If It's Messy, Eat it Over the Sink

There is a novel by Tom Robbins that I enjoy.  There are actually several. Actually, all of them. He has a wonderfully ribald (some would consider it obscene) and insightful way of viewing the world that he relates in beautifully playful prose. He's not everybody's cup of tea, but at one point in my life I devoured everything he wrote with great relish and always found myself wishing he would write more.

But I'm not just writing about a great author today. I'm going to write about the way great authors write things that find their way into everyday life, that are so true that we find them intruding in ways we could never have expected while we were reading their works in the first place.

Today is a snow today. No school for me, no school for the kids. CPAs, on the other hand, do not get snow days. Especially not during tax season. My wife is a CPA. Oh, I suppose if it snowed a couple of feet and wild yeti were wandering the highways in search of meals my wife might consider not going into work. But that hasn't happened yet.

I got up early this morning, before my wife. I came downstairs and caught up my Words With Friends and read Facebook statuses and played a game and figured out who had said what in a couple of my favorite forums. Then I realized I could be wonderful and fix my wife breakfast. Of course, by that time she was out of the shower and on her way downstairs. And she wasn't going to wait for traffic to make her morning drive just that more interesting. So she left. And I ended up making myself breakfast.

I fried two eggs hard, some ham, some cheese, toasted two slices of bread and sliced a tomato. Excellent breakfast sandwich. But messy. And that made me think of a character in a Tom Robbins novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The character was something of a spoof on the wise Asian, the mentor, the advisor. But in Mr. Robbins wonderfully clever way, he was both a spoof and he wasn't. People thought he was crazy, but some people thought him wise, but he did outrageous things that made you wonder, and the best advice he offered the heroine in the novel was, "If it's messy, eat it over the sink."

When I read the novel at nineteen or twenty, I didn't get it. I thought Mr. Robbins was making a clever statement on the nature of advice given to people. It's generally useless, or so obvious that most people overlook it.

But this morning at 6:30 as I was eating my breakfast sandwich with the tomato juice running down between my fingers and the mayonnaise being squeezed out the sides and the bread slipping off one side and the ham off the other, I got it.

I realized that what he meant (or maybe just what I took from it, which is the same thing in the end) was that sometimes we encounter things in life that are worthwhile, that are good, that we need in our lives (like fried egg sandwiches with tomatoes). But the attainment of these things, the true enjoyment to be had from them, will not be easy. There might be consequences, there may be accompanying unpleasantness (tomato juice, mayonnaise). So all we can do is prepare ourselves as best we can (eat it over the sink) and go ahead and enjoy them anyway.

To take it a step further, maybe we even learn to enjoy the messy aspect. Maybe, if our minds and hearts are well-prepared, we accept the deliciousness of the sandwich and even enjoy the mess we make of ourselves while we eat it. We learn to enjoy the whole of the experience. We should learn to enjoy it all.

And that leads me to think that we as a society have worked so hard to divorce the two aspects of enjoyment that we have forgotten how to really enjoy things. Instead of just eating it over the sink, we invent a new kind of bread. Or we leave off the tomatoes. And then we forget how truly good something is.

So the next time I'm thinking about going camping and even before we begin I start dreading the clean-up and the putting away that must be done when we get home, I'll just eat it over the sink. So many experiences we might pass up, so many enjoyable things in life that we avoid because of an accompanying difficulty. I'm just going to eat it over the sink.