THE SQUARE EGG MAKER

“My dad enjoyed gadgets and gizmos—some practical, some wacky.”

My dad enjoyed gadgets and gizmos—some practical, some wacky. He carried a loupe in his pocket in case he needed to find the stamp on a piece of antique jewelry or diagnose a print-quality issue in a magazine (a holdover from his decades as an editor at Time Life). He also carried a pocket level, the better to be ready for any painting hanging askew. 

He especially loved gadgets that enhanced his frugality. All our toothpaste tubes were clipped with “squeezers” to ensure that no minty brushful went to waste. He used a Fizz-Keeper cap to keep his 2-litre bottles of generic soda bubbly. When we finished a bottle of ketchup or mustard or barbecue sauce or maple or chocolate syrup, he got out the ketchup coupler—a small hourglass-shaped funnel commonly used in restaurants—to transfer the last bits of the old to the new. As I drizzled ranch dressing on my salad, I was always aware I was getting some from the previous bottle and probably a few drops from the one before it too.

His greatest treasures came from scouring garage sales, a weekend ritual as sacred in our family as attending religious services was in others. A garage sale was the source of a Tidal Wave “water bat”—a softball bat filled with fluid to increase the force when bat met ball. Ditto the rock tumbler that hummed 24/7 in our garage. And of course the driving accoutrements: radar detector, paperback copy of A Speeder’s Guide to Avoiding Tickets, gimballed dashboard cup-holder that pivoted to keep liquid from sloshing out of a travel mug even in the sharpest turns. He was that kind of driver, my dad.

The gadget of which I’m fondest—another garage-sale score—is a 1970s novelty item from Japan called The Square Egg Maker. You place a warm, peeled, hard-boiled egg in the chamber, cover it with the compression plate and screw down the top. After 10 minutes in the fridge, the egg can be popped out and will retain its square (really, cubic) shape. Every year as Easter approached, Dad would pack a square egg in my school lunch and remind me to make sure everyone at my lunch table noticed. “Tell them, ‘It came from a square chicken!’” he always said. 

Dad was 48 when I was born, and had four grown children from his first marriage. We spent a lot of time together. Countless bike rides to look for swallows at the nearby sandpit, many afternoons by Huzzle Guzzle Brook, searching for turtles and frogs and stones to skip. He was my confidant en route to violin lessons, sports practices, Girl Scouts, jazz band. But once he got involved in local politics, I had to avoid being with him in public. It’s only slightly hyperbolic to say he knew every last resident of Madison, Connecticut, and never said no to hearing every last one of their opinions.

He died in 2011, seven years before my son was born. I’ve told my son many stories to help him know his grandfather, but it turns out gadgets work better. When he discovered an owl pellet on our porch, I took out the loupe and showed him how to use it to look more closely. When he found the gimballed cup holder in my nightstand drawer, he was gratifyingly mesmerized by the way it swiveled in opposition to his tilted palm. He doesn’t like hard-boiled eggs, but this spring we made a square egg for his lunchbox and practiced his lines for a cafeteria debut. 

My son is named Jeremiah, after my dad. He pays attention to detail, loves garage sales and searching for turtles, has a goofy sense of humor and appreciates the peculiar and the clever. I like to think that—in the same way the bottle of ranch dressing contained remnants of its predecessors—he too contains something of his namesake. I hope he’ll grow up to be just as good an egg.

—Lauren Kleutsch

With my dad, circa 1984, when he was about 50. He regularly read The New York Times, The Hartford Courant, The New Haven Register, the Shoreline Times and The Proctor Journal (with news of his Minnesota hometown) and kept a red pen handy to mark typos, misspellings and grammatical errors.

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Lauren Kleutsch is an ESL teacher living outside Boston with her husband, their two children and their dog. 

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