One Crazy Coincidence

Saturday night Olivier made me dinner. It was kind of an excuse to use up some leftovers, so he fried up a couple of shallots, half a yellow pepper and an egg and then added some pasta with a garlic sauce that we hadn’t finished a few days before. We each took a first serving and started eating. I finished my last bite of noodle and looked into my bowl. There was something there. I took a closer look. I picked it up and wiped off the egg. It was a small silver ball. It was the ball from my earring that I had lost on Monday morning!!!

I freaked out, of course, as did Olivier, and we tried to figure out how this earring ball, which I had considered lost, got into my pasta – SIX DAYS LATER!

The way I lost the ball was that I was standing in Olivier’s room on Monday morning talking to Eddy and Olga, who had come from Frankfurt on Sunday and needed a place to stay since they had a flight out of Munich on Monday at noon. Olivier was in the shower and the three of us were eating breakfast. Eddy was talking and I was spinning the ball in the earring around, which I often do. Suddenly, the ball popped out of the earring, hit a plate (as evidenced by the “ping” that we all heard) and then it was gone. The three of us looked everywhere for it at the time, and Olivier looked around for it later on, but to no avail; I assumed it lost.

So how did it get into my dinner on Saturday night? I bet you’re thinking it was in the pasta, right? Wrong. Olivier suggested it was in the pepper, since I had used it a few days before for a salad. But I ruled that out right away because I personally sliced it into small pieces for the meal, and we bought it after I lost the ball, so I knew it wasn’t in there. It wouldn’t have been in the egg, because that would have been a miracle. Do you want me to spit it out yet, or what? Okay, here’s the answer: it was in the butter. We had the butter on the table on Monday morning for breakfast and it must have landed there after that first bounce. Then, when Olivier fried up the shallots and peppers, he just cut off a slice of butter and threw it into the pan.

Mystery solved. And I have a complete earring again. Solving problems is fun and rewarding!