Dionisia Morales
When we visited family in Germany for the summer, we measured time in eggs.
Saturday mornings, my father-in-law, Klaus, left the house at half past six to be first at the farmer’s market. He brought back jumbo-sized eggs, so big that when I cradled one in my palm, my fingers could barely curl around it. Klaus bought one for each of us to have soft-boiled with crusty bread.
The big eggs were always in high demand; the farmer collected only a few dozen each week and sold his supply not long after putting up his stall and unlocking his cash box. My kids loved a trip to town and any excuse to stop at the Bäckerei for an apple turnover, but Klaus never brought them with him to the weekend market. Buckling a car seat or shortening his stride wasted precious minutes and could be the difference between buying eggs that took four minutes to cook and eggs that took six.
Klaus usually woke Meilo and Dahlia when he opened and shut the basement door to fetch his wicker shopping basket. But by the time they rolled out of bed rubbing their eyes, he was already pulling out of the driveway. Instead of going back to sleep, they waited for him, barefoot and pajamaed on the terrace, sitting by the table with their knees pulled up to their chests in the early morning chill.
When Klaus returned, we’d hear his car before seeing it edge down the driveway behind a thick hedge.
“Wer hat Hunger?” He’d pull the basket from the hatchback, the dried reed handle cracking and settling with the weight of groceries.
“Did you get the big eggs?” the kids called.
“Ja, natürlich,” he’d say without further comment.
We never ate soft-boiled eggs at home, so Meilo and Dahlia made up their own name for them. They called them Opa Eier: “grandpa eggs.”
“You know, they have a real name,” I told them one Saturday as we set the table.
“So?” they said in unison.
At Saturday breakfast, everyone’s egg-eating techniques were on display. Dahlia used a serrated-knife-sawing method to remove the pointy end of the egg; Meilo loosened the shell by tapping it with the back of a spoon and peeling it off. Dahlia dunked hand-torn pieces of bread into the yolk, but Meilo preferred to cut his bread in tidy wedges. They both watched in fascinated horror when one of their cousins denuded an entire egg and pressed its semi-congealed body and molten center across a slice of toast. But they said nothing. Only waste was criticized. Leaving even a thin layer of egg white on the curved inside of a discarded shell was verboten.
There were other rituals. We used the orange plastic egg cups that Klaus had had since the 1970s and not the shiny new metal ones. The kids said the old ones made the eggs taste better or hotter or friendlier. And although there were multiple saltshakers in the house, only the small, silver-capped one was set out on Saturdays. It was passed and repassed around the table, slowing the pace of the morning to match each person’s anticipation of the perfectly seasoned bite.
I rarely remembered the first egg of our summer trips; our humble breakfast tradition wasn’t enough to shake the jetlagged blur and fitful nights of each first week. But by the second egg, a week later, I’d settle into the rhythm of midday hot meals and a light supper of bread, cheese, and cold cuts. With the comings and goings of friends and relatives, Meilo and Dahlia fell back into speaking fluent German by egg number three and over the next weeks used their language skills to negotiate with Klaus, trying to work out terms for accompanying him to the Saturday market. Their proposed schemes were artful in their simplicity——putting an alarm clock under their pillows to wake up before him, sleeping with their shoes on to leave the house quickly, running two steps ahead of him to clear a path to the egg stall, and promising to ask for an apple turnover only after they had secured their precious cargo. Klaus listened, his head cocked to one side, a king among his subjects. He still left them behind.
Week after week, egg after egg, we settled into our life away from home. I don’t drive stick shift, so I relied on others to get me around in Germany. By egg number four, I would start to bristle at my loss of independence. I speak German well, but my sense of humor doesn’t translate. After weeks of participating in conversations in a manner best described as demure, I would begin to miss the wise-cracking, smart-ass version of myself. Sometime around the fifth egg, I’d mount a one-woman protest and speak in English or not at all. But that never lasted long, not around Klaus, whose English is limited to a handful of catchphrases. When I sat with him alone on the back terrace, I was content with silence. But the view of layered shades of green in the yard always unlocked his reverie. With eyes fixed on the sloping lawn that gave way to a stand of walnut trees bounded by grape vines heavy with summer fruit, he told me stories of getting lost in the woods as a boy or catching fish with his bare hands in the swift current by the old sawmill or the lean times after the war. I had to abandon my mono-language protest. I had so many questions.
The last eggs——numbers six, seven, and, one year, eight——were a kind of reckoning. Where had the summer gone? Our final Saturday together, instead of savoring breakfast, I was already sorting, washing, and packing clothes in my mind. As the saltshaker made its journey around the table, I thought: this time next week, we’ll be home.
Klaus rarely came to the airport to see us off; we said our goodbyes at the train station. On the platform, he took each of us by the shoulders and looked us squarely in the eye, nodding his head. We talked about the day’s itinerary and not much else. We promised to let him know when we arrived home. After boarding, as we looked out through the smoke-tinted windows, we could see him walk the length of our car, absently waving, his gaze unfocused. He couldn’t see in, but he kept his hand up like a standard-bearer.
One winter, when Klaus had heart surgery, eggs were no longer allowed in his diet. After that, from one summer to the next, his Saturday breakfasts looked like his breakfast on any other day——a bowl of muesli with yogurt and fruit and a cup of tea. The kids were old enough to go to the market on their own by then. And my husband, an early riser, could have driven into town to shop on Saturdays. But we never bought the big eggs for ourselves.
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I was intrigued by Nicolette Polek’s “personal history with clocks” and Anne Elizabeth Moore's discussion of the standardization of time. While “agreeing on a single notion of time” may be desirable for trains, it is delusional for people. As both Polek and Moore reveal, time gets its meaning from experience, and experience is never fixed.
Dionisia Morales’s essays have appeared in Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, Brevity, and other journals. Her essay collection, Homing Instincts, was a 2019 Oregon Book Award finalist.