Sucking Eggs with Gramma

My wife's driving and even though I should know better, I direct her to change lanes.

She shoots me a glare and says, "Don't teach your grandmother how to suck eggs!"

Silence. Morgue-like silence. Silence so intense that even the crickets are stunned quiet.

Finally... "What?"

"Don't teach your grandmother how to suck eggs," she repeats.

"What are you talking about?"

She rolls her eyes and rolls into the next lane. "Oh, come on, like you haven't heard that a thousand times."

"No. I haven't. Not once! First of all...ew. Second...what the hell's it mean anyway?"

My wife, always an educator and not an enabler, says, "Look it up."

Well, I'm always lazy and not a researcher. Besides, a smart phone may be smart, but my wife's smarter, not to mention a lot quicker.

Exasperated, I say, "C'mon, just tell me!"

She won't. "Look it up."

Okay, this went on for a while and I still didn't know what the phrase meant. I mean...is sucking eggs even a thing? Again, I reiterate...ewww. THIS I looked up. Apparently it's a different method of eating eggs by putting a small hole in the shell and sucking at it. Raw. *Choke* Gasp!

Secondly, ever since my wife said this horrendous phrase, I can't erase the image of my grandma sucking away at an egg, her whiskers fringing around the shell. The horror!

Thirdly, I've given this way too much thought.

Finally, yes, I did break down and look the phrase up. It means don't tell someone how to do something they have more knowledge about. Huh. So...all grandmothers are expert egg-suckers is the take-away from this lesson in semantics. Now I'm seeing vivid imagery of a line of lil' ol' ladies sucking on their eggs. I'm scarred for life.

Don't even get me going on "You can't have your cake and eat it, too." (Why, actually, yes, yes you can have cake and eat it, too. In fact, I'm willing to wager that when you offer someone a piece of cake, 99% of the people will consume said cake. Unless, of course, "having" means possession, so if you eat the cake, you no longer possess it, not really, and then we're getting into the nebulous world of philosophy, which never helped anyone out, and ARGGGGH, I'm thinking wayyyyy too much about all of this...).

While on the topic of obsession, you'll find a host of obsessed characters in my short story collection, Twisted Tales from Tornado Alley. There's the man whose wife may (or may not) be cheating on him; the guy who proclaims much too loudly he's not a racist; the young woman obsessed with finding her missing brother even if it takes her into the bowels of Hell; and many, many more. (Now you can kinda see why I like writing about obsessed characters!) Go read the book. Perfect for Christmas gifts (especially if you don't like the person)!