Why the face mask?

My dad tried to cook his first meal today in twenty years. He got up at 9 a.m. and beat three eggs in a bowl [Ed.: My God! The first version of this sentence said that he “beat three eyes in a bowl.”], but me and Richard and his girlfriend Aimee were all still sleeping, so he dawdled around the house until 11 a.m., when I woke up. The beaten eggs were all golden with oxidation by then, but my dad rejoiced that I was awake so his culinary turn could finally find fruition.

Before one cooks, however, one must wear the appropriate cooking clothes. For my dad, this meant:

1) a shower cap (to catch follicles and dander before they despoiled the scrambled eggs)
2) safety goggles (to catch the blinding spray of cooking oil)
3) a face mask (for anthrax?)



Though he is an engineer by trade, my dad has some difficulty understanding kitchen systems. This morning’s cookout looked like a herky-jerky comedy of errors that betrayed a fundamental misapprehension of how to prepare a meal. These were his actions, in order, with the time elapsed in parentheses:

1) He beats three eggs in a bowl. (0:00:00)
2) He adds salt and pepper to the beaten eggs. (0:01:00)
3) He reads the newspaper in the bathroom, and curses loudly. (0:03:00)
4) He turns the right burner to low. (2:00.00)
5) He turns the right burner to very high. (2:00:30)
6) He leaves the ungreased skillet on the burner. (2:02:00)
7) He opens the bag of bread. (2:02:30)
8) He turns the toaster oven to broil, claiming that it needs to “warm up.” (2:02:40)
9) He turns the right burner off. (2:03:00)
10) He closes the bag of bread and puts it away, having taken nothing out. (2:03:30)
11) He opens a bag of salad-in-a-bag. (2:04:00)
12) He dumps the contents of the salad-in-a-bag into the bag, and agitates it strenuously for a minute. (2:06:00)
13) He turns off the toaster oven. (2:06:30)
14) He pours the salad-in-a-bag into three plates, one for me, one for Richard, and one for Aimee. (2:07:00)
15) He turns on the right burner, and pours enough oil to almost cover the pan. (2:08:00)
16) He pours in the eggs. (2:08:30)
17) He struggles with the spatula as the eggs stick to the bottom of the pan. (2:09:30)
18) He lifts the pan of half-cooked eggs into the air, about chest level (2:09:45) and walks away from the burner (still on, 2:10:00) and around the kitchen, scraping the eggs off the pan and onto a plate (2:10:30)
19) I make some toast in the toaster oven, eat my eggs, and congratulate him for cooking the most delicious meal I’ve ever had. (2:15:30)

The entire time he was cooking, he kept saying how delicious everything would taste. AMAZING.

(Unrelated: Does anyone remember that comic from the 1980s that asked its readers to send in their drawings of egg-related puns for publication? Like a drawing a sombrero on an oval, and labelling it "M-eggs-ican"? (I think that was the actual example in the comic.) I think I sent one in but never got a response. Eggs-cruciating. But still s-eggs-y.)