Wildcat 82 | Stories | The great egg caper

The Great Egg Caper

By Mike Callahan

Do you remember Mrs. Payne’s home and family living class? Yes, that was the one that you took if you were looking for the classic blow-off class. The class the rest of us took who were not going to go to MIT or Harvard. It was mostly filled with jocks and the drill team, so while the rest of the class was reading the Brave New World and studying Chaucer or learning Advanced Physics or taking Chemistry 2 - 4 or any number of those special "K"-level classes because they were worried about their class rank and GPA, we were learning how to bake a cupcake, change a diaper, arrange a table, which fork to use and in some cases how to use a fork (not to mention any names Doug Smith). Well you may then recall the one way that Mrs. Payne had at getting back at all of her young Einsteins: she used to have them all baby-sit an egg for one week. That’s right folks, while you were trying to remember what Avagrados number was for, or calculate how many electrons there were remaining after you bombarded boron gas with photons, or remember the Pythagorean theorem, we were babysitting eggs. Now tell me who the really smart ones are? Can any body tell me when they last used Avagadros number? Better yet don't. I wont know what the heck you were talking about anyway.

But I digress; the rules for baby-sitting eggs were simple: you had to keep your baby egg with all the time for one week and it could not get broken. If you left the egg somewhere like your locker and got caught by Mrs. Payne without it, you would get an F for the 6 weeks. You could hire a babysitter, which of course none of us did, except maybe Anita Donelle (the moral compass of a saint, that girl). Well as it turns out, some people just take to parenting better than others, and being the doting father that he was, Jim Denk fashioned a beautiful crib for his egg out of a male athletic cup support system. How Jim came to be in possession of one of these, particularly one that was so large is anyone's guess.

By this time in our lives we have all seen the tragic results of egg envy, and this was no different. It seems that Jack Sarver had just been eaten up with a case of Egg Envy.

0ne day after lunch Jack could no longer restrain himself, through much conniving and cajoling Jack managed to break the secret coded system that was our locker system and get into Jim’s locker. As we all rounded the corner after lunch down the senior hall, there stood Jack with Jim’s Egg held high above his head, and like something out of a Stephen King Movie, he dropped the egg and it shattered while Jim ran down the hall shouting "Noooooooooooo.”

Later that day, as Jim and I walked to the field house (locker room) to get ready for our other mind expanding seventh period class "athletics," we were discussing the prospects of avenging the death of Jim’s egg when we came upon a dead rat in the courtyard. I may not have been much on the Pythagorean theorem but peer pressure I could do. Truth be told, Jim did not take much convincing, that is how that dead smelly maggot-infested rat ended up in a shoebox in Jack Sarver's locker over the long Easter weekend. And that is what the smell was when we came back.

Jack, I hope the years have softened your memory of that awful smell. Just to show that there are no hard feelings, when we get together at the reunion I will let Jim buy you a Snapple.

By the way does any body remember who broke the egg on my letter Jacket while Leslie Hubbard was wearing it? Jack if it was you, no Snapple. Jim and I ended up as roommates at Texas Tech, where he helped me pass freshman English, I unfortunately was not much help to Jim at all, quite the contrary in fact but I will let him tell that story. Which should not be too difficult because the last I heard he received his degree in English from Tech. So long.