Sunday breakfast

Herring with boiled potatoes and steamed onions is my dad's Sunday morning ritual. You know how I feel about herring; I find boiled potatoes very boring, and I'm neutral on steamed onions. So I soft-boiled some eggs and awkwardly man-handled the first over the egg cup, which was too small to easily accomodate the supersized eggs that my parents buy.

Dad: You know the whole point is to place the egg in the egg cup.
A.: The egg cup's too small.

Pause

A.: There's a French expression: "you're teaching your grandmother to suck eggs."
Mom: Is that based on sexual innuendo?
A.: NO!!!
Dad: The Russian version might be, "the egg is teaching the chicken."
A.: Exactly.[
Mom: There's a joke... something like...
Dad: Let me tell it.
Mom: Yes, do.
Dad: A mother and her son were in the dining cart of a train. The son was about to take his silver spoon to the egg when his mother said, "eggs are corrosive to silver." A Georgian sitting nearby overheard, promptly moved his silver-encased cigarette lighter from his front pocket to a back pocket and said, "you learn something new every day." [Or the Russian version: "A century you live, a century you learn."]
Mom: Do you get it?
A.: Yes.
Mom: It's that kind of egg...
A.: I get it.

***
Mom: These potatoes are massive.
Dad: A. had wanted to get smaller ones.
A.: Right--they had organic potatoes for $1/lb, and dad said he was perfectly happy with conventional ones for $1.29/lb.
Dad: I did? I didn't see that they were $1/lb.
A.: I pointed them out to you twice and asked you whether you were sure you wanted the conventional ones. I'm not a big potato person, but I have to say, when we got CSA potatoes over the summer, they were amazing--both white and sweet potatoes. Do you know what CSA is? Or does that smack of socialism to you?
Mom: Oh, no, no--CSAs are wonderful. I'd join one if I could find one around here.
A.: You probably could. We were part of one in college my last year. Anyway, I couldn't go back to buying conventional sweet potatoes. I've been buying the organic ones at Trader Joe's--still not as good as the CSA's, but better than conventional ones by orders of magnitude.
Dad: I don't like sweet potatoes.
A.: Well, organic white potatoes taste better than conventional, too.
Dad: [Shrug]