Dodo Eggs

This post is part of an archive.  To read the current version, we recommend  Dodo Egg Or Turkey Scratch.

It’s time to test your truth sniffing abilities. Can you pull wheat from chaff? Are you able to rescue fruit from cottage cheese? Does your eye find decent programming during daytime television?

Both stories have embellishments and shreds of truth. Read each separately and reckon your judgment without regard to the other. It is possible neither has a backbone of truth or both could be gently lifted from my actual experience.

Egg #1-

I was born a whopping boy of almost eleven pounds. My mother wasn’t conscious when my first breath was taken and the nurses immediately upgraded my diaper regimen to “sumo.”

To all eyes and measurements, I appeared healthy but I was underdeveloped in one key area. The valve that closed my stomach was not fully formed. That meant most of the food I took in purchased a round trip ticket. By some witnesses estimate, I regurgitated at least a third of what I ate.

Mama Teply found this circumstance annoying. It was hard enough for a new, exhausted mother to look nice but to try and accessorize with burp rags was too much. She tried old art smocks which failed to catch fire with local fashion scene.

The constant burping up wasn’t all thorns and hexes. For their amusement and mine, my family would strap my round body into an old wind-up swing. It was a four-legged contraption made mostly of metal with a vinyl sling for a seat. A few quick turns of the handle on the mechanism’s side sent me click-click-clacking back and forth.

With each forward swing my momentum brought up a small portion whatever was in my stomach. To a young family with a poorly developed sense of humor, it was amusing to watch the infant burp-up in perfect synchrony with the swing’s pendulum path.

Egg #2-

I have two brothers whose sense of humor runs parallel with my own. The rare times we all spend together hold a high concentration of happy memories. We’ve squandered hours sitting around beverages so saturated with sugar you have to push for your straw to earn penetration.

One of our favorite maxims is, “You can’t crash if you don’t stop.”

When my first brother finally found someone who would adapt him into the fraternity of the blissfully wed, he asked our youngest brother and me to participate in assembling the wedding.

Our sister-in-law-to-be discovered the responsibilities we had been entrusted with and went about eroding them. “No, no don’t worry about picking up the tuxes. I will have one of my brides maids do that.” Also, “Make sure you keep the ring in the right front pocket of you tux’s jacket. The pant’s pocket has a slight hole in the upper part of the pocket for pulling your shirt and we don’t want you to loose the ring.”

She even had a couple of her bride’s operatives (oops, I mean maids.) keep watch as we decorated my brother’s car. What violations they were looking for was beyond me but I’m sure their garter belts held nightsticks.

The one thing we were allowed to assemble was the reception slide show, which set photos of the families and the couple to music. It was an easy enough task and one my brother and I had no problem doing.

“Say, you know what we ought to do?”

“No, what?”

“Let’s pull a photo of some overly happy family off the Internet and slip it into the presentation. We’ll slip it in between one of the transition parts and give it an extra three seconds of exposure. Do you think anyone would notice?”

“I don’t know but I’m not going along unless their waving with grins you would need antidepressants to achieve.”

We did so and made sure to laugh it out early in order to maintain our composure during the presentation.

To my eternal dismay, no one batted an eye as they admired what was to everyone in the room a collection of perfect, well-wishing strangers. The only sound audible over the music was a strangled snicker from my brother on the other side of the table.

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