Red's Wrap

You never know about a hard-boiled egg, how it’s going to peel, whether the shell will slide off or insist on being picked apart tiny shard by tiny shard. Once, when I volunteered for the morning shift at an overnight winter homeless shelter, I became obsessed with the lack of protein in the breakfast offerings. Cellophane-wrapped raspberry Danish, third-day bagels from the store up the street, bananas curling with their ripeness.

               So, I’d go to the quick mart up the street and buy a slew of eggs, enough for each person to start their day with God’s little nutrition gift – a perfectly boiled egg. Eighty eggs. I’d boil them at night, put them in the fridge, and very early in the morning while it was still dark, carry them in the big green plastic bowl that I use to make potato salad for twenty people.

               One day when I stepped out to the back parking lot of the shelter, I caught a glimpse of a guy peeling one of my eggs. I felt warm inside, righteous, like I’d single-handedly brought him protein in a sea of day-old carbohydrates. He was studying the egg, peering at it, fussing at it with his fingers, his gloves stuffed under one arm. His warm breath hung in the zero-degree cold. He continued to peel the egg, tiny bit by tiny bit, until he walked over to the trash bin and threw the egg in, threw it hard like he was mad. “Fuck it!” he said and then walked away into the barely light morning.

               I wondered if all the eggs were as hard to peel as his. Had I created a sneaky, unpleasant way to remind them life is hard, that helpers’ help is often twisted, well-intentioned but conditional. Surely, some of the eggs would peel easily. I only hoped this. I had no way of knowing.

               After that, I learned about the perils of new eggs, how boiled eggs peel better if they are older. I also learned about putting vinegar in the boiling water, so much that my house smelled like the days I dyed Easter eggs in the kitchen with my kids. But from then on, I worried heartily about my boiled eggs when I brought them to the shelter in the morning. It tortured me. My good deed started to torture me, but I didn’t quit boiling eggs and taking them in the green bowl. I would have to live with not knowing if the eggs were horrible to peel or easy to peel. I just had to hope for the best.

Photo by Mustafa Bashari on Unsplash

I’ve found that looking out the kitchen window first thing in the morning and wringing my hands while the coffee is brewing sets just the right mood for my day.

You have to do some preemptive hand wringing so you aren’t tempted to take your hands of the wheel when the urge strikes. If you have some hand wringing stored up, you’re good for hours.

Our daughter is very ill and has been in the hospital for two weeks. Her little girl is living with us. So, we have the almost indescribable joy of being around a crazy happy five-year old all the time along with intense worry and anxiety about the future.

We continue our practice of taking our first cup of coffee on the back porch if the temperature is at least above freezing and there isn’t much wind. Now, our granddaughter joins us eating Golden Grahams out of a coffee mug. She wears one of my winter hats and her bathrobe, sitting in a canvas camp chair tucked in with the blanket from the couch. We talk about the birds and the squirrels and other pressing matters like how all the people have to go to school but animals don’t.

I spend a lot of time in the car driving to and fro. My backseat has erupted into a pile of coloring books, markers, jackets, small bags of animal crackers, and orange peels. The valet parking guys are very nice to us, including the guy who whistles all the time and from a distance sounds like birds recorded in some pristine wild. He whistles while sick and bandaged people wait in wheelchairs and one little girl spins in circles, her arms stretched out and hair flying like this day, this moment is the best one of her life.

I can see the envy on the faces of all the sick and bandaged people. I know that envy, that remembering of a time when we were carefree like this little girl although the feel of it, the breath of it is so distant now.

Maybe it’s enough to know that we had our turn to spin in circles and listen to the man whistle like a bird.

I thought of that looking out the window this morning while wringing my hands.

Sometimes if you can’t write about a thing, you can write around the edges of a thing.

Today, while I was waiting outside the hospital for the valet parking guy to get my car, I espied a huge man clad in all white sitting in a wheelchair a few feet away. He had blond hair but was older and had a face that had piles of years, decades, folded every which way. He was enormous, so much so that where his limbs began and his torso ended couldn’t be determined. His feet were bandaged, letting only his long yellow toenails see the light of day.

“I was at the hospital for two hours. The doctor said I’d die if I left but I’m outside waiting for my ride.” He held his cellphone to his voluminous cheek. I imagined that the phone had gotten stuck there, swallowed by the whaleness of his face.

I didn’t know who he was talking to, I didn’t want to listen that carefully, but the man knew I was looking at him and when I wasn’t looking at him, I was thinking about him. I was thinking about how monstrous he was, fierce in his massive weight, scary in the look given from under his thick eyebrow. Who are you to look at me? To listen to what the doctor said?

And then I chastised myself for my unkind revulsion and tried to imagine the man as he might have appeared in his high school yearbook. He would be sitting up straight, maybe with a white shirt and tie, his hair would be parted on the side and combed to one side. His mom would have ironed that shirt for him while the sun was still coming up. Where was his mother now? Was she gone? Would she come fetch him?

It was not my place to wonder about his life, nor to look at the giant man a single more time. When the valet pulled up in my car, I gave him $5 and told him I’d see him tomorrow. I never looked back. I don’t know if the man was looking at me. He might have been.