200words.

even though it doesn’t meet as regularly as it used to and even if some of the furrier members have moved on to other, more kitty-appropriate groups, The Wine and Cigarette Club (LLC) is serious business.

the meeting minutes are mostly made up of long stretches of couch-sitting with an occasional CD change/short video thrown in for good measure.

there are some medium-size stretches of conversations covering homemade heartbeat recorders, binary stars, geraniums, boys for pele and crochet.

there are short stretches of exchange still waiting to be translated.

the best part about the W&CC?
besides the W and the many C’s?

the 4am egg sandwiches.

cayenne is optional but, all the diehards prefer their sandwiches with, rather than without.

they’re cooked in the ceremonial tiny cast iron pan and are ready in approximately the amount of time to smoke half a cigarette and fall half asleep.

or, alternatively, get bitten by the furrier members of the club.

Her voice was no louder than usual, Caribbean cadences lifting and rocking the consonants, but each single-syllable word outlined with menace.

I blinked, struck still, and met the gleam of her eye, leveled on me from two feet above. I was a scrawny kid, prescribed iron supplements by the pediatrician.

“The… what? What egg?”

“The egg. What did you do with it. It was right here.”

Lucille was my grandmother’s cook, and I would spend family visits in the kitchen, “helping” the Jamaican woman while the rest sipped cocktails in stockings and suits in the living room.

I’d been fishing a sugar cube out of the Domino box to pop in my mouth when she’d surprised me. My eyes swept her counters. An egg. What the heck was she even doing with an egg? Not baking anything—she’d been cleaning up while a garlicky leg of lamb sizzled in the oven.

And then it hit me. My hiccups were gone. I looked at her with sudden understanding—she’d scared them right out of me. Lucille gave me a wink and her signature grin and returned to wiping those sparkling counters.

I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I don’t like farm-fresh eggs. I grew up on them (we had chickens - I’ve been permanently scarred by the smell of boiling feathers and the spraying blood from a chicken whose head has just been cut off, and yes, they really do run around if you don’t have them tied up by their feet). But my mom and sisters and grandma used to get new chickens - peepies - every year, just to get the fresh eggs and then slaughter the chickens, each woman or girl holding firmly taut lips in the “mom face” and taut chicken skin to pull out wet feathers.

I used to “hunt” the eggs for my grandma, wipe them clean once back in the house and nestle them in her old strawberry baskets. Every morning I’d say, “Grandma, can I go hunt the eggs?”
“Sorry, Peapicker, I already did it.” Or, “Go ahead, I left them there for you” or “No, it’s your brother’s turn.”

Hunting the eggs was never as fun at my house…. the chicken poop was ranker than at Grandma’s, and it was dustier, wormier, with many-legged bugs that seemed to come from the Earth’s core squirming under the wood planks walking up to the door. Disgusting.

Anyway, someone at work brings fresh eggs to whoever wants to buy them every Monday. I got some the second week. But the yolks won’t crack right - the shell won’t split over the membrane part - it hangs on for dear life and you have to tip the shell carefully so the yolk won’t break, and then bits of the shell finally let go and fall right into the skillet or the bowl or hot water. And those egg whites seem to hold the shell bits more firmly than store bought - you can’t just get them out with a fingertip dab - it takes a scrape.

Hmmm.

My grandma was a farm-fresh egg. But I loved her.
Let me rethink this.

There is a woman who used to work in my lab who I have never actually met but in my mind she is somewhat of a legend. She is almost manic about her work and was known as the “Whitney Houston” of the lab (keep in mind she was a doctoral student in the lab in the mid to late nineties so that was actually a compliment and not an affront to her character)-intelligent, sharp, always well dressed and impeccably groomed.

A couple of years ago she was in town for a conference and my boss came to her hotel room for a dinner date. She walked out of the bathroom and took a couple sniffs. She asked “Laura, do you smell that? Do you smell that sulfur?” My manager sniffed the air, trying to smell what she was smelling. She said “You know what that is? That’s the smell of our eggs burning.”

Ha.