Shell Shocked

By Gordon Hopkins It has been nearly a week since it ended. Yet, as always, we are still dealing with the aftermath. And when it happens, we all ask that same question, with an ever-more-desperate quiver in our collective voices.Easter is over. Why do I still have so many dang eggs?Of course, no one wants to address the real question, the real crux of the problem.Why did we color so many eggs in the first place?On the surface, coloring eggs for a holiday seems like a relatively harmless practice. By and large, eggs come in a pretty limited and boring palette: mostly white, with a few brown and even fewer blue. Obviously, we’re talking about the traditional chicken kind of eggs here. Occasionally, you might find a chicken egg of another color, like black. You probably shouldn’t eat those.Plus, people eat eggs all the time. So, once you are finished coloring and hiding and finding the eggs, they won’t go to waste, unlike all those pumpkins carved up for Halloween. (Don’t even get me started.)Where the problem comes is the realization that always comes too late: even the biggest family isn’t going to eat eight dozen eggs.Look, I understand. Really, I do. When I was a kid, I remember my mother buying those “egg dying kits.” There were a lot of different brands and different kinds. We usually got the ones with the different colored tablets that you dropped into cups of water and vinegar.And I remember mom bringing those kits home along with cartons and cartons of eggs. Then, the day before Easter, she would start boiling pots of water on the stove. Every burner had a pot of boiling water and every pot had eight to ten eggs beneath the bubbling, steaming surface. Soon, walking into the kitchen was like trekking through a rain forest.Then, that night, my mother got out some of my dad’s coffee cups and filled them with water and vinegar. She let us kids drop the color tablets in cuz that was always the best part. They fizzed like psychedelic Alka-Seltzer.The kits also came with a couple of flimsy wire “holders” that we were supposed to use to lower the eggs into the cups filled with fizzing, vinegary-smelling dye. Exactly why we had to use those wire things instead of spoons or our fingers was never made clear. I only know that, when we tried to fish the eggs out with the wire, the eggs would inevitably fall, hit the kitchen counter and leave a blue or red or yellow or green or purple or orange splotch. Then we would pick them up with our fingers and put them back onto the wire holder, leaving blue or red or yellow or green or purple or orange stains on our fingers and, subsequently, blue or red or yellow or green or purple or orange stains on everything else we touched.The kits also came with a little wax crayon that we could use to draw pictures or write something on eggs that wouldn’t appear until you dipped the eggs into the dye. It was kind of like writing secret messages with invisible ink. I wonder how many spies passed along stolen intelligence via that method. I think I smell a new Dan Brown thriller in the works: “The Easter Egg Code.”It was fun, of course. At least, it was fun for the kiddos. I can’t imagine it was any great thrill for my mother and likely even less so for my father, who complained every morning for the next week that his daily cup-a-joe tasted like salad dressing.My point is, I understand the temptation to overdo it. There is a lot of build up to the whole Easter egg dying event and you know the kids are apt to be disappointed if you stop at just six eggs.So, we are still left with the question of what to do with an entire flock of pre-born, pastel-colored chickens. Honestly, there are only so many meals in a week where you can stomach egg salad sandwiches. (In my case, that number is zero. I HATE egg salad.)In an attempt to make your life a bit more bearable, I have come up with an alternative use for all those eggs that nobody wants to eat.I call it: “Egg Skeet.”The traditional targets for skeet shooting are made out of clay. That is something I’ve never understood. Aside from everything else, the danger from hard clay shrapnel cannot be overstated. Think how much safer and more satisfying it is to blast into smithereens a brightly colored egg. Especially after a week of eating hard boiled eggs for lunch.There are other possible egg-themed variations on popular sports, of course, such as egg baseball and egg golf. You can freeze them and play egg hocky. There is also egg football, I suppose, but that probably would require an egg from a bigger bird than your average chicken. Maybe an ostrich or emu.

Gordon Hopkins

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