For that matter, I’ll take it any way you want to dish it out: scrambled, fried, poached, hard boiled, soft boiled, asparagus on a yolk, egg white omelet, Denver Omelet coddled, shirred, deviled, foo young, quail or duck eggs”, name it I’ll do it. Tart it up with kippers, lox, bacon, sausage, spuds or casserole. Frittata me Daddy! Dream it up, I’ll try it at least once. I mean, if my capacity and desire for egg dishes equated the myriad talents of a high end professional working girl, Elliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, John Ensign and David Letterman, just to name four of many more boys with the hungries, they would be fighting to get to my kitchen door, panting to get their ticket stamped.

If they had meetings for my kind I’d be at the front of the room at least three times a week.

"Hi, I’m Bill, I’m a Comfort Brother and I’m an eggaholic."

"Hi Bill"

From Innocent to Corrupted I can remember the day I lost control. And it was the unlikeliest of persons who started me on the path to eggaliscious ruin. I think I was about twelve years old, in the early sixties, visiting my grandparents in tiny Iuka Mississippi, locally famous for the curative powers of the sulphery mineral springs in the park in the middle of town. Iuka, named after an Indian Chief, was not too far from Pick Wick Lake, and was about a half an hour by train from Muscle Shoals Alabama. Luckily, I had a grandmother who was filled with boundless and endless unconditional love for me and all her grandchildren, and who seemed to be from a time and place totally alien to a kid growing up in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. From where I sit now, she might as well been from the Moon. And for me, that love was expressed by food. She had a big garden and a chicken coop, made the best apple sauce in the world from the two trees outside her back door. She, Pearl Barnette, made pecan pies from the trees next to the driveway that dropped permanent inky blots on my Dad’s 55 Buick that evoked his wrath. Everything was fresh and everything came from about five miles around granddaddy’s and her little house on Rowena, the yellow gravel street a ten minute walk to Main Street where Granddaddy, Ernest, had a small pharmacy. There were Mimosa trees, a swing on the porch, no air-conditioning or TV reception and the screen door to the back porch banged with each entry or exit.

One morning while my mom, dad and brother slept I got up early and headed to the kitchen, a small and simple place that was always warm and frequently very hot, with uneven linoleum under foot and a green and yellow parakeet named Pretty Boy in a cage by the kitchen table, the same table that Granddaddy gave me my first taste of coffee, a small dram into my milk, the kind of thing grandparents do that my own would have never. I love grandparents and can’t wait to corrupt my own children’s children. But on that morning in a slick, ebony colored cast iron skillet forged in Muscle Shoals (I own it now) Grandma made me two eggs over very easy from her henhouse that she had robbed an hour earlier. I'm sure there was bacon and/or sausage involved, maybe grits, certainly toast (Broiled in the gas oven, four pats of melted butter, like yellow rouge blots, soaking the crispy bread.) to run through the bright orangey yolk that spread on my plate.

And I asked for more, a signal to anyone paying attention that this boy had an appetite, and it probably wouldn’t stop at eggs. Of course she complied, smiling, loving to feed someone she loved, a feeling I now know so well. I asked for more, and more and more. I ate a dozen fresh eggs that morning. That’s how it all started. I can’t stop. I am a punch line in my own house. To quote one of my sons: Dad will put an egg on anything.

Damn right I will. But it doesn’t make me a bad person. And I’m worth it.

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