The Bean Counters Give Me 9.6 Years

I hate to admit it but there was a day when I found it inconceivable that anyone could forget they’d put a pot of eggs on a gas stove burner and then turned the heat to high.

I mean, seriously, a brain capable of that level of error would belong in the Smithsonian.

Well, two weeks ago, I put my usual half dozen eggs in a pan of water to hard boil. Turned the heat to high. Set my little timer to nine minutes. Went upstairs to my back bedroom home office and sat down to write a sentence or two before going downstairs to turn off the heat, cover the pan, and then wait 22 minutes before draining the pan and setting the eggs aside in a bowl to cool.

Mind you, I don’t follow this process just for aesthetic reasons. Like any old man with OCD tendencies, I follow it because it works. And also because every week I eat three of the boiled eggs: one on Monday night with pats of Tillamook butter; one on Wednesday night with dabs of tartar sauce; and the third on Saturday night with a King Oscar brisling sardine on each half of the egg.

Yes, Observant Reader, you’re correct: I do cut each egg in half, longitudinally, on each of the three nights. Why? Well, I can get an entire hard-boiled egg in my mouth if I open dentist-visit-wide, but, unfortunately, my mouth isn’t cavernous enough to then chew the egg.

I don’t want to die by choking.

Speaking of choking, I’ve given thought to how I’d like to die. I’m in no hurry to do it, mind you, but I’ll be 79 in five more months so I’m no longer a spring chicken being ignored by the Reaper.

Happily, statistics are in my favor, according to what I’ve read. The bean counters give me 9.6 more years, and the leading causes of death include heart disease, cancer, strokes, and unintentional injuries. Oh, by the way, those bean counters would file a fellow who forgets a gas burner into that last category.

Anyway, ideally I’ll go in my sleep and quietly, painlessly, and effortlessly log off in the middle of a sweet dream and wake up in the Great Beyond with my late wife Ellen smiling and laughing at me, along with a gaggle of dogs, cats, birds, lizards, and assorted other animal companions who filled our lives with their barking, meowing, cawing, slithering, and other happy sounds. That would be a good way to ice the cake of a long and interesting life. For sure.

Not so ideally, I would die in a raging fire because I forgot to turn off a burner when I was boiling a half dozen eggs, three for evening snacks, and the other three for my weekly bowl of potato salad. I would burn to a crisp, trapped upstairs in my little split-level home because the kitchen had gone up in flames when the water boiled off and the stainless steel pot melted and the dish towels on the oven’s handle erupted in flames like an enraged volcano and the flames from the towels ignited the grease behind the stove and the stove hood that I hadn’t bothered to clean in eight years and then, kaboom, the gas lines blew and so did CasaDay!

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but such a nasty exit from this world might have happened two weeks ago when I put the usual six eggs on to boil and promptly forgot I had done so. If that wasn’t bad enough, my old ears failed to hear the frantic dinging of my kitchen timer when it went off.

There I was, happily typing away, giggling at a clever line that had appeared out of nowhere for this newsletter, patting myself on the back at how funny you’d find a silly simile, and then, somehow, luckily, I was suddenly so thirsty I thought I’d just spent an entire summer vacation lost in the Gobi Desert. So I got up from the computer, started down the seven stairs to the kitchen, and on maybe the fifth stair heard a weird kind of pounding/tumbling noise. You know the kind. I've got rocks in my head. Yeah, that kind.

“What the hell?” I’m thinking as I walk into the kitchen to find six eggs in maybe a half inch of water bouncing against the side of the pan the way the goofy Lawrence Welk dancers used to do when Myron Floren smiled that toothy grin of his while playing his stupid accordion.

And the timer? Sitting there on the counter, quiet as a grave without a body, exhausted from dinging itself hoarse like a greedy auctioneer itching for one last bid.

Since this is a family publication, I won’t share the curse word that came out of my mouth as I rushed to turn off the burner and move the pan off the stove, but I will describe how I then fell to my knees on the 1976 linoleum of my old kitchen, turned my head upward in gratitude, and thanked the Great Beyond for saving me from turning into a crispy critter in my beloved home office.

***

Since I usually end these ramblings with a moral, here’s the latest, and it didn't take a genius to spot it: I learned that my short-term memory has deteriorated more than I believed possible and that the day had come when I needed to be constantly mindful of turning on burners, stove ovens, microwaves, hot water taps, cold water taps, and everything else that could either fry or flood my humble abode.

I mentioned my OCD tendencies above, predilections of mine that have always been both a blessing and a curse. In this instance, they proved a blessing because it dawned on me I already had a perfect tool to use for all the other ways I could die before my time.

What tool, you ask? One of my twelve kitchen timers! Yes, I bought twelve because they were on sale, magnetic, small, and easy to misplace, especially with a sinking short-term memory.

So, from now on, without exception, I’ll set one of my small timers and bring it with me, no matter where I go, until it warns me to return to the kitchen and turn off a burner, my stove oven, my microwave, hot water taps, cold water taps, and everything else that could either fry or flood CasaDay.

I trust you’ll join me in mindfulness during the coming week. Next Tuesday I’ll tell you the story of Lucy, the kitten my late wife Ellen rescued from a dumpster behind McDonald’s right after we moved to North Carolina in the fall of 1997.

Chet

P.S. By the way, I not only hold onto the stair railings in this house with one hand going up and down, but I also walk around with a kitchen timer in the other. Which means I'm fresh out of hands, so I'll ask with my mouth: please forward this issue to somebody who enjoys my kind of stories, and tell me in the comments what you've forgotten lately.