David’s Lousy Eggs

The great poet Robert Frost published in 1916 a collection of poems titled Mountain Interval.  The first poem in the compilation is “The Road Not Taken,” and I have often read and pondered the myriad of meanings one can extract from this masterpiece.  I’m certain Mr. Frost had his own personal meaning(s) embedded within the lines, but I believe my own meanings would be significantly altered if I were to discover the true reason behind this poem.

Every day choices are made for better or for worse.  And sometimes worse isn’t so bad, it’s just not the best choice.  But then again, what is there to compare with?  If one chooses one way over another, how is that person to know if the other way would have been better or worse?

I eat; therefore, I cook.  I do not consider myself to be a great cook, and there are certain persons who have informed me my time spent in the kitchen is time wasted, but I like to cook.  I have a collection of recipes from many sources, mostly from my family or my own experiments, and usually I follow them (more or less).  My palate is not the most refined, and I must admit this is an advantage when cooking just for me.  However, I rarely get to cook just for me, so I have developed a list of “go to” recipes based upon observing the reactions from my guinea pigs guests.

Today I made scrambled eggs for myself.  Just me.  No one else.  And I did them up in David style.  Yes, I could have chosen a different road, but no, I chose the road less traveled.  Even I knew these eggs were lousy, but I licked the plate clean.  I even went back for seconds; however, seconds were not to be.  My wife discovered my afternoon snack, and she helped herself to what remained.  I didn’t know what to say.  She added salt, pepper, and my extra slice of toast to her plate and sat down to watch some television.

As she tasted the first fork full, she looked down at the plate as though it was something more akin to roadkill.  She lifted the plate to her nose and sniffed of it two or three times, and then with it at eye level, she moved some of it around with her fork.  I think she was trying to determine what was in those eggs, but she took a second bite, and a third.  Soon it was a clean plate, and she returned to the kitchen to look for more.

My scrambled eggs were simply a cleaning of the refrigerator.  To the four jumbo eggs I added some mushrooms, Parmesan cheese, sliced sweet mini-peppers, some kind of meat in a container, a splotch of cheap store-bought salsa, some forgotten corn kernels, and a few other things that had been sitting on the shelf way too long.  I’m not really certain what was in one of those containers, but it scrambled as well as everything else.

It’s not that I necessarily like this type of eggs, but I seem to do this every two or three weeks.  Maybe that road is more traveled than I realized.