Gathering Goat Eggs

Gathering goat eggs.

My youngest daughter has a Game Boy game in which you play a farmer. You keep your chickens and cows happy, eventually you get a wife and the chickens lay platinum eggs, which are the very best kind of eggs. Much better than large eggs. Then you make mayonnaise and sell it at the market and become rich and buy more chickens and some baby furniture because now your wife's pregnant. The online reviews uniformly panned this game as boring beyond belief, but the youngster loves it.

Not only loves playing it, but loves talking about playing it. In the car, she has a captive audience for her babbling. I've threatened for years to tie her to the roof rack if she won't shut up, but it's just a bluff and she knows it. The older daughter (who is Florence King trapped in a teenaged body) and I lost all sense of decency and started mocking young Norman Borlaug with a litany of ridiculous agricultural tasks she should perform. Vacuum the llamas. Polish the chickens. Lacquer the barn. Gather the goat eggs.

Gather the goat eggs. As it escaped my lips, I realized that's what most of my life has amounted to. Faithfully performing tasks that make no sense, seem both impossible and pointless, are vaguely silly — and yet someone seems to need them done. So here we go. Let us gather the goat eggs.