grateful for a husband who tells me how he feels: it’s a starting point in navigating the balance of daily life. In the geometry of aging conjugal depression, there are so many tough angles, sharp turns, risks, perils, and disruptions.
Usually if one of us hits a low, the other takes up the slack — to give comfort, reassurance, kindness, empathy, to offer perspective. That’s how we roll: sometimes he’s down, sometimes it’s me struggling in the existential swamp. In our marriage the balance is sometimes skewed, with my ongoing troughs more frequent, more volatile, more florid, than his; he is inexplicably cheerier in general, even though it’s his body aging faster than mine, even though it is his family business that is struggling in pandemic tremors. Even though it was his daughter who died last year.
The moment was dangerous. This time his plunge corresponded to one of my own.
We could feel it coming: the two of us cascading out of control down into the darkest valleys. We reached for each other’s hand across the gulf between our little fetal kingdoms of the easy chairs.
And then the eggs exploded.
I’d left them bubbling on the stove, forgotten in our intensely mutual cri de coeur.
A sudden BANG followed by a shower of sound like a tinkling hailstorm.
What?
Imagine the two of us struggling out of our chairs “fast” to see what happened,
When we finally made it to the kitchen, what we saw was such a mess that for about three seconds we just stood there agape.
Then I lunged for the burner and clicked it off — the little pan black and smoking — hollering “DAMN-Shit-Damn!”
What six eggs can do: A thousand tiny torpedoes. Hundreds — shards of shattered shell and hard-cooked yoke and shrapnel of white.
“What a crackup.” My droll husband couldn’t resist.
And then we started grinning, and then chuckling, then outright laughing. Egg parts on all the burners, unde the burners. Egg parts on the ceiling, All over the counters, on the floor in a seven-foot wide radius. Even on the fridge — on the fridge magnets — under the fridge. Under the vent hood. On the dishwasher. On the sink way across the room. On artsy framed photos of garlic and sage. Eggs on the drawer knobs.
Sometimes physics is a blessing.
Ignoring our creaky bones, we cleaned it up. Ted pushed the broom and I scooped the dustpan — doing something together.I wiped down the stove, put the sizzling pan under water. He slid the broom under baseboards, into the 90-degree angles of corners. Wiped off the drawer knobs, the sink. Reached up into the oven hood. Moving our arms and legs while laughing stirred up a little bit of underground vim.
“I know this was my fault, but I don’t care,” I found myself saying. “It’s just so absurd.”
“In 10,000 years, none of this will matter,” my husband offered, repeating one of his favorite ideas. “So, who cares?”
I hate when he says that.
“That means I’ll be dead and nobody will remember us, dammit,” I squawked, as I always do.
“Nobody remembers us now,” he said.
“Do you have to be so goddamned right?” I stopped to brush off his cheek, where a little clot of eggwhite dangled. We smiled at each other.
“What the hell,” I said. “Fuck those poor fools in 10,000 years.”
All day we felt lighter, as if we too had been cracked open and flung out of our gloomy shells by surprising life forces.
So the exploding eggs rescued us — putting a stop, at least for one day, to our long lachrymose arias of grief. Wiping down the kitchen together with my husband, who I saw could still push a mean broom, I felt incongruously merry.
Jan Worth-Nelson of Flint, MI is the author of essays and poems in Belt Magazine, Hypertext Review, the MacGuffin, Nice Cage, Gravel and many others. She wrote the novel Night Blind and is a consulting editor of East Village Magazine.
