Nothing discourages my good neighbor, Joshua Farnsworth. He is an inventor who never quits. After his combined spoon and fork utensil and the lawsuit that proved to be a costly failure, Joshua”s next invention was a way to bring breakfast directly from the hen house to the table.
His steady source of fried eggs in the morning was the chicken house in the backyard. It was home to a dozen good White Rock laying hens. As he removed the eggs out from under his hens, he had an inspiration; it was a way to deliver his eggs directly to the frying pan in his kitchen. I saw the plans; he drew me a sketch. When he was finished with the drawing and he had wiped away the specks of fried egg, he held it up to show me.
The conveyer belt he planned to use was one he had seen in Curley”s Used Furniture and Tool Emporium. It was 12 inches wide and more than 60-feet-long. Attached to the rollers and the motor, the belt would stretch all the way from the hen house to kitchen. Josh”s idea was beautiful in its simplicity.
Joshua cut a small trap door under each of the three laying nests. The eggs dropped through the layer of hay to the slanted, rubber-padded collector box. The eggs rolled down the slanted box directly onto the conveyer belt. You would have thought that the eggs would roll right off the belt. Ordinarily, they would. Josh had solved that problem. The belt had a pebbled surface with depressions in it the size and shape of eggs. He found a strip of plastic at Curley”s place.
Curley has everything you can imagine squirreled away someplace in the shelves and corners of his big, dusty old barn of a store. I”ve heard some folks have found things that have been on Curley”s shelves since the Civil War. A week later Josh unveiled his automatic “Egg Waiter.”
Josh called me.
“Come on over for breakfast.”
I could tell from his voice he had something great to show me. After the morning chores I came over and we sat down, I had my napkin around my neck ready for a fried egg breakfast. He flicked a switch on the kitchen wall. The switch started the quarter-horse motor and the roller and conveyer belt. Outside the kitchen window I saw the belt moving and in another three minutes the belt brought six eggs, fresh from the hens, right through his kitchen window. They dropped them into a basket ready for the pan. Josh reached over, cracked them in the frying pan, fried them nice as you please, and we ate them up. I was proud of Josh.
“Every farmer in the county will want this setup in his own chicken house. It”s a wonderful idea,” I told Josh as I sopped up my bread in what was left of my four eggs.
Josh has had his share of disappointments like every great man. He dreamed that every farmer in the county would be fighting to his front door to have the remarkable Egg Waiter installed in every farmer”s hen house. Josh even put a $15 ad in the Penny Saver. The only call he got was a disrespectful horse laugh. It was from someone who had read his ad and wanted to know if Josh was serious.
Gene Paleno is a writer and illustrator living in Witter Springs.
